Foundations 101 is an overview course intended for individuals who hold the title of Product Manager, or have some working knowledge of the product development process. The intention of this course is to help product managers develop a broader understanding of their role. It seeks to answer the questions:

• What are the core functions and primary responsibilities of a product manager?
• What does good product management look like?
• How do product managers know if they are adding value?

As such, the course is tightly focused on running an effective core team that is centered around inquiry-driven development process. Participants will improve their understanding of customer problems and perspectives, solution testing, delivery mechanisms, and team process.

What we’ll cover on the day

Foundations 101 is a full-day workshop that is comprised of nine modules. Each module includes a lecture component on theory and practice interspersed with up to three hands-on activities. This ensures that participants are afforded an opportunity to apply and work with concepts in a setting that will answer questions and facilitate critical thinking. The following modules will be covered:

• Learning mindsets: How inquiry breaks down at different points through the product development lifecycle
• Goals alignment: How to create effective goals and align the team and organisation around them
• Design thinking: What design thinking is and how product managers can break down what is needed for product understanding
• Persona development: How to effectively create personas and use them in product processes
• Lean testing: Unpacking types of lean tests and how to implement them for maximum learning
• Interview guides: Writing interview guides that do not bias or lead the subject
• Wireframes and prototypes: Using visuals at different fidelities to facilitate the right conversation
• User stories: Creating an effective communication mechanism for efficient and transparent delivery
• Core team communication: How to think about “culture as product” and foster a team that that is geared towards continuous improvement

Using process to collaborate strategically across your organisation

We know that product managers are responsible for so much more than simply product delivery but are often given little authority. However, as product managers develop in their roles and continue to confidently deliver value to their customers, it is crucial that they begin to align their organisation around their process and vision in order to have an impact.

Communication and Alignment empowers product people to begin understanding how to align their organisation around product process and practice. In this overview workshop, we outline some of the grounded, tactical skills that product managers can use every day and how they can add a layer of strategic thinking to help collaborate with their stakeholders.

Together we delve into communication strategies that will help foster trust and collaboration within your organisation, how to evaluate an opportunity, how to extract maximum value from your research activities, and much more.

What we’ll cover on the day

Communication & Alignment is a full-day workshop comprised of six modules. Each module includes a lecture component on theory and practice interspersed with up to three hands-on activities. This ensures that participants have an opportunity to apply and work with concepts in a setting that will answer questions and facilitate critical thinking. The following modules will be covered:

• Evaluating opportunity: Understanding how to unpack product assumptions and line up macro data to establish product viability and the foundations for product/market fit
• Implementing user research: Breaks down the components of running a user research round and what is needed to ensure maximum value of the time invested
• Research techniques: Reviewing a range of research methodologies, beyond the classic interview, that help product teams validate problem and solution
• Synthesis: Distilling insights from research and how to collaborate with stakeholders to deepen user understanding and influence
• Prioritisation: Covering a range of techniques and their uses for alignment at points of product development life cycle
• Stakeholder management: A deep-dive into organisational relationships and understanding how to build a communication strategy

Every product manager understands that they need to gather evidence to help them make decisions and set the right strategy and priorities, yet simply having a massive data warehouse and analytics skill sets doesn’t help you ask the right questions or come to the right conclusions.

How can product managers take a human centered approach to measurement?  The third full-day workshop offered by Mind the Product seeks to answer this question; how can we take a product mindset on metrics.

This workshop will be framed very differently from the usual Metrics workshops because it specifically focuses on the role of the product manager in driving a common understanding throughout the product development lifecycle.

In the workshop we’ll address how product managers can work with their teams to create a strong metrics practice that’s set-up for long-term success, answering the following questions:

• How do you put a product mindset around metrics?
• How can Product Managers flesh out the One Metric That Matters and locate it within the ecosystem of other metrics?
• How do you work with data to help experiment towards the most valuable experiments?
• What can a product manager do to ensure that metrics are implemented and tracked properly during the build process?
• What does a product team need to report on as they track metrics?
• How can you create a metrics-driven culture?

Although these are simple questions on the surface, the answers to them are seemingly infinite. This course is a practical, actionable life raft in a sea of competing terms, formulas, theories, and approaches. It was created to ensure that you take the ideas and frameworks within it directly to your job the following day.

Take this course if you:

• Want to hear specifically how product managers work with metrics
• Prefer pragmatic, actionable insights over theories that sound good but never tie back in to your job as a product manager
• Want to understand the “one metric that matters” for various types of business models and stages
• Want to hear specific details and scenarios about working with cross-functional teams to implement metrics tracking
• Want to get hands-on with business scenarios that will let you work with metrics concepts throughout the course of the day
• Want to hear about pitfalls you should watch out for along the analytics journey
• Want to spark inspiration from the 100+ different metrics – used by businesses of all sizes and verticals – that are sprinkled throughout this course

This class is tailored towards working product managers, ideally who have worked with products through various stages of development. The class is hands-on and requires deep reflection from participants on what has worked for them in the past, and how their process could evolve. Metrics and analytics inform almost everything you do. Whether you’re refreshing your memory or expanding your understanding, you’ll be practicing all day to apply metrics and analytics to real-world situations. Come to class with a product, service, brand, or entire company in mind – there will be several opportunities to explore how you’d apply these theories and frameworks to real-life situations.

Key Takeaways

At the end of the session participants will come away with a sense of what frameworks they can implement immediately, as well as a grounded understanding of how to ensure that your users stay at the heart of the measurement process.

Use maps to create value for your customer and your organisation

Definitions

The definition of systems thinking is a “holistic approach to evaluating how a system’s parts relate, and how a system works over time.”  Using systems thinking through system’s mapping in your product practice is critical for understanding risk and spotting opportunities for innovation.   

Workshop Overview

Designed for working product managers who are striving to create product strategy, this training workshop will enable you to use maps effectively in order to make critical product decisions, communicate with stakeholders, and facilitate a shared understanding.

Not be confused with the process of story mapping, systems maps come in all shapes and sizes; user journey maps, experience maps, flows, etc. The key part of maps is that they help the people involved in building products understand the system(s) which underpin their organisation, customer base, workflow, etc. At the end of the session, you’ll have the key tools and techniques necessary to effectively facilitate mapping sessions and achieve desired outcomes.

What we’ll cover on the day

We will use a collaborative scenario in this training workshop to drive hands-on learning. Additionally, you will be prompted at the end of each exercise to reflect on actions or practices from your own products.  The following topics will be covered:

– An overview of systems thinking and the utility of mapping
– Aligning on product strategy and discovery goals
– A tactical guide to maps, including:

• Types of maps
• How interactions create outcomes
• Who to include and how to include them

– How to evaluate and decide on structure:

• Selling the value of the mapping process to stakeholders

– Map creation process:

• What do you need to know?
• What are you looking for?
• Who is involved?

– How can product managers guide towards success?
– An interactive afternoon of collaborative map building

Things to reflect on before your training workshop

Before your training workshop, we ask that you take some time to consider the following questions. The more time you take to consider your current situation, and the issues and challenges you face, the more you’ll gain from your training:

• How much do you understand about your customer’s current experience of your product?
• List 3-5 areas where you feel you wish you had more information about your customer’s current experience
• How well do you understand how parts of your organisation work together?
• How well does your organisation understand dependencies between departments?

Key Takeaways

At the end of the workshop, you will have the ability to use maps to achieve goals and outcomes within your organisation and will have a firm understanding of key mapping frameworks and scenarios. You’ll be able to identify the right map for the organisational challenge and have the tools needed to effectively facilitate collaboration on maps within your wider team. In short, you will have a plan for maintaining an effective use of maps and adopting them as a long term asset.

Understanding leadership for product teams

Product Leadership is a one-day, advanced course intended for product managers who wish to understand how to champion product practice, effectively lead their teams, and contribute to developing a healthy culture within their organisation. It is not intended for senior product leaders. If you are a senior product leader, VP, CPO, Director, or higher, please join us for our exclusive Leadership Forum which runs at the same time as these workshops.

The course seeks to answer the questions:

• What is product leadership?
• What leadership styles exist and how do you know what’s needed for your team?
• How can you evaluate your leadership skills gaps and understand where growth is needed?

The course is focused on presenting concepts that frame how leadership connects with the individual, the team, and the larger organisation. It also deconstructs what leadership skills are, how to assess your current skill-set, and how to evaluate what your team could need in different scenarios. The workshop is driven by exercises that support participants’ ability to reflect and evaluate their needs.

How do we improve the way we prioritise to ensure that we’re delivering value quickly and not wasting our precious capacity to innovate? Since economics is all about scarcity, we can turn to economics to help us quickly discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.

The first essential building block is to understand the value. To help structure the conversation we will use a simple economic framework to surface the assumptions and drive to the economic impacts. The second essential building block is to understand the urgency. For this, we will look at different urgency curves to help us understand how value is likely to decay over time. We call this “Cost of Delay”. Cost of Delay is the value that is leaking away every week or month we don’t have the feature or the product.

To understand and quantify Cost of Delay we will look at some common scenarios that help you put what you’ve learned about Value and Urgency into practice. We then do the same for a real life example from a real company. We then compare the different results across the group to help us understand what the value might be and the areas of greatest uncertainty in our assumptions – so we can focus our scarce product development resources on the things that will reduce the risk and have the greatest economic impact.

You will learn how understanding Cost of Delay helps with managing demand from multiple stakeholders, prioritisation decisions, surfacing assumptions about where the value is, and how time-sensitive that value is, enabling the team to make better trade-off decisions, and changing the focus of conversations: less about cost and dates, more about value and urgency.

A practical, hands-on way to understand how the human brain works and apply that knowledge to user experience and product design. Learn the psychological principles behind how our brain makes sense of the world and apply that to product and user interface design.

What you’ll learn
Through a series of fun, practical exercises you’ll learn:

• Psychology and interaction design. How to evaluate and design interactions such as onboarding, search, navigation and eCommerce using psychology.
• Psychology and user experience. Evaluating and improving digital products based on psychology. How humans perceive and understand the world around them and how to build your product around that framework.
• Psychology and the dark arts. Persuasive design, cognitive biases and other brain hacks. Do they really work and how to apply them in product design.

After the workshop you’ll be able to:

• Design products, apps and websites that match how people think and behave
• Find, understand, evaluate and apply psychology theory to digital product design
• Make better, informed design decisions and advocate to the wider team using psychology theory
• Put psychology into practice as soon as you get back to the office.

Does your organisation have trouble keeping track of the big picture during product development? Are you working with an agile team concerned with delivering more stories rather than a great user experience? Have you ever ended up releasing a product that doesn’t actually solve the customer’s problem?

In this workshop, you’ll learn how User Story Mapping can help. User Story Mapping is a collaborative practice that keeps the whole team focused on how and why customers use your product. Helping everybody deliver a great user experience together.

You’ll create story maps with your fellow attendees. You’ll see how they keep the whole team focused on the customer’s experience. You’ll understand how they can be used to break down the customer journey into small chunks of work without losing sight of the big picture.

What you will take away from this workshop:

• Understand user story mapping and how to create story maps with your team
• How story maps help the whole team identify with the customer’s journey
• How to use story maps as a tool for product discovery
• How story maps can bring product managers, researchers, designers, developers and testers together around a  single artefact
• How story maps help you prioritise the customer experience over building more features
• How you can use story maps to supplement or replace traditional agile backlogs

If your work involves creativity, design, innovation or strategy, workshops will be a large part of what you do. You’ll need to get insights from users and clients, brainstorm with your team and regularly get together with colleagues for high-level discussions.

Running great workshops can transform projects. They help you to generate better content, participants will leave the workshop with more clarity and you’ll increase your capacity for delivering great work.

Who this workshop is for:

This one-day masterclass is interactive and practical. It’s both for complete beginners and people who have some experience but want to up their game and refresh their skills.

After this masterclass you will be able to:

• Create structured workshop activities and plans, from a range of tools and methods
• Design sessions that keep creativity flowing and participants engaged
• Lead productive and effective workshops that generate useful outputs and results
• Facilitate great workshops that stay on track and encourage contributions from all participants
• Deal with the common challenges that come up during workshops

What is covered:

The day covers tools and techniques that you can start using straight away, the knowledge and best practices that engage and motivate teams for creativity and innovation and practical methods for leading productive workshops:

• Part 1: Introduction and group dynamics: how to encourage creativity and support collaboration in workshops
• Part 2: Workshop design: setting goals and expectations, types of workshops, activities, structuring workshops
• Part 3: Workshop facilitation: the role of the facilitator, skills and techniques, facilitation styles, troubleshooting
• Part 4: Follow up and next steps: workshop outputs and maintaining momentum