The next Product School Meetup, on Thursday, November 28th, will give the opportunity to discuss important challenges in the agenda of a product manager on a daily basis: how to balance the phases of discovery and delivery, and how to maintain a good analogy while prioritizing big features vs smaller things, i.e.iterations or fixes of what has already been delivered.
Join us in a very interesting discussion with Savvas Georgiou from Welcome and Spiros Martzoukos from Lenses, both senior Product Managers, sharing their experiences on how they’ve managed to tackle those challenges so far in their professional path.
- The Mixed Priorities Challenge – Working on big features and “small” things in parallel, “Welcome“
We will try to share the story of evolving the way we collect and prioritize work. Specifically how things changed when we moved form 20 people company with single digit resources and problems (1 product, 1 designer, 1 product manager, 1 experiment at a time etc) to today’s reality: a handful of products, many stakeholders and 100 team members all contributing with ideas, bugs, blockers & findings. We have switched our internal processes several times in an effort to “merge” our Bold new-feature-driven Roadmap with multiple smaller things we need to deliver-or-die. So, before switching again, we will share this journey with you.
- The Double Diamond framework – Balancing Product Discovery and Delivery, “Lenses“
Our job as Product Managers is to discover a usable, feasible and useful product. This entails a list of activities that span across the entire discovery spectrum, such as facilitating and running user interviews, creating competitive analyses, procuring technical feasibility reports, yet we are often called to focus on the Delivery side of things, from the mind-numbing backlog administration activities to managing stakeholders and preparing product releases. Inevitably, questions arise from this process such as “how do you balance these activities”, “how do you argue the value and the investment in each activity” and “how does this all fit into a coherent process”? The aim of this talk is to present a framework which we deployed at Contentful and helped us solve problems such as: – Misalignment between stakeholders, PMs and the team. – Constant rework because of insufficient product discovery. – Unsatisfied team members because they don’t feel involved in the product creation process. – Unsatisfied stakeholders because they feel kept out of the loop.
Meet the Speakers
Savvas Georgiou
Savvas was born in Athens, Greece and holds an MSc degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Savvas has worked in start-up companies since 2009, starting from the incubator of Facebook Fund 08 in Palo Alto and worked a few years as a hands-on Ruby engineer. Before Welcome Pickups he was the CTO of the Daily Secret team, together with heading up the tech team at Conde Nast publications in Greece. Since 2015, as a co-founder and Product Director of Welcome Pickups, he is scaling the product team and he is directly responsible for the successful integration of Welcome Pickups with the travel industry (Hotels, Property Managers, OTAs and more).
Spiros Martzoukos
Spiros Martzoukos has been working as a Designer, Developer, Product Owner and finally Product Manager in a range of Organization across Athens, New York and Berlin. Transitioning from a Head of Design position in Liberis Digital to Head of Design at Dailysecret, he leads the company’s design efforts to expand across 27 cities around the world. After that, he made the jump to Berlin where he worked as a UI engineer at Edenspiekermann in projects such as Fontshop.com and later as a Product Owner in Red Bull Amaphiko, a Social Entrepreneurship platform driven by the energy drink company. Making the shift from an agency to a Product company, he then joined Contentful as a Product Manager where he helped move the product forward and launch mammoth initiatives such as the Contentful’s Rich Text Editor. After 6 years in Berlin, he returned to Greece where he is helping Lenses.io change the Big Data world and trying to share his experience around Product Management with as many people as possible.
About Product School
Product School is the global leader in product management training, with over 10,000 alumni, 20 campuses worldwide and a live online campus. Product School’s certificates (PMC™,FPMC™,PLC™) are the most important industry-recognized certificates for product managers; all of our instructors are senior-level product managers working at top technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Airbnb, PayPal, LinkedIn, and Netflix.
For more info here: http://bit.ly/2X3B0uK
