MTP Engage Round-up: Workshops and Conference Program
Since 2017, I have teamed up with Arne Kittler to organize, curate, run, and moderate the MTP Engage event in Hamburg. This is one of my favorite ways to give back to the product community—and it also happens to be a lot of fun!
MTP Engage Hamburg is a three-day event packed full of workshops, panel discussions, keynotes, and networking, so rather than try to cram everything into a single blog post, I’m writing a mini-series of MTP Engage Round-up posts. This second post focuses on the workshops and main-day conference program.
Want to learn more about the Product Leadership Forum? Find that post here. Or, if you’re looking for key learnings, takeaways from attendees, and other resources, you’ll find that post here (soon :-)).
One quick note: As the event co-organizer, my perspective and takeaways are likely to be quite different from those of an attendee. I will also share some reviews and recaps by attendees in case you’re curious to hear more from them.
Workshops and setting up the big venue
On Thursday, we hosted 90 product people for 2 product workshops. Christina Wodtke, a lecturer at Stanford and author of Radical Focus, did a seminar on “OKRs Done Right: Accomplish Big Goals with Objectives and Key Results,” and Tim Herbig, Product Discovery Coach, helped people to understand the nuts and bolts of product discovery.
Christina Wodtke in full training swing.
Arne and I just said a brief “Hello” in the morning and then headed over to the main conference venue, Kampnagel, to set everything up for the big day. We had sponsor booth walkthroughs and speaker rehearsals coming up in the afternoon so we had to hurry up to get things in place together with our team.
Thursday was the most intense day for me. I personally had to juggle 100 things in parallel and it would have definitely been better if we had asked a few volunteers to help us during setup day.
Pro tip and note to self for future event organizing: Make sure you prioritize which activities are the most important for you to work on and which are the ones you can delegate to others. This can save you a lot of unnecessary stress and running around!
🎉 What a 2 days it has been so far with #mtpcon Engage leadership forum and workshops. We are super excited about the conference tomorrow, here's a sneak peak of the stage coming together earlier today 👀 pic.twitter.com/Wpjy1RLoUt
— MTPEngageHH (@MTPEngageHH) June 16, 2022
If you attended the workshops or want to get an idea of what that looked like, check out more pictures of the workshops on Flickr.
Conference day
This was the official, training-budget-approved justification for attendees to pause their daily work and escape the grind. Our goal was to offer a day full of great content and new perspectives and to create the opportunity for attendees to build connections with product peers.
So good to be back! Hello MTP Engage audience - Arne and myself giving our opening remarks
As we welcomed everyone and kicked off the programming, we asked all attendees to consider a framing question:
What are you going to do differently?
By asking this question at the outset, we hoped to give attendees a lens to help them make sense of all the keynotes, sessions, and conversations they participated in.
Whether it was something small like sharing a talk with a colleague or something adventurous like trying a new framework, we encouraged everyone to write it down and tie an action to it. Because everything great starts with a small step.
The program
The conference included a mix of keynotes and sessions that looked at specific aspects of product management like being responsible, human, and user-centered. Here’s a high-level overview of the content.
Keynotes
Martin Eriksson, “Overcoming Decision Overload: Using Principles to Make Better Decisions Faster”
"Design has design systems, engineering has coding principles. Product needs product principles."
"How to get started? Use your retros: where do the common arguments come from, what can you codify here? What do you keep saying no to? Can that help identify a principle? Reinforce strategy by codifying acceptable trade-offs."
Georgie Smallwood, “Product Tetris”
"Aim of Product Tetris: be a strong and confident leader; earn points; don't let things pile up. How? Own the strategy, build the team, instill the culture and processes required."
"Product management is not formulaic—no one system, no one framework or book will solve this. It takes a growth mindset, and constant assessment, and you have to work IN the current game."
Dries Depoorter, “Surveillance Art, Dying Phones and Fake Likes” - Dries showcased interactive apps in development and explained his interactive installation from the previous years such as The Flemish Scrollers and Die with Me. My personal Highlight was, when Christina Wodtkes Companion Dog Nina got 1.000 more likes on Instagram.
Matt LeMay, “Incomplete by Design”
"Has anyone at your org ever received a negative reaction for presenting something too polished?"
“When we share unfinished things, and finish them together, collaboration moves us forward, not backward.”
Christina Wodtke, “The Knowing-Doing Gap How Agile, Lean, and Now OKRs Went from Useful to Stoopit”
“No, you can’t wordsmith your OKRs forever because you need to do the work. Be wrong for three months and take it from there.”
"Explain procedural knowledge to someone (e.g. knitting). Then ask them to demonstrate it. Can they do it? Nope. That's the seduction. You can't teach design thinking in a one-hour workshop."
Shaun Russell, Thor Mitchel and Holly Donohue on stage
Sessions
On Being Responsible (as a PM) - with Cennydd Bowles & Roisi Proven
Cennydd: "Product Managers are the primary source of unethical decisions."
Cennydd: "Ethics can't always be fixed in the next release. What if the thing you're breaking is democracy?" Do pre-mortems.
Roisi: "Move fast and break things is all well and good until the thing you are breaking is people."
Roisi: “ARTIFICIAL. GENERAL. INTELLIGENCE. IS. NOT. READY. TO. BE. SCALED.”
On Being Human (as a PM) - with Thor Mitchell & Holly Donohue
Thor: But if you stop and take a breath, you could always find ways in which you could have handled the situation better.”
Holly: “So your action might be to quit something. And that is not failure. But failing to quit something that is making you really unhappy might be.”
On Being User Oriented (as a PM) - with Aras Bilgen, Michele Hansen & Andy Polaine
Aras: "I see some teams where the central researchers restrict scope. If the engineers have appetite to learn more, do more research, then train them, provide that support, don't restrict."
Andy: "Services are created in silos, and are experienced in bits; you have one experience when you buy insurance, and entirely another when you make a claim."
On Giving Direction (as a PM) - with Nacho Bassino, Janna Bastow & Chiedza Muguti
Janna: “The value isn’t in the roadmap, it’s in the roadmapping.”
“There is no point in pretending. It is all going to be fine, if we are having everything (the strategy) in place.”
Shiny happy people during our lunch break
If you want to read more about what other attendees shared about the event or hear some of my learnings make sure to read the next post as well. And if you want to get updated on our next big event, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Or, if you’re managing product people and want to learn about product leadership development opportunities, sign up for my quarterly newsletter!