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 focussed 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

Morag McLaren Senior Director of Product

We all know that we build better products when we get more exposure to our users, but how do we get the most out of our time and target our efforts more effectively?

This is a workshop for product managers who need, or want, to do their own user research / user experience testing – how to start, how to do it and then presenting back in a way likely to get people excited about the results rather than dreading them.

The day will be focused on learning techniques that you can start using immediately – so we’ll be looking at:

• Where to start: it’s easier than you think and we do it all the time in our day jobs
• Getting buy-in from those around you: including your user researchers if you have them
• Aligning research with business goals / objectives
• Choosing the right tool for the job (tools, methodologies, terminology, etc.)
• How to fit research into agile development processes
• Presenting findings (to get even more buy-in)
• What happens after you’ve made your changes

Ask 10 people what a product roadmap is and you will get 10 different answers! This artifact is often misunderstood, yet an incredibly powerful if done right. Creating a great one is part art and part science. In this full-day session, we will talk through the purposes of a roadmap and a process for establishing your product’s vision, gaining alignment with your stakeholders, validating themes, and presenting to upper level execs in order to maximize your team’s impact.

Key questions to answer include:

• What are the differences between product strategy, a product roadmap and a feature release plan?
• How do I relate my product work to business objectives?
• How can I balance the need to plan, while staying lean and agile?
• How do I look beyond the next quarter without over-committing?
• How do I confirm projects or initiatives that have not been fully validated by customers?
• How do I manage stakeholders and their pressure/influence?
• How do I prioritize what product aspects to work on 1st, 2nd, 3rd…?
• What’s the best way to present a product roadmap to my stakeholders?

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 will look at some simplified scenarios that help you put what you’ve learned about Value and Urgency into practice, then do the same for a real-life example from a real company. To help us learn about what the key assumptions where we will compare results across the group to help us understand what the value might be and the areas of greatest uncertainty.

You will learn how understanding Value and Urgency 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.

Whether you’ve already been in product management for a few years, or are new to the job, stakeholder management is one the biggest factors in your success as a product manager. But many product managers say it’s also one of their biggest challenges. This workshop is designed to increase your knowledge and skills, and to give you practical tools to address these challenges, and to turn your relationships with stakeholders into productive and rewarding parts of your role.

 You’ll bring your own stakeholder challenge into the workshop, and will leave with a bespoke plan that you can put into action as soon as you get back to the office. In the process you’ll learn theory, tools, attitudes and habits that you can bring to stakeholder management whatever your future brings.

Topics include:

• Stakeholder Analysis
• Emotional Intelligence
• Influencing
• Conflict

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

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a worldwide phenomenon, helping to drive the success of organisations like Google, Zynga, Oracle, Twitter, and many more. They are particularly suited to driving the alignment necessary for a high-performing cross-functional product team. But if not handled correctly, OKRs can quickly lead to silos, unethical behaviour, and demotivation.

How do the best-performing product cultures use OKRs? Topics we will cover:

• How to define effective OKRs
• How to set annual OKRs and break them down quarterly
• How to determine the right level of ambition for your organisation
• How OKRs drive your product roadmap
• How to map OKRs to people and teams
• How to make OKRs visible across your organisation
• How to turn OKRs into action plans
• How to monitor and report on OKRs
• How to adjust OKRs when thing don’t go as planned
• How to get buy-in on OKRs from your stakeholders

We’ll also cover the most common what-if scenarios teams experience (or fear):

• What if we can’t measure the most important things?
• What if we miss our targets?
• What if our outputs don’t generate the outcomes we wanted?
• What if our direction changes mid-year?
• What if we realize our objectives were wrong all along?

During this workshop, you’ll gain first-hand experience using OKRs throughout a simulated year-in-the-life of a product team, handling what goes wrong, adjusting course, and managing expectations. You’ll also get the chance to set OKRs for your team and get live feedback you can leverage when you get back to the office.

Use Jobs to be Done to improve your website, app and product design process
A practical, hands on way to understand how make the right product choices based on user needs. Use JTBD to uncover, plan and build innovative products. How JTBD can be used to advocate user centred design to senior stakeholders and unify product and marketing effort around a shared understanding of what users want to do. Perfect for product managers, UXers, business analysts and everyone planning and delivering product.

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

• How and why to run user research to uncover the Jobs to be Done. Research techniques to identify and capture met and unmet user need.
• How to prioritise the Jobs to be Done. Which jobs to focus on first, which will have the greatest impact and which will deliver real innovation.
• How to design products, experiences and features around each JTBD. How to practically translate each Job to be Done into a product feature / UI via Job Stories.
• How JTBD can fit into your existing product processes (eg Agile, Design Sprints, user research) as well as the pros and cons of using JTBD.
• Use JTBD to align senior stakeholders, product teams and marketing.
• And if you are an agency / consultancy how to use JTBD to build long term client.
• I’ve worked with organisations like MoneySuperMarket eBay, Disney and Marriott as well as many startups so will share my experience of researching, planning and designing successful digital products.

After the Workshop, you’ll be able to:

• Uncover the Jobs to be Done, map them to your product and understand where there is unmet user need
• Advocate and evidence product changes across the organisation from C level executives to marketing
• Design the right thing in the right order for the right reasons
• Come to the workshop and you’ll able to put JTBD into practice as soon as you get back to the office.

Workshop Overview
Product Management Foundations 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. You will improve your understanding of customer problems and perspectives, solution testing, delivery mechanisms, and team process.

What we’ll cover on the day
Product Management Foundations 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 you 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 organization 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

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

• How was your role described to you when you first got started?
• What have you learned about product management since taking the job?
• How well do you feel you understand your customers?
• Do you think you have a healthy team culture?

Key Takeaways
At the end of the workshop, you will be confident in your understanding of the role of a product manager, including a firm grasp of the concept of design thinking and how it is important. You’ll have a clear understanding of where the customer sits in the product practice, how to define and prioritise your customer personas, and how not to bias your customer research. You’ll go back to the office feeling confident in your ability to facilitate a goals conversation, and how to structure hypothesis for lean tests.

Workshop Overview
Product Management Essentials is an overview course intended for confident product managers who are looking to increase their strategic skills and influence. The intention of this course is to help product managers build a strategic layer onto their core product practices, and focus on the soft skills and influencing tactics that are often needed to ensure effective product delivery. It seeks to answer the questions:

• How can product managers increase organisational understanding of product practice?
• What parts of their process can be used as tools for increased alignment?
• How can product teams craft an evidence-driven product vision and ensure buy-in?

This course is centered on the product manager’s role between the product team and the broader business. In order for teams to deliver effectively, they need buy-in and support from their stakeholders. You will gain an understanding of how to sharpen your product practice so that it becomes an alignment and educational tool.

What we’ll cover on the day
Product Management Essentials 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 you 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
• 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 lifecycle
• Stakeholder management: A deep-dive into organisational relationships and understanding how to build a communication strategy
• Things to reflect on before the workshop (also sent in the pre-workshop email)

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 effort do you feel you have invested in stakeholder relationships?
• How often do you make an effort to make your process more collaborative?
• How do new projects or changes to features happen at your company?
• How do you currently collect evidence to support decisions?

Key Takeaways
You will leave this workshop with the skills you need in order to build a strategic layer onto your core product practices. You will understand how to evaluate a potential product idea/change for value, and how to use process as an alignment tool within your company. You’ll go back to work with a firm grasp of where you should include your stakeholders as collaborators, understanding how to build effective relationships with said stakeholders, and with the ability to create a communication strategy with your organisation.

Workshop Overview
Every product manager understands that they need to gather evidence to help them make decisions and set the right strategy and priorities. However, simply having a huge data warehouse and analytics skill sets doesn’t help you ask the right questions or come to the right conclusions. So, how can product managers understand how to use data and metrics to add value to the customer’s journey and their businesses?

Geared towards working product managers who need to regularly gather data from different sources to make decisions, this full-day workshop offered by Mind the Product helps participants understand how to adopt a user-driven perspective on measurement, ensuring that your products are optimized for customer success.

This Product Metrics workshop is unique because it specifically focuses on the role of the product manager in driving a common understanding throughout the product development lifecycle.

What we’ll cover on the day
Divided into modules, each topic covered focuses specifically on the role that product managers should play in the process of metrics alignment and implementation: The workshop will be driven by a single business scenario, allowing you to work together in a hands-on way, tackling metrics questions similar to aa real-world situation.

The course covers:

• How to keep customers at the center of your metrics process
• How to align your stakeholders around measurement goals and help them break down business goals into workable metrics
• How to apply the concept of “One Metric that Matters” and how other metrics work with OMTM
• How product managers should think about measuring tests and experiments
• Implementing metrics and how to effectively collaborate with different roles on your team
• Structures for reporting about metrics and achieving alignment with stakeholders
• Reflections on what a metrics-driven culture looks like and how product managers can help to create one

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

• Currently what are your most common data sources?
• How often do you look at data (qualitative or quantitative) before you make product decisions?

Key Takeaways
At the end of the end of the workshop you will understand how product managers work with metrics. You’ll go away with pragmatic, actionable insights that tie back into your job as a product manager, and specific details and scenarios about working with cross-functional teams to implement metrics tracking. You’ll also have a good understanding of the “One Metric that Matters” concept for various types of business models and stages.

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 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 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.