The Cayman Islands Joins ProductTank

During the inaugural ProductTank Cayman Islands meetup held at Uniregistry offices in Grand Cayman, the participants had the opportunity to enjoy two great product presentations.

Bartosz Mozyrko took us through a new product launch case study to showcase how to structure product roll-outs to embrace and manage uncertainty rather than focusing on avoiding unexpected surprises. Bart started with a history of how the company evolved in the last few years and what business context led to launching a new product – Domain Perks.

He explained initial frictions within the company that could jeopardize the success of the project as well as the influence of external factors and how they have been mitigated. Presenting the case study, he said:

The truth about launching new products is that no one knows what they’re doing. We had to adapt a method of fast learning by evolving our new product according to customer needs, business needs, and internal constraints through quick iterations. If we knew what we were doing from the start, then we wouldn’t be building something new.

Key Takeaways

  • Building products is a collaborative effort. It’s good to have a direct manager that can support you when going gets tough and a buy-in from surrounding teams.
  • Cutting corners can save on development time. Do you really need this yearly subscription renewal (backend) to find out how many people will buy your product?
  • To help you and your team increase the speed, keep the group of people working on your project as small as possible, but keep every stakeholder up-to-date.
  • Launching products is as much about building them as making sure they will get used.

During the second presentation, Paulo Fierro, took us through the process of liberating existing data to help improve people’s everyday experiences.

Paulo gave us an amusing summary of how he got into programming and the background of how, in 2009, he came to develop the #1 paid app in Norway which helped support the Governments free bicycle scheme – the first of its kind and now a hallmark in most major cities around the world.

Back to the present day and, tired of getting stuck in George Town traffic on a seemingly random basis, Paulo used the tools available to him to do something about it and tie it all together in genuinely pleasing user experience – creating a popular app called Avoid Town.

During the presentation, Paulo educated the audience on the “how”, “what”, and “why” of new App Development and also provided some useful techniques every product person can use to take better advantage of the vast amounts of freely-available data that’s around us.

Often our best work comes from building something personal. Something that gets rid of friction or frustration in our everyday lives and that is exactly how Avoid Town came to be.

You can see Paulo’s slides here.

For information regarding the next Meetup please visit ProductTank Cayman Islands