I took my HR hat to a Product Conference and this is what I learned
Some notes about INDUSTRYs' NY Product Conference
I had the pleasure of attending The New York Product Conference, powered by INDUSTRY, at The Times Center last week (courtesy of my friends at ITX, who also have their own awesome event coming up this June in Rochester, NY). The event was truly amazing and was held at a great venue.
I learned a tremendous amount about product management and was able to validate a couple of hypotheses that I had been considering for a while:
1- The Product Management community is awesome
The conference was a great opportunity to network with other product managers and discuss common challenges and ideas. I was particularly impressed with the openness and friendliness of the product management community. I had very interesting conversations with practitioners from many different organizations (and several parts of the world). The presenters, in particular, were very accessible and welcoming and seemed to really enjoy interacting with the attendance at the social events. Nobody was there to “be a VIP” or “play celebrity”.
2- Although most of the time I am an introvert, events like these energize me
I guess perhaps it has to do less with the type of event and more with the type of people that attend these events: passionate and curious people that are open-minded and want to truly absorb all they can from their interactions with other humans. Being my first big Product event, I was worried that I would find it hard to connect with other more seasoned Product Managers, but I had great conversations with very interesting folks, from whom I learned a lot and who also seemed interested in my attempt to blend Product Management and HR.
And this is an excellent segway to the next hypothesis.
3- There is so much overlap between Product and HR
For a while, since the idea about ProductizeHR started forming, I have been trying to draw similarities between these 2 fields, and I was initially concerned that I was trying too hard to find the coincidences, that I was suffering from Confirmation Bias and Clustering illusion, finding patterns where there were none. Luckily for me -and for the ProductizeHR concept- this has proven NOT to be a mirage.🌴
Through the many conversations I had, not only did everybody validate my intuition that Clients and Employees are very similar, e.g.
Visitors are converted into Users, Candidates are converted into Employees
Both need to go through onboarding to realize their value and the faster you can do it, the better your chances of retaining them
Both have a lifetime value to maximize, and both can be nudged to upgrade their commitment
Both suffer from churn and require retention efforts
NPS vs eNPS
etc
But also that I am not the only one who saw the coincidence, so there’s this:
Pendo has a product (Adopt) focused on the adoption of internal tools and on “powering the digital workplace experience”.
Christine Itawaru (also from Pendo) presented on Cognitive Bias in Product Management, and while this is not exclusive to HR, bias has been part of the vocabulary of HR and DEI for a long time. So hybridization goes both ways.
Stephanie Musat from Warner Bros Discovery (photo above) had a killer (quack! 🦆) presentation on killing your product, and it really got me thinking about how HR usually has so much trouble killing products because “that’s what we have always done” and “our team has expectations about this”, and that’s how we end up with tons of tools, policies, and benefits that nobody uses, and others that people would use, but nobody knows about them. 🤷
Had a very interesting conversation with an attendee from Atlassian about how HR teams use Trello for Kanban.
ProductBoard has a case study on how TomTom uses its product to help its internal HR team prioritize initiatives.
(there were a lot of other interesting presentations and vendors, but these were the ones that best illustrate the point I am trying to make)
This week I presented at an HR-focused event, DisruptHR (I will write about it next week, gimme a break, sheesh!) and I blew a lot of minds when I told them about some of the things I learned and reflected upon.
We can learn SO MUCH from each other (HR from Product and vice-versa). Hopefully, I will run into more people from HR in Product events, and more people from Product in HR events. See you there!
P.S.: I was staying at a friend’s house in Harlem and so I took a minute to go see a landmark that my Dad, who was a big fan of soul music, Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding would have loved to see: the Apollo Theater. Being a big music fan myself, I just felt it was super cool to share a pic because I had always wanted to visit it.
