YConf 2021

In today's world, for modern buyers, the value of a product is closely correlated with the experience - be it in the B2C or B2B world. Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy that uses the product as a channel to drive business KPIs, such as revenue, engagement and outreach without dependencies on marketing and sales or other parts of the organization. PLG thinking allows for experimentation with different factors that could drive the uplift of a product and conversion rates.

In this talk, Madhu and Ramani present the building blocks of PLG and how you can create a culture of product-led growth in your businesses with: Frictionless product introduction over forced product adoption | Customer engagement and value over payments | Investing in user feedback over business priority.

Are you provided roadmaps with prioritized features and dates? Is your team not talking to the end-user? Do you feel like you don't have end-to-end ownership of a product you are developing? Is your team demotivated and feels like they are not contributing to the most critical business problems?

In our experience, giving engineers some time in discovery is easily one of the best things you can do to ultimately lead to ROI.

In this talk, Iska, Fatima, and Christine give a perspective of how to transform feature teams into product teams and give actionable steps on how to achieve the right balance between discovery and delivery in a mature software company. They explore how to create an environment where engineers are provided with the strategic context of problems to solve and the possibility to leverage technology to figure out the best solutions.

When it comes to data projects, we often observe that collecting data from data producers and setting up data ecosystems takes precedence over building business use cases driven by data consumers. Amassing data first and solving business problems next, we have found, is a suboptimal route.

On one end, a common difficulty is project leads being unable to justify the cost of investment by proving tangible success of such data projects. On the other hand, advanced data pipelines do not prove their value until they are contextualized to the customer/user experience at each stage of the data journey.

In this talk, Ammara Gafoor and Deepthi Karuppusami will share their experience of how a data consumer-first approach based on principles of Data Mesh can make your data strategy effective. You will understand the pros of applying product development principles to data to make a data product. Through personal war story examples, Ammara and Deepthi will look at how analysis techniques such as OKRs and hypothesis-driven development can be used to establish a cost benefit analysis keeping customer focus at the forefront.

Legacy replacement projects are commonly viewed as tech-only problems, moving from old systems to new. That’s only one side of the coin. Legacy replacement projects change the organization’s culture and ways of working, creating the perfect opportunity to bring in user-centered design practices.

In this talk, you’ll hear stories from Esra and Gabe about how they've influenced enterprise organizations with user-centered design. They share insights into their design approach, using visual design to strengthen internal products and how they connect everyone to users.

The rise of data and AI is an exciting challenge for product and experience designers. The technical barriers to incorporating intelligence into products are falling while the expectations of users are rising. In this talk, Guy Samuel will look at two complementary perspectives:

1. How should product and experience managers expand their skillset to build successful products with Data and AI? How are intelligent products different from what we've done in the past?
2. How might data scientists and machine learning engineers incorporate product thinking and user experience to help drive successful intelligent products?

Together with you, Guy will explore practical examples of product-powered AI and the principles behind them.

Understanding and fully applying the Discover - Build - Measure - Learn cycle is vital for teams to build first class products that delight customers. Having the cycle in mind as a constant practice, enables and fosters experimentation and innovation, and it is a differentiator between good and great high-performing teams.

Maya Ormaza and Maria Krasteva will share some of the challenges they have faced and practical ideas and techniques to embrace the cycle and make it a fundamental part of your product building processes.

Have you ever felt frustrated because you could clearly see the vision of your organization, yet the product and strategy decisions were moving in a completely different direction? Are your research insights not being considered outside of your immediate teams?

In this talk, Itay Ziv discusses how designers and product managers can take practical approaches to get buy-in from stakeholders before jumping into common methods and workshops that might not achieve the right level of outcome.

Based on learnings from working across startups, scale-ups, large enterprises, and government agencies, this session will provide practical steps for maximizing organizational impact, including tools and concepts like structural-cultural assessment, organizational maturity and more.

All organizations have a design operating model, but often it gets established by accident, without deliberate thought. In this situation, design and customer centricity gets fitted around other priorities of business or technology.

In order for your organization to transform into a customer value-driven organization, you need to be deliberate about shaping and evolving your design operating model. You need to bring the design, business, and tech perspectives together at equal eye-level to enable collaboration and shape user-centred products.

This talk shares how to be intentional about the design operating model -- where to start and how to continue to evolve it. With real-life stories and illustrations, you will take away a set of principles and guard rails for shaping your design operating model intentionally.