ProductCon 2024 London: Takeaways
ProductCon 2024 London wrapped up a couple of days ago. We heard from product people at companies like Booking.com, Monzo, Just Eat, and more.
You can check out the full guest list and catch up on each presenter's slides. ProductSchool also upload the recordings on their YouTube channel.
In the meantime, here are five takeaways I've been noodling on since the show ended.
Generative AI forces us to revisit our customer journey (Booking.com)
Joe Futty, VP of Product at Booking.com, opened the day with a talk about the impact of generative AI on his business.
Joe believes generative AI forces them to revisit the customer journey:
What unmet customer needs does generative AI now allow us to meet?
How can we better understand customer intent?
Can we reach true personalisation (instead of mere segmentation)?
I enjoyed the thought exercise Joe put us through. We were along for the ride.
He's right: things have changed.
Fancy new AI technology is not just a new 'thing'. It's an opportunity to revisit our entire product stack.
Product is responsible for revenue (TripAdvisor)
Fabrice des Mazery, former TripAdvisor CPO, encouraged product people to 'act like an owner, think like a VC'.
Fabrice's point, beautifully brought home through a funny deck, is simple: building a beautiful product cannot be a goal in itself.
The reason product organisations exist is to generate ROI for the user and the company.
To act like an owner and think like a VC, he offers three strategies:
Investment. Product must be co-responsible for return on investment.
Capping. Product must control the time it spends on an opportunity. A direct callback to Shape Up's 'Appetite' concept.
Build a portfolio. Product must split work between low-hanging fruits, initiatives, and bets.
This is something I've implemented in my team for the past year with reasonable success. Emergencies sometimes force you to deviate from the plan. But having the plan encourages everyone to realign eventually.
First-principle thinking (Monzo)
Fernando Fanton, CPO of Monzo, told us what it's like working on Monzo's product team.
I was most impressed by how customer-led Monzo seems to be. According to Fernando, some products get over 500 bits of customer feedback per month.
Theirs is a first-principle approach to product. Fernando makes the point that, to deliver something excellent, his team must:
Start from scratch. Looking at how competitors solve problems is not something they do.
Be in constant contact with users. Gather as much feedback as possible.
Pilot internally. More than 3,000 Monzo employees join in new product/feature trials.
Learn & iterate.
Nothing too groundbreaking, of course, but a great reminder of what we should all strive for.
This was one of my favourite talks of the day. It sounds like Monzo is truly a product-first company.
Product careers are anything but linear (Just Eat)
Jess Hall, CPO of Just Eat, stole the show towards the end of the day with a stellar talk on career progression and leadership. Based on the feedback I've seen, this was a crowd favourite.
She features twice in my takeaways from the event.
My first takeaway from Jess' talk is about product careers. She reckons a product career looks like this:
And I tend to agree. There's nothing linear about a product career. I would hazard a guess why: product is a varied field.
There are many subcategories shoved under the 'product' umbrella term. This creates plenty of opportunities for individuals coming from non-product roles (marketing like me, engineering, design, etc.). It also creates plenty of opportunities to niche down further in one's career.
A rough guide to product success (Just Eat)
My second takeaway from Jess' talk was this beautiful slide:
Seeing this breakdown of product skills energises me. There's so much to learn, so much to practice, so much to explore.
Whether you want to remain a product manager or move to a leader role, there's plenty to do.
I suppose if I had to bundle both my takeaways from Jess' talk, it would be this: there are opportunities in product.
Random thoughts and musings from the day
In his talk, Joe talked about an interesting challenge at Booking.com: a single user may have multiple personas. 'Booking-business-trip' Alex and 'booking-honeymoon' Alex are two very different personas under the same user. I never really thought about that.
Generative AI was, unsurprisingly, omnipresent across all talks.
Millie Zah (DAZN)'s rally cry "Don't stay in your lane" resonated a lot with the audience. Another facet of the 'opportunity in product' I mentioned earlier.
The concept of an 'AI Product Manager' was both lauded and criticised. Some saw it as an opportunity for PMs to niche down. Others thought it a silly concept because all PM work will become AI in one way or another. I guess time will tell.
Did you attend ProductCon 2024? Which talk got you fired up? Tell me in the comments below 👇