Last week my team and I were in London to attend mtpcon, one of the biggest conferences about product management in Europe organized by Mind The Product. And this year was not only the first in-person conference after the pandemic, but also marked the 10th year anniversary of the conference itself.

10 years is a great milestone for a product community, considering that the art and science of product management is almost as old (for reference Inspired was published for the first time in 2012). And considering that mtpcon is a single-stage conference, it was extra interesting to listen to the speakers and reflect on the messages that were considered worthy of the 10 years anniversary stage.

Let’s start with a general comment: I appreciated the diversity of the speakers, it felt that every single one of them had something meaningful to share. Yet, considering that Mind The Product is one of the most respected communities for product, I was quite surprised that one of the talks made it to the stage, as to me it promoted a really skewed view of product management.

After listening, landing, and reflecting, these are the three lessons I take home with me.

1.People over frameworks

Saielle Da Silva went straight to the point, in my favorite talk at mtpcon when she said that software is people, and people are feelings.

At the end of the day, no matter how good your strategy is, no matter how inspiring your vision is, without execution you’ll get nowhere. And the only key to impeccable execution is people.

Without people by your side, you’ll get nowhere, and to start making the needle move you have to realize that leading in product management means thinking feelings as much as thinking strategy and vision.

Trust is a feeling, psychological safety is a feeling, and if people cannot trust you, you’ll miss contact with what is wrong in the organization and will not be able to innovate. Software is people. The sooner you recognize it, and define your plan on how to work and develop with them, the sooner you’ll find yourself leading a successful product organization.

Pippa Topp’s talk was also about people but from another angle. What she highlighted is that, during these 10 years of product management, one mythical figure was created: the uber product person.

That mythical figure that has read all the books, understands all the frameworks, and aces all the different aspects of product management at once, while also having a super balanced approach to life.

Let’s be real, this is for real a mythical figure created by tons of books published in the last decade. Frameworks are everywhere, what is hard is applying them without feeling overwhelmed and living with that constant impostor syndrome that many product people experiences (I am for sure part of that club every time I am done reading a book about product management, see here).

What Pippa presented is an alternative approach that she named ”pocket of brilliance”. Here is the trick: instead of trying to excel at everything, think about incremental improvements exactly as you do while developing your products. Every smaller action, tiny step, or new routine that will bring you closer to where you want to be, is a success. Her talk was a great reminder about the importance of being kind to oneself, and focusing on incremental value creation instead of chasing an impossible ideal.

2. Scaling with product principles

If the role of product is to scale impact, how can product people apply this principle to themselves?

Mtcon opened with the talk of one of the gurus of the product community, Martin Ericson, who answered that question by sharing a framework: the decision stack. Its purpose is to align the organization on what is really important and increase velocity by reducing decision overload. The decision stack is a really elegant way of framing what is needed to really make sure that your product strategy doesn’t get lost in everyday decision-making. It became also the talk of the town between product people at Hemnet, which made me reflect on it a bit extra.

I really appreciate the simplicity of the framework, and I see how it can be extremely powerful in streamlining decisions if implemented right. At the same time as with every framework, I really think is important to not oversimplify reality, and make principles serve you, not the other way around.

We have not implemented any principles yet, but I started to reflect on the attributes that are important in order for them to fulfill their full potential. What I could think about is that good principles should be

Really specific - overgeneralized principles could be easily misused and miss to capture all the tradeoffs that they entail. In our case for example having a principle about user engagement over revenues could be an oversimplification that can lead to ”wrong” decisions if taken by itself. While defining engagement over outbound traffic could be a much better way of capturing what we want to do. When starting with principles may be a good way could be to analyze the decision we took and reverse-engineer the principles that could have helped us. This way we could really have reality-based principles, instead of theory-based ones.
Shared - it is super important that we do not create too many principles that could be conflicting with each other, and that those principles have the sign-off of everyone impacted by them. A few principles, really clear trade-offs, and committed stakeholders need to be in place for the tool to work.
Always aligned with the strategy - if the strategy changes, the principles need to follow. I reacted to one of the slides where Martin showed the principles from Klarna and I started to wonder if those are really valid today in the new market conditions. I assume Klarna has changed its product principles together with its strategy. If principles become part of your product toolbox, they need to follow the same cadence as your strategy review.
Reviewed - once implemented, you might want to analyze if the principles really served your decisions or not. Especially when starting with them they need to be used to see if they actually serve a purpose. And being intentional with quick reviews, in the beginning, could be a way to catch if there is any miss in one of the three points above

3. Product is diverse, complex, contextual, and generalizing is harmful

Throughout the conference I heard more than one speaker say that they ”accidentally fall into product” and one of my favorite quotes from the conference was that

”product management is the queer cousin of business development”.

Let’s be honest this is so relatable. None of us starting with product some years ago knew exactly what we were doing, nobody starting back then went to any product management school or course, yet we figured it out and adapted while doing the job. This is why I believe there is not one single way of doing product. And there is not one single framework that can be applied literally and work for everyone.

Product is complex, diverse, and contextual, and we should embrace it for what it is.

I really liked the message coming from Manon Dave about innovation coming from cross-pollination between disciplines. When tech meets music, or when literature meets learning, there is where the best products are born. There are no boundaries and less so perfect ways.

Because I am a real advocate of the complexity of product, I really reacted when one of the speakers used really strong language and generalizations to paint the word in black and white. In his presentation and answers during the Q&A, he expressed himself with sentences like ”they (the stakeholders) do not know better, and you should remove them from the room”. Or ”if you are working this way, it is wrong”.

As much as there are ways that are proven to be more efficient than others for product development, I think that these kinds of generalizations, especially on such a big stage, are really dangerous.

The message that came to me was like putting product ”on a pedestal” with the right of deciding what is impactful or not based on a framework and kicking everyone else out of the door. Not only in my ears this message went in a different direction from what was said on the stage, but it also promotes a harmful mindset.

No matter how product lead you are, product is not entitled to hold all the opinions. Innovation comes from a healthy debate between two equal parties, if one thinks is the sole retainer of the truth, or the only one capable of defining what impact is, we are really on a slippery slope.

I wonder how many in the audience reacted to the same words, if you were there I would love to hear your thoughts.

3 lessons I take with me from MTPCON 2022