Product Operations is gaining popularity for organizations that want to scale and optimize product management functions.

In this presentation, I will share how Sonatype implemented its Product Operations function and what we learned. Goal is to inspire how Product Operations can be rolled-out in your organization.

Topics include:
- What problems did we prioritize to solve
- How our team grew from 0 to 5
- Lessons we picked up along the way

This presentation will not cover "What is Product Operations". Intended audience are PM leaders or PMs who want to start or has just started their product operations team.

In Vancouver, one of the local universities - the University of British Columbia, or UBC - offers companies and entrepreneurs amazing resources to help start a company, build a company, and scale a company. Find out if UBC's incubator and accelerator programs are a fit for you or your company.

UBC has 90,000 full-time students, faculty and staff, spends over $670million across over 9,500 different research projects each year, was ranked #34 in the world in 2021 - and ranked #1 for climate action globally - and have 8 nobel prize winners on faculty.

At this local world-class research and education institution, entrepreneurship@UBC works with around 100 different ventures at any given time. Over the past 9 years, entrepreneurship@UBC has supported 623 ventures, which together have raised $1.43billion in combined financing, generated $119million in combined revenue, and hired 1,056 employees.

Learn more about e@UBC and how you can get in and take advantage of extensive training sessions, networking and events, access over 200 volunteer business executives and startup exited entrepreneurs, Concept Fund, and 17 Entrepreneurs in Residence - all for free and without giving any equity.

Acquiring users for your feature and experimenting on existing user experience paradigms is tricky when users are already 'used' to something.

• When do you leverage internal vs. external customers for research?
• How might we formulate hypotheses and test them in product?
• When is a prototype good enough?
• What kind of data do we need to collect?
• How do we balance competing proposals?
• What's significant?

In this presentation, we'll explore all of the above through some of the key moments in developing IntelliCode suggestions. We'll also explore what we learned about operating as a product & dev team and discuss some practices that could be helpful to you.

As UX Researchers and Designers we’ve seen a lot when it comes to Personas in the world of product design. A lot of what passes for a Persona these days is not that useful to designers or product teams. As a result, there seems to be a backlash against Persona's as today’s product teams seem to take a “set it and forget it” approach or simply forego them altogether.

From our perspective Persona’s get a bad rap. If you get them right Personas can be an instrumental tool for engaging your team and stakeholders to define product strategy, drive innovation and communicate value.

We’ll walk through the top ways personas are done wrong and how to fix them so they truly add value to your product team.

Drew, Chris and Paul will dispel some myths and land some facts regarding growing as Product Managers in big tech and start-ups including the following:
- How is the PM role and PM team different?
- How do the cultures compare?
- How would my career growth be affected?
- What is the work-life balance really like?
- Is the compensation really that different?
- Plus many more areas we will uncover

Drew is a Sr Director of Product Management at Salesforce, and formerly led Product at Vancouver start-ups Mobify and Elastic Path.

Chris is a Senior Director of Product Management at Unbounce and has previous experience at AWS and Hootsuite.

Paul is a Senior PM at Microsoft with experience at sub 1,000 person companies (Central 1 and iQmetrix) and very small startups.

This is not just a click bite. Yoni Tzafrir, founder and CEO of Newsly (https://newsly.me), the fastest-growing audio app in North America, will introduce you to Newsly products and give you the opportunity to join not only as an employee but as a co-founder of the company. A little bit about Newsly:

Newsly is an audio content and news aggregator mobile application. It picks up the most trending articles on the web on topics you choose at any given moment and reads them to you in a natural human voice using AI technology.
For the first time in the history of the internet, the entire web becomes listenable all in one place.
It was initially developed to give people suffering from dyslexia and people with learning disabilities a new and better way to consume content, but while doing the market fit, we found it is the desired solution for audio lovers who listen to spoken audio (podcasts, audiobooks) but have no way to listen to topical personalized content.
In recent years, the spoken audio market has grown by 55% a year and is expected to accelerate even further.

Also, we have podcasts on our app (which has become one of our biggest growth engines), and digital radio so you don't have to switch to another app.
The app Is already on both mobile stores, moving from linear to exponential growth.

You can download the mobile app from:
https://newsly.me/

Newsly was chosen to be one of the top 15 consumer application companies in Canada in 2021 by bestartup.ca and to be one of the top 3 daily products on Product Hunt.

We can all imagine a world where the majority of goods and services embrace sustainable practices. Most of us care, even care deeply about this.

However, there is a gap between our values and daily choices we make, professionally and personally. There is a gap between how we perceive ourselves and our actual impact on things.

We want to take this opportunity to guide a [panel/workshop] session on discussing what are the steps that we as product people can take, today. Heck, even voting for and attending this session is a step - making a decision for sustainability.

Outcomes for this session are intended to generate interest not in specific issues themselves; but, rather, in the very need for Product people and our products, to start thinking in this wider scope. [maybe say something about Circular BC group? But not sure what…]

Locally, there are several major tech companies hiring: Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Apple. (called MAAMA now and was formerly FAANG) This session is not only for those who would like to eventually work at a MAAMA, but those just curious as to what it takes to land a role here. In this session, I will provide some tips for you to get noticed and hired. Some of the topics that will be covered include the following:
- Resume overhaul
- Interview preparation
- Securing an interview
- Interview
- Salary negotiation

I will provide some tips for success for all of these stages for companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta in this interactive presentation. Also, keep in mind that any of the topics above could warrant multiple sessions so consider this an abridged version or a “greatest hits”. I will also call upon the audience to contribute to help make this more interactive.

Paul is a senior product manager at Microsoft and has previously interviewed at Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

The "definition of done" is a central pillar of SCRUM methodology that is commonly used in software engineering planning processes, primarily to ensure engineering are not handed ill-defined tasks, which would likely lead to delays.

This session will explore how product & design teams can best coordinate with engineering teams. We'll use practical, project-based examples, to show how to deliver projects that are well-scoped and land on time.

Presentation Highlights:
- How to turn user stories & designs into engineering tasks with clear definitions of done
- Common pitfalls when writing up tasks for engineering
- Making room for R&D and code quality efforts
- Adapting when engineering inevitably hit roadblocks
- Validating that the work is actually done

Whether you’re researching market opportunities, brainstorming new product ideas, developing products customers love, or managing product roll-outs – organizations face many challenges in product delivery.

In this session we explore the Product Office and how it helps organizational alignment across teams, oversees service delivery, and provides visibility into product development.

Outline

Signs your product management is out of balance 

The importance of strong product management  

How the Product Office brings balance 

Addressing challenges by converging capabilities in areas like governance, product management and product ownership

Group exercise that allows participants to explore the work and outcomes of the Product Office 

The convergence of product management and product ownership 

Implications for organizations  

Learning Outcomes 

Discover signs of strong (and weak) product management 

Understand the difference between product management and product ownership 

Understand the functions and outcomes of a Product Office 

Learn what organizational challenges lead to the need for a Product Office 

An overview of the Product Office  

Apply principles of Product Office back in your organisation 

If you can give a killer product demo as a PM, you'll be able to rapidly gain trust from your stakeholders, massively elevate your team, and have a lot of fun doing it!

I've given over 100 product demos since 2017 and royally messed up about 30+ of them. I made a lot of mistakes and am proud to say that I've gotten pretty good at them!

In this presentation, I'm going to share with you:

-The biggest demo mistakes I've made (and other PMs make)
-How to properly prepare for a product demo (planning is key!)
-How to deal with the awkwardness of giving a remote product demo

I'd love to have you! I think you'll learn a lot. 🤗