By Teresa Torres · producttalk.org · @ttorres on X · LinkedIn
Teresa Torres recaps her favorite moments from the Mind the Product SF 2017 conference, which she considers the best product event she attends. She highlights her own workshop on continuous product discovery habits, then speakers on machine learning, knowledge sharing, user engagement metrics, intrapreneurship, roadmaps as strategy prototypes, and prototyping. Her closing observation is that most of the day centered on product discovery, a stage she believes product teams have neglected. The piece works as a snapshot of where product thinking was heading in 2017.
01Key takeaways
- Treat your roadmap as a prototype of your strategy rather than a fixed picture of an uncertain future.
- Track core users to find out whether people are actually using your product, not just signing up.
- Reward learning over certainty, and ask questions rather than telling teams what to do.
- Share customer knowledge deliberately across teams, since deep customer understanding is a competitive advantage.
- Solve the hardest problem first and iterate rapidly when prototyping.
- Invest more attention in product discovery, where many of the hardest problems actually sit.
02Key sections
- Workshop on continuous discovery
- Torres describes her full workshop, where attendees collected customer stories, built rapid prototypes, and learned her opportunity solution tree at a participant's request.
- Machine learning and adaptive computing
- Aparna Chennapragada's point that machine learning lets computers adapt to humans, rather than the reverse, stood out as a compelling vision.
- Sharing customer knowledge
- Nate Walkingshaw's focus on transferring knowledge across teams reinforces Torres's view that customer understanding is a core competitive advantage.
- Measuring real product usage
- Josh Elman's simple metrics for checking whether users truly engage with a product, by tracking core users, drew her attention.
- Intrapreneurship in large companies
- Janice Fraser's talk on why intrapreneurship is hard and what leaders and individuals can do was Torres's favorite session of the day.
- Roadmaps and prototyping
- Janna Bastow's view of roadmaps as strategy prototypes and Caitlin Kalinowski's prototyping tips round out the talks Torres found most useful.
03From the post
“In April, we posted this list of conferences. Since then, I’ve been asked dozens of times what my favorite product conference is. There are a lot of great product events, but for my money, none are better than Mind the Product. It’s the only product conference where I”
04Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.