MTP Engage Hamburg 2018

Modern corporate culture is slowly coming to understand the benefits of highly diverse teams, stretching from gender to personality types. But where does product management stand with embracing that same diversity and complexity in our users? At this year’s MTP Engage, product director at Xing, Mirja Bester, shared how she thinks that by taking the Read more »

In this talk to the MTP Engage Hamburg audience my colleague Natalie Moschner and I share some of our experiences and learnings from implementing product discovery in daily work routines, and we look at how we integrated product discovery in a firm with over 400 employees like AutoScout24. Product Discovery Basics Firstly, you should keep Read more »

True to the “Engage” of our conference title we always look for formats that go beyond brilliant presentations and that give our attendees opportunities to interact with each other and grow their network within the product community. But we also wanted to try something new at this year’s MTP Engage conference in order to create Read more »

“The hallmark of successful scaling is knowing when to hit the brakes so you can scale faster later,” according to Bob Sutton, organizational behavior expert at Stanford’s School of Engineering. I couldn’t agree more. Finding the right moment to enter the growth phase is crucial. Startups are quite vulnerable to focusing too much on scaling Read more »

As product managers, our job is to make the right decisions. However, as human beings, our decision-making is constantly impaired by systematic cognitive biases, making it really hard to decide objectively and rationally. For example, we look up to our most successful peers and are therefore biased to follow industry leaders such as Spotify, Soundcloud, Read more »

The final keynote of this year’s MTP Engage came from Paul Adams, VP of product at Intercom. In the preparations leading up to the conference, Paul had warned me that he would challenge some common beliefs in the audience. We were excited, because we wanted to end the conference by giving our audience something to Read more »

What does culture have to do with building great products? In my opinion, everything. I’m a group product manager at Yelp, and in this presentation from MTP Engage, I look at why it’s so important to create a supportive culture where product people and engineers collaborate and trust each other. I manage a team of Read more »

Bashing agile is in vogue at the moment, so when veteran product manager and product design evangelist Jeff Patton suggested it as a topic for his keynote talk at MTP Engage I jumped at it. If the audience was expecting a speech which shot down agile methodologies, they were wrong. Instead Jeff started to deconstruct agile Read more »

When we compare today’s agile product management in practice with what we have seen some 10 years ago, not much has changed: Agility is still mainly limited to UX labs and A/B testing, and misses the potential value that could be found between the initial idea and a working product. The standard answer within product Read more »

Booking.com is a European company with a reputation for running experiments in a sophisticated way. Lukas Vermeer is a senior product owner at Booking.com and one of the key players who established not only the tooling, but more importantly the culture behind experimentation at Booking.com. The title of his keynote at MTP Engage refers to an Read more »