Get your tickets now for the Product Aotearoa Conference '24
Dan Olsen
How to Prioritize Customer Needs
Dan Olsen is a product management trainer, consultant, and speaker. Dan wrote the bestselling product management book The Lean Product Playbook. Through his talks and interactive training workshops, Dan helps companies build great products and strong product teams. His clients include Google, Facebook, Uber, Amazon, Box, and Walmart. He is also the founder of the 12,000-member Lean Product Meetup community.
Talk Description
We all know that most new product initiatives fail. A big reason why is because the team was focused on the solution they were building and weren’t as clear on the customer problem they were solving. In this talk, Dan Olsen will share advice from his bestselling product book The Lean Product Playbook on how to understand and define customer problems before you start building. Once you have a well-defined problem space, the next question is: How do we prioritize the different opportunities we could pursue? To answer this question, Dan will share his powerful but easy to use Importance vs. Satisfaction framework, which will help your team prioritize the opportunities that will create the most value for your customers. Dan will illustrate his frameworks with real world examples and case studies. Come learn how to increase your odds of product success.
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.
Joe Raeburn
A.I. War Stories from the Battlefront of Videogames.
Joe was the founding product person at Space Ape Games, makers of the top grossing music game (Beatstar) and car game (Chrome Valley Customs). Joe is now the CEO of 2UP Games, a 7-person games studio focused on using Gen AI to unlock player creativity.
Talk description
Mobile videogames have been a bloodbath since the highs of covid. 2UP Games, we pivoted to using Gen A.I. to meet new customer needs. What worked? What failed? And what can product managers learn about working with A.I.? Strap in for two years of learnings, warts and all.
Shipra Mahindra & Iryna Melnyk
The mythical Product-led culture meets the real world
Ships is a seasoned Product leader with diverse experience in a bunch of SaaS companies. She is a Principal Product Manager at Octopus Deploy, a technical tool that helps companies automate their software deployments.
Iryna is a Product Leader with over a decade of experience across a multitude of tech businesses. As the Product Director at Octopus Deploy, she leads multiple product teams and drives strategic decisions on future investments.
Talk Description
Have you ever read about empowered product teams, product operating models, escaping the build trap, and embracing continuous discovery? This sure sounds like a product wonderland. But is working as a product manager in a product-led organisation as great as it seems? In this collaborative talk, Iryna and Ships will share real-life examples from their careers and offer insights into ways to make product-led culture a reality without waiting for the world around us to be perfect. Learn from our mistakes and wins, and walk away with a toolkit for thriving in your day-to-day work life.
Vidya Dinamani
From Feature Factory to Customer-Centric Success
Vidya Dinamani is a seasoned product leader and founding partner at Product Rebels, an elite coaching firm dedicated to empowering teams to build products that customers love. With over two decades of experience in the product industry, Vidya has a proven track record of driving innovation and delivering exceptional results. As a passionate advocate for customer-centric product management, Vidya has coached hundreds of teams, from early stage startups to multinational Fortune50 companies, teaching them hands-on ways to become more customer-centric. She thrives on aligning teams with customer needs and driving business growth. Vidya is the co-author of “Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products” and co-host of the podcast “Product Rebels.
Talk Description
Are you tired of building features that fall flat? You’re not alone: many companies fall into the “feature factory” trap, focusing on functionality without understanding the core problems customers face. This leads to bloated products, frustrated users, and ultimately, stagnant growth. In this talk, inspired by the Groundwork Method outlined in the book “Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products,” we’ll explore a practical framework to break free from this cycle. By leveraging key principles around identifying the real customer problem, understanding what truly motivates your customer, and identifying specific needs and desires, you’ll discover how to: Develop razor-sharp focus in defining customer problems Create team empathy for your customers challenges and needs Build products that solve real problems Whether you’re a new product owner, or a seasoned product manager, this talk will equip you with a new way of thinking and practical tools and strategies to build products your customers will love.
Christina Baldarelli
Unconventional Product Stories: How Product Skills Can Thrive in Unexpected Places
In a time of exponential change, Christina’s superpower is learning. Her early career as a linguist and international development leader took her around the world, with roles in the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, the US Embassy in Nepal, and various nonprofit and educational institutions. Despite starting out tech-averse, Christina pivoted to a tech career that has included founding a startup and leading high-growth B2B SaaS Product teams, from Product Manager to the C-Suite. Christina now coaches startup founders on zero-to-one Product Development and Product Strategy, partnering with APAC’s top innovation hubs like Startmate, Creative HQ, and Ministry of Awesome.
Talk Description
With a career that has spanned International Relations and the Peace Corps in the most far-flung corners of the world, all the way through to being the first PM in a restaurant-tech scale-up during COVID lockdown hyper-growth, acting as CPO for global Climate FinTech Cogo, and coaching startup founders here in Aotearoa, Christina Baldarelli has mastered the art of applying Product Management skills in places you’d least expect. In her talk, “Unconventional Product Stories,” Christina will share how PMs can thrive in unconventional industries and turn seemingly unrelated experiences into strategic advantages. She’ll not only captivate you with real-world case studies of Product Managers breaking new ground, but also equip you along the way with a step-by-step guide to crafting compelling narratives—a skill every Product Manager needs to influence stakeholders and drive product success.
Tana Isaac
Thriving Amidst Change: Mastering Product Management in the Face of Downsizing, Career Shifts, and AI Innovation
Tana has worked in the technology sector for over 20 years, with the last decade in leadership roles. He has held roles internationally, in organizations in a range of industries and at different scales and stages of maturity. In his current role as Executive VP Product & Technology at Volpara Health, Tana leads the strategy, development and operation of Volpara’s product suite.
Talk Description
In today’s fast-evolving landscape, downsizing and lean teams are becoming the new normal. How do product management professionals navigate the uncertainty and still drive success? What can you do if you are directly impacted by a restructure? In this session, we’ll explore strategies for managing products with reduced resources and creating space for innovation, while maintaining high-impact delivery. We’ll also dive into how tough times can create great opportunities for taking the next step forward in your career and how you can leverage your existing skills to help make the transition easier. Lastly, we will explore how to harness the power of AI to power up your capabilities and unlock new potential in product creation. Join us for actionable insights that will help you turn challenges into opportunities and future-proof your career in product management.