People from all over the world came to Portugal to have the opportunity to participate on the Workshops, the Talks and expand their Network a little more. The themes were, inevitably, related with the product discovery, build and management. All the product-related topics always return to the user-center approach. Why? Because the products are meant to serve people’s needs. And sometimes having a product with thousands of features can mean nothing if nobody uses them. (Well, it can mean a lot of effort / money thrown off the window.)
Day 1 — The Workshops
My morning started with the workshop “Creating products and services people will buy with Jobs to be Done” by Rene Bastijans and Andrej Balaz.
Using the Jobs To Be Done framework, we’ve documented a user interview through a timeline tool and then collected the most important insights that would give us a clue on where to focus our attentions on a product.
Sometimes, in our user research, we are so focused on knowing our current users or future users that we forget about our product leavers. People that stop using a product can tell us the real story that led them to switch. And it’s really important to know how to keep the product experience good and up to the market demands in order to retain users.
The afternoon continued with another great workshop “Lean Product Management” by Jeff Gothelf, the author of some books like “Lean UX” or “Lean Vs Agile Vs Design Thinking”. In the workshop we dove in what could be the thinking behind a specific application of a very known management software. What were the user or business needs that triggered that product? How can we measure that product’s success?
Lean experimentation to lead product decisions based on real data is the way to avoid unnecessary risks of spending too much time on features people actually don’t need. Product managers should ship, sense and respond as fast as they can, even if that means failing the test. It’s better to fail an early-staged idea than failing an entire developed project.
Day 2 — The Talks
With a top-notch panel of speakers there was really not much to do but to sit and absorb that all. At the end of the day I felt that all those people left the venue even more aware of the User Experience impact in their Products. I’ll share below some of the take-overs:
As a conclusion, I’ll use Jeff Gothelf’s ending sentence:
“Frame your product success in user-centric terms”
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