Following our Product Symposium on Wednesday 8 Feb, Brad Bell at Point of Rental shared some notes from the sessions. With permission – and thanks – he’s said we can share them with the world alongside some of the other key takeaways from the day.
Get ready for matrixes, silences, and free tools.
Using Your Product as a Marketing Engine. Lucy Heskins, OhBlimey
Some great ideas to inspire thinking but for me, the key takeaway was the Problem Awareness Matrix. It is easy to forget that not all visitors to our site are at the same stage in the buying process and this was a good reminder.
It prompted us to explore, starting from the JTBD which our products serve, what problem awareness content we could partner with marketing to create. eg Our software helps manage assets to reduce shrinkage. Marketing could blog on shrinkage data for the event industry segment. This could drive general web traffic of people who don’t know they need our software this helping position us as a source of useful information as well as feeding the lead funnel and raising awareness of our solutions.
Hiring Your First PM or Product Specialist. Tim Wilkinson, Product Heads
A session on hiring the first PM in a startup but with excellent implications for hiring in general. Tim started by explaining why you cannot use a generic job description to hire from and have to establish what sort of company and product person you need, how to define this, and set up your hire for success.
Different types of PM are required in different companies depending on the maturity and needs of the product.
Tim also shared an interview scoring tool for the hiring process that can also be adopted for career development. Feel free to create a copy of the doc here.
Interviews. Designing and Running Customer Interviews That Work. Jim Morris, Product Discovery Group
Super practical session covering the when and the why of customer interviews and how you should use them across the whole product development process. We then split into groups to run practice interviews.
My key takeaway, among many, don’t try to guide the interviewee and do not be afraid of silence. Let people think and you will learn.
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