Recorded Event: Rosenfeld Media's PMUX Virtual Conference Talks from the conference

Good to Great

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

Lots of product teams have progressed substantially over the past several years from very weak/novice to generally capable/competent. The dialog has moved from “why can’t we have a product designer or user researcher on our team?” to “why is it that our product manager and product designer are not always working together effectively?” and “why is it that the user research is being largely ignored when they have such seemingly valuable findings?”

This is actually progress, and we can see the improvements in the results, but in the commercial product world, it’s not sufficient to just have mediocre products, at least not for long. Our products have to provide substantial value over and above the alternatives. In this presentation, Inspired author Marty Cagan will focus on raising the game of product managers, product designers and user researchers. He will highlight several of the top issues/problems for these roles, and discuss how you can address each.

Radical Focus

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

Getting a team to work together and achieve a goal can be as much about picking the goal as picking the team. Too many companies fail at making big changes or tackling big problems because they fail to focus, prioritize, and motivate all members of the team.

In this talk, Christina Wodtke, author of the forthcoming Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results, will teach you how to tackle and realize big goals in a methodical way using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). You’ll learn the beauty of a good fail and how regular check-ins can keep you on track to success. Christina has devoted her career to tackling monumental tasks. She’s helped grow companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and the New York Times. Nowadays she works with startups and entrepreneurs, sharing her strategies for success and inspiring them to pursue big goals and outlandish dreams.

UX Luvs PM: 6 Ways to Learn Better Together

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

UXers who practice user research and Product Managers have a lot in common. They both want to learn from users and customers and work hard toward developing successful products, features, or services.

However, sometimes they may feel disconnected from each other, perceiving one another as too slow, fast, biased, academic, disorganized, vague, and what not. During this talk, Tomer Sharon, author of It’s Our Research and the forthcoming Validating Product Ideas, will provide six practices—three for UXers, three for PMs—to work better together in researching users and their needs.

UX designers:​

• Be there early to help Product Managers to Shape product roadmap 
• Listen to PMs to identify knowledge gaps
• Let PMs be: invite them to ask users questions

Product Managers:

• ​UXers can make you heroes
• Get feedback on your survey questions ​ ​
• Customer meetings are a rare opportunity to learn​

Planning Your User’s Path Together

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

Product teams spend a lot of time making decisions about what the customer will experience. UX Designers make journey maps and interfaces. Product Managers build and prioritize roadmaps. Marketing writes copy and gets in front of potential users. Engineers make it all into a product. All too frequently, we do these things separately, which can lead to problems. Engineering doesn’t understand the ideal user flow. Designers don’t know why one feature is being built before a more important one. Marketing has a different vision of the ideal customer. And Product Managers have to run around explaining the vision to everybody on the team.

Some things are so important that they need to be created, shared, and understood by the whole team together. The User Lifecycle Funnel is one of those things. In this talk, Laura Klein, author of the forthcoming Build Better Products, will share a framework and a design thinking exercise for making sure that everyone on your team—including Product Managers and UX Designers—is united in their vision for just what exactly it is that you’re building. You’ll learn a quick, hands-on tool that will help you combine qualitative and quantitative data to determine and measure every step of your customer’s journey.

Balancing Continuous Discovery and Delivery

What You’ll Learn

• Build your core product team—your triad
• Give equal visibility to discovery and delivery work
• Involve the whole team in the discovery process
• Make discovery an iterative process

There is No Such Thing as UX Strategy. There is Only Product Strategy.

From Rosenfeld Media's Product Management + User Experience Virtual Conference.

UX strategy is part of product strategy. It is not its own thing. Calling it out as such further isolates designers from their colleagues in “the business” and in Product Management. It does nothing to actually drive the value of a holistic user experience into the org’s mainstream conversations. Instead, designers should work closely with Product Managers to inform a product strategy conversation that considers not only the UX but the business’ and product’s success factors as well.

In this talk, Jeff Gothelf—co-author of Lean UX and the forthcoming Sense and Respond—will teach you:

• Why carving out a separate “UX” strategy is detrimental to team and product cohesion
• How collaboration between product managers and ux designers can help frame a holistic product strategy
• How to divide strategic responsibilities between product managers and ux designers so that everyone has their seat at the table