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Laetitia Laubscher
Developing for prisons: Lessons from an iterative build creating for a highly distinct end user and customer
Originally trained as a lawyer, Laetitia (she/her) has had a decade-long, pioneering career in media, producing work across the digital, television, and gaming sectors. She is now the CEO of Manana, an innovative organisation that is gamifying biofeedback training to help teach people in prison learn how to better regulate their emotions to reduce reoffending and increase wellbeing. She has previously worked for the United Nations Development Programme, national journalist Patrick Gower, and for pioneering AI game company Altered State Machine. In 2018, Laetitia also founded the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, the world’s first and only poetry exhibition held in Antarctica.
Talk Description
Prisons house some of the most complex and vulnerable people within our society. Building a gamified health intervention for the prison space presents a multitude of complex challenges, including navigating a substantially different customer to end user, gathering useful insights in a low-trust interview environment, and deeply understanding the end user and customer needs through research and observation. This talk will document some of the hard-won lessons learnt while designing for this space, the obstacles we faced, and how Manana found a way forward.
Kirsten Mann
Navigating the Grey: Harnessing a Sales Playbook for Product Management Success
Kirsten is the Chief Product Officer at Prospection and holds board roles with PaperCut and The Executive Connection (TEC). With a reputation as a transformational and strategic leader, she has 30 years experience working in the tech industry across the disciplines of product management, user experience and product development. Kirsten has worked with globally recognised brands including Oracle and MYOB. She was part of the executive leadership team at Aconex, the world’s largest online SaaS platform for construction and engineering, which became an Australian success story when it was acquired by Oracle in 2018 for 1.6b.
Talk description
Join Kirsten Mann, CPO at Prospection, as she reveals how top product managers leverage sales strategies to thrive in complex business environments. With 30 years of experience scaling tech companies, Kirsten will share practical tools to balance product ideals with commercial realities. Learn how to apply ANUM, the 3 Whys, and value-based approaches to supercharge your product decisions. Discover the art of embracing ambiguity and making impactful choices in the face of uncertainty. Don’t miss this chance to elevate your product game!
Simon Jackson
Running Impactful Product Experiments: Lessons from Tech titans like Meta
Simon Jackson is the CEO of Hypergrowth Data, helping businesses significantly improve performance with data. He is a data science expert with over 13 years experience, having held senior technical and leadership positions at titans like Meta, Booking.com, and Canva.
Talk description
Do you know the fastest path to a significantly more impactful product? A path you are confident will achieve, perhaps even exceed your goals? After leading high-velocity experimentation programs at tech titans like Meta, I’ve learned a few things about how (and how not) to iteratively develop products for maximal impact. Join me as I share some of my biggest learnings like why big changes often fail or how surfacing deep assumptions often leads to the biggest wins. This talk will give Product Managers and builders tactics to come up with more impactful product iteration ideas and tests in their own work.