MTP Engage Manchester Schedule

Workshops - 6 Feb Conference - 7 Feb

Auditorium

Exchange 9

Exchange 10

08:30

Registration

Coffee & networking

09:30

Opening Remarks

09:40

Lauren Currie

Managing Director of NOBL

@redjotter

UPFRONT

09:40 - 10:05

Info

Lauren Currie

Managing Director of NOBL

@redjotter

Lauren is a European designer and entrepreneur from Scotland. She lives in London and spends her time as MD of NOBL in the UK and Europe, and founder of #UPFRONT. She speaks on global stages around the world from Sydney to Beijing, and New York to Hong Kong. She teaches at leading educational institutions from INSEEC to the University of Dundee, coaching the next generation of designers and doers. Prior to NOBL, Lauren was Director of Design at Good Lab. Lauren co-founded Snook, an award winning global design consultancy based in London and Glasgow. Management Today recently named Lauren as one of the UK’s top 35 business women under 35. She designed and led Hyper Island’s new MA in Experience Design and was recently featured in ELLE UK as 30 women under 30 changing the world. Last year she was awarded an OBE for her services to design and diversity.

@redjotter

10:05

Janna Bastow

Co-Founder of ProdPad

@simplybastow

10:05 - 10:30

Info

Janna Bastow

Co-Founder of ProdPad

@simplybastow

Janna comes from a user-centric design background and has extensive experience building social web experiences. She founded ProductCamp London in 2010 in an effort to meet and learn from other product managers. As a product manager always looking for better tools, she co-founded ProdPad, product management software that helps you manage your roadmap and your product backlog.

@simplybastow

10:30

John Cutler

Product Evangelist, Amplitude

@johncutlefish

10:30 - 11:00

Info

John Cutler

Product Evangelist, Amplitude

@johncutlefish

John Cutler is keenly focused on user experience and evidence-driven product development. He mixes and matches various methodologies to help teams deliver lasting outcomes for their customers. “Team Tetris and the feature factory will only take you so far. Cross-functional teams desire so much more, and my passion is helping them get there. It’s a win/win for the front-line teams, the business, and the customer and user.” John currently works as a product evangelist at Amplitude. As a former UX researcher at AppFolio, a product manager at Zendesk, Pendo.io, AdKeeper and RichFX, a startup founder, and a product team coach, John has a perspective that spans individual roles, domains, and products. His viral enthusiasm has been heard through speaking/teaching engagements at Agile-Lean Ireland, UX Thailand, Front, Oredev, Mind The Product, Agile 2015, Heart of Agile Philadelphia (2016), and various ProductCamps (Vancouver, Los Angeles, Raleigh NC) and MeetUps (Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, New York). John’s talk on Feature Factories was voted one of the Top 10 Product Talks of 2017.

@johncutlefish

11:00

Morning Coffee

Spotlight Stage:
11:10 - 11:35- Speaker Q&A with Janna Bastow and John Cutler

Speed Networking:
11:05 - 11:20
11:25 - 11:40

11:45

Rakhi Rajani

Creating cognitively diverse teams

11:45 - 12:15

Info

Rachael Shah

Building a product team - iteratively

11:45 - 12:15

Info

Stephen Culligan

Why we chose to fight SAFe and how we lost

11:45 - 12:15

Info

Creating cognitively diverse teams

The conversation around diversity has traditionally focused on gender and race, however the best teams I’ve ever worked in are diverse in many other ways. In this session, I’ll share lessons learnt from creating innovative product teams that excel at finding forward thinking solutions - by leaving their disciplinary baggage at the door.

Rakhi Rajani

Associate Partner, QuantumBlack

Rakhi is a Chartered Psychologist who explores the connection between human intelligence and machine intelligence. Working at the intersection of psychology, emerging technology and design, she creates interdisciplinary R&D, Innovation and Skunkworks labs for organisations that want to experiment, think forward and invent the future. Rakhi has extensive experience observing how people behave, monitoring the world for weak signals, patterns and drivers of change, subsequently creating normative or exploratory futures that lead to innovation in new products, services, business models and experiences. Areas of expertise include: Interplanetary civilisation, innovation for humanity, and behavioural change by design.

@rakhi

Building a product team - iteratively

Just like building a product, a team is also built iteratively. We talk about product growth but can neglect the role delivery plays on growing a team and the evolution along the way. There are parallels between product and delivery that while the product manager is focussed on the product strategy, the delivery manager is thinking about team strategy ( which can be though of as a product). I plan to share my experiences of supporting and growing a product team as they've evolved over the first year of a product.

Rachael Shah

Delivery Manager, Co-op

Rachael Shah is a Delivery Manager at Co-op digital in Manchester, UK. She’s worked with a range of delivery teams spanning in-house and agency environments working with clients ranging from SMEs to household names such as the BBC, British Red Cross & The Scout Association. Rachael’s an avid conference fan, though to date has been a keen supporter of the Deliver conference platform where she’s delivered workshops and talks on the following topics; LEGO Scrum community of practice, Data-driven delivery in 2018 and managing remote teams in 2015. Active in the delivery community as a blogger at Rachaelshah.com, as well as guest features at the Digitalprojectmanager.com. Rachael’s keen to ensure that delivery and product disciplines collaborate ensure sharing of best practices and emerging trends on how we collectively deliver value as product teams.

@rachaelashah

Why we chose to fight SAFe and how we lost

Scaled Agile Framework-e (SAFe) has been adopted across the technology industry as a silver bullet to effective agile adoption at scale. It has sparked many backlashes from product teams and, most recently, from famed product coach Marty Cagan. This is the story of why our product team chose to fight SAFe, how we lost and the lessons we learned along the way.

Stephen Culligan

Head of Product, Glofox

Stephen is Head of Product at Glofox where he is helping fitness communities to live happier and healthier lives. He has spent the last 3 years coaching product teams through their biggest challenges in the telco, automotive, finance and healthcare industries. As an MTP trainer in Boston and Dublin and coordinator for ProductTanks in EMEA he gets to meet a lot of product managers and loves sharing war stories. Come say hi on the MTP slack!

@cu_lligs

12:15

Itamar Gilad

The GIST Framework

12:15 - 12:45

Info

Adrian Howard

How to write OKRs that don't suck

12:15 - 12:45

Info

Oluwatobi Otokiti

Influential Leadership builds winning products

12:15 - 12:45

Info

The GIST Framework

In this talk I'll explain why classic roadmaps, project plans and product backlogs are failing us,and why I switched to using GIST (Goals, Ideas, Steps and Tasks) a framework for planning and execution that uses plans that are built for change, creates lower management overhead, empowers team autonomy, and ultimately delivers high impact products.

Itamar Gilad

Consultant, Author and Speaker

Itamar Gilad is a consultant, author and speaker specializing in product management, strategy, and growth. Over the past 20 years he held senior product management and engineering roles at Google, Microsoft and other companies. Itamar writes a popular product management blog and is the creator of a number of product management methodologies including the GIST Framework and the Confidence Meter. For more information please visit itamargilad.com

@ItamarGilad

How to write OKRs that don't suck

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are awesome — everybody says so! So why do they work so badly for some companies? Why do they often end up as another stick to beat teams with? Adrian will share his experiences of working with OKRs. We’ll walk through ways to create and work with OKRs effectively — and how to do the exact opposite. You’ll leave with a list of common mistakes and anti-patterns to avoid — helping you and your teams create OKRs that don’t suck!

Adrian Howard

Consultant, Quietstars

Adrian Howard helps companies build effective teams and great products with quietstars.com. He’s at his best solving problems where Product, Agile, and UX overlap. You’ll find him working with companies of all sizes — combining team coaching & teaching with hands on UX & development work.

@adrianh

Influential Leadership builds winning products

Have you been second-guessed by your developers, designers and executives in your PM journey before? One common problem Product Managers face is not being able to steer the product strategy and roadmap of their product. In this talk, I’ll explore why this happens and share how I’ve learned to build the influence needed to lead internal teams and stakeholders

Oluwatobi Otokiti

Product Manager, Andela

Oluwatobi Otokiti is a Technology Product Manager at Andela, a company that builds high performing software engineering teams by investing in Africa’s most talented software engineers. She is a product development expert with varied experiences in building consumer products, B2B products and most recently internal products that help Andela drive & achieve her business goals.

@TobiOtokiti

12:45

Lunch

Spotlight Stage:
13:00 - 13:45 - The Product Experience Podcast Live!
13:50 - 14:00- Delivering an exceptional customer experience with embedded analytics - Shawn Deegan, General Manager, Yellowfin

Speed Networking:
13:05 - 13:29
13:40 - 14:10

14:15

Lucy Spence

Decision Supervision

14:15 - 14:40

Info

Neil Vass

How to disappoint people

14:15 - 14:40

Info

Sally Brogan

The Dreaded ‘R’s: Refactor, Re-write, Re-build

14:15 - 14:40

Info

Decision Supervision

As product people it’s up to us to ensure that the right decisions are getting made, but surprisingly often, that means that we’re not the people making those decisions. What we need to do is guide the process so we achieve the right outcomes. How you do that successfully will vary by organisation, however there are lots of concepts and techniques that can help you improve decision quality, whatever the decision, and whoever is making it. This talk covers a selection of those techniques and concepts that I have found most helpful in my professional life, and illustrates them with tales from my personal life, and the decision to get a dog.

Lucy Spence

Associate Director, Product Management, Compare the Market

Lucy has spent two decades making all sorts of mistakes while building customer experiences. She likes to share what she's learnt from places like Amazon, TUI, LOVEFiLM, M&S, Department of Health, and now Compare the Market, so others can can make new and more interesting mistakes.

@lucyjspence

How to disappoint people

Many projects start with grand ambitions and limited time and money – some kind of disappointment is inevitable. There are different approaches we can take to disappointing people, some of which lead to projects being seen as successes and others which end in tears and recriminations. This talk will tour through some recurring sources of disappointment I’ve seen and techniques for coming to terms with them. You'll leave equipped with some new ideas you can use to try disappointing people yourself.

Neil Vass

Principal Delivery Manager, Co-op

Neil is a delivery manager for Co-op Digital, helping product teams and stakeholders from across the Co-op collaborate on new products and services. Previously, he worked in a variety of roles, with experience including automating medical image analysis, building a motion-tracking toothbrush to study brushing technique, and adding new features to the CBeebies website. It’s people problems that are the most interesting, though.

@neil_vass

The Dreaded ‘R’s: Refactor, Re-write, Re-build

As Product Managers we’re often under intense business pressure to deliver new features and functionality. But how do we know when it’s the right time to look again at what’s already there? When do issues go beyond technical debt? Do features and products have a lifespan? Should we dread the ‘R’ words or embrace them? Explore how to spot the signs, when you should take the plunge and getting buy-in from the business. Consider different approaches to reworking systems and achieving the optimal balance between old and new functionality.

Sally Brogan

MD Product and Tech, Big Sofa

Sally is MD Product and Tech at Big Sofa. Her role involves managing the journey of Big Sofa’s product offering to meet the business’s vision of being a world-leading, video-led, visualisation, and intelligence partner to global clients. Over the last ten years she has developed a passion for getting stuck into the design, build, and innovation of interesting user-centric and data led products.

14:40

Thor Mitchell

In My Humble Opinion

14:40 - 15:10

Info

Richard Cadman

Product lessons from two years at Monzo

14:40 - 15:10

Info

Stewart Livingstone

Experience is overrated

14:40 - 15:10

Info

In My Humble Opinion

Great product managers are humble to a fault. They understand that their opinion is just one of many that are valuable and valid. They know that they can never fully understand how others feel, or what others need, but must never stop trying to do so. They do not crave attention, credit, or authority, yet they offer them willingly to others. This talk will examine why this is the case, and what this means for you. Why is humility is so foundational to being a product manager? How can you develop your humility as a skill? And how can you test for and recognise humility in others when looking for people to join your team?

Thor Mitchell

Product Leadership Coach

Thor is a Product Leadership Coach, working with Heads of Product and Chief Product Officers in the UK, Europe, and the US, to help them build and develop high performing product teams. As a regular speaker at Product meetups and events, Thor draws on twenty years experience in the technology industry, including nine years at Google as an Engineer and Product Manager and three years as Chief Product Officer at Crowdcube. Thor also works closely with a number of UK universities to introduce Product Management to students studying business and entrepreneurship, is a founding co-organiser of ProductTank Exeter, and was the featured guest on the first episode of the Product Experience podcast.

@ThorMitchell

Product lessons from two years at Monzo

Rich joined Monzo two years ago. In that time, Monzo has grown enormously, launching and scaling their current account to over 3.5m users. Rich has worked on their marketplace beta, energy switching, overdrafts, loans, Monzo Points, growth, and now the Monzo Plus premium account. This talk will run through some of the product highlights of his time at Monzo. It’ll be interspersed with practical lessons on managing people and products that he’s picked up along the way.

Richard Cadman

Product Manager, Monzo

Rich is a product manager at Monzo, the UK’s fastest growing bank. In his two years at Monzo he’s shipped the first version of savings and energy switching, scaled overdrafts from a few hundred to 300,000+ users, launched loans, and is now working on Monzo’s premium account. Previously he worked as a product manager at Jukedeck (acquired by ByteDance), and an operations consultant at one of the UK’s largest retailers. He has an MEng in Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Cambridge.

@richardcadman

Experience is overrated

In a world where we’re at war with each other to hire and retain talent ask yourselves “Are we using experience as an excuse?”. As a new comer to the industry and with 10 years experience in Learning and Development, I’ll be looking at the problem we’ve yet to solve around the talent shortage. I’ll explore possible solutions which aren’t focussed on ‘having digital experience’ and give you fresh ideas on how you can implement these in your workplace.

Stewart Livingstone

Agile Delivery Manager, The Co-op

Stewart Livingstone is a Delivery Manager at Co-op, working within their Digital department. Stewart helps the Web team deliver value through his ongoing coaching and leading on agile practices within the team. He’s new to working with product teams, however, with a wealth of leadership and people experience, he’s already on the front foot in this new world.

@stewlivi

15:10

Ross Webb

Your Product Leadership Scorecard

15:10 - 15:30

Info

Salma Alam-Naylor

A team is not a bonsai tree

15:10 - 15:30

Info

Lisa Vigar

Iterating your Voice product

15:10 - 15:30

Info

Your Product Leadership Scorecard

Product leadership is a journey and I'd like to share a map for the way forward. With the success of agile coaching, more and more companies are turning to Product Coaching. As a Product Coach I've been fortunate to work with some great teams and have been able to grow some very successful products. I've coached dozens of Product Leaders to help them best deal with their journey and want to share what I've learned with you. This isn't about how to build a product but how to deal with the problems Product Leaders face, like how to deal with being overwhelmed and how to help your managers and direct reports. Your team’s Product Dashboard and scorecard can help get you where you need to be.

Ross Webb

Head Coach

Ross has been developing digital products for over 20 years. As a hands-on Product Manager, he has launched several successful products, including taking one from ideation to $50 million turnover in 9 months, and has led products with a turnover of half a billion dollars. He now coaches Product Leaders and Teams and has helped coach dozens of product teams globally. He thinks the hardest product he ever launched was a game for a broadcaster aimed at small kids where users let him know if they liked the product by fighting over devices or crying.

@ross_webb

A team is not a bonsai tree

If a team is not a bonsai tree, what is it? Salma will be drawing on her experiences as a tech leader to present a very horticultural metaphor that explores servant leadership, cultivating empowered teams, and the human condition.

Salma Alam-Naylor

Software Development Lead, Code

Salma is a Leader, Engineer, Human Being and Activist. As a professional musician, qualified music teacher and musical comedian in a past life, she uses her diverse experience in working with groups of people of all ages to bring tech teams together, empower them, and nurture their organic growth. From previous tech leadership roles at a range of start-ups and global ecommerce companies, Salma joined Code Computerlove in 2019 as their first Front End Specialist Software Development Lead, with a bold mission to empower every single person at the heart of the technology discipline to deliver brilliant digital products and experiences.

Iterating your Voice product

You don’t just ‘find’ a great product, it evolves and iterates into something the audience will love and use time and time again – and a Voice product is no different. When you only have a voice to play with, the smallest change can have big consequences – especially for a child! In this talk I’ll explain some of the successes and failures, techniques and lessons learnt along the way to building a Webby Award winning Kids Voice skill.

Lisa Vigar

Senior Product Manager, BBC

With vast experience across editorial and digital, Lisa’s spent years building products including the chart topping Children’s mobile apps, IPTV and red button features and services. In 2016, she product managed the launch of the Award winning BBC iPlayer Kids app before moving into the BBC’s new Voice + AI team last year where she launched the BBC Kids skill, and continues to work on new innovations using voice.

@LisaVigar

15:30

Afternoon Coffee

Spotlight Stage:
15:40 - 16:05 - Speaker Q&A with Itamar Gilad and Adrian Howard.
Hosted by Arne Kittler

Speed Networking:
15:35 - 15:50
15:55 - 16:10

16:15

Joe Leech

Product Strategy and UX Consultant

@mrjoe

16:15 - 16:45

Info

Joe Leech

Product Strategy and UX Consultant

@mrjoe

Joe is the author of the book Psychology of Designers. Joe helps big organisations and startups do the right things in the right order for the right reasons in the right way. A recovering neuroscientist, then a spell as an elementary school teacher, Joe started his UX & product career 14 years ago. He has worked with big organisations like MoMa, Raspberry Pi, AO.com, Disney, eBay, and Marriott as well as helping to supercharge high growth businesses and startup. He is also a director and shareholder for a small portfolio of startups.

@mrjoe

16:45

Shaun Russell

Product Coach

@_ShaunRussell

16:45 - 17:10

Info

Shaun Russell

Product Coach

@_ShaunRussell

Shaun is a Product Coach, working with Product Managers, Owners and Founders to realise their potential. He mixes teaching modern Product Management techniques with building an awareness of communication and conflict, based on the lessons he learnt at startups such as Outfittery, Lyst and Adthena. When not coaching, you can find Shaun playing music, climbing walls, and co-organising ProductTank in Berlin.

@_ShaunRussell

17:10

Melissa Perri

CEO of Produx Labs

@lissijean

17:10 - 17:50

Info

Melissa Perri

CEO of Produx Labs

@lissijean

Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy, and the author of “Escaping the Build Trap”. She believes the key to creating great products is growing great product leaders. Committed to that mission, she created the online school Product Institute, where she has shared her scientific approach to Product Management with over 3500 students. In 2019, Melissa was appointed to the faculty of Harvard Business School to teach Product Management in the MBA program. As a consultant, Melissa works with executives worldwide to set up their product organizations, advise on product strategy, and grow product leaders into Chief Product Officers. Melissa will be handing out signed copies of her book, The Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value at the conference.

@lissijean

17:50

Closing Remarks

18:00

Afterparty