Highlights from September’s ProductTank meetups

ProductTanks, created by Mind the Product, are informal meetups that bring local product people together and provide a space to new speakers to share amazing product insights. September has been a very busy month for ProductTanks and we hosted 56 meetups around the world, a lot of product management insights were shared, and in this article we will highlight a few.

We would also like to give a warm welcome to our 2 new organisers: James Gunaca (London) and Chantal Botana (Porto).  

Dave Baines, Co-Founder of Hyperact, shared a write up of the evening:

‘Had a blast at a packed ProductTank Manchester last night. Three diverse talks from people in the thick of the action leading product teams in and around Manchester.

My former colleague Charlotte King got things rolling with her experiences over the last couple of years as VP of Product & Design at foodtech unicorn, Flipdish.

Charlotte opened with the a powerful statement that some “scale-ups” can’t actually be scaled. Something we often fail to recognise.

If they don’t have the right foundations in place - things like a well defined business strategy, effective ways of working, infrastructure, the right people, culture, and a profitable business model or a clear plan to get to profitability - then it’s important to acknowledge that a more significant intervention is required.

There were loads of useful nuggets in the talk from leaning into Richard Rumelt's classic approach to strategy to give the whole org a platform to start from, to Wardley mapping with the CEO, to outlining a Golden Path of engineering, to piloting a dedicated experimentation team.

It was refreshing to hear Charlotte's reflections on what hadn’t gone well, which were just as insightful as the successes, if not more so.

I'd back a couple of Charlotte's reading recommendations:

- Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

- Skelton and Pais' Team Topologies

I've still have yet to get to Charlotte's third recommendation - Cagan's Transformed.

Second up, Senior Product Manager, Jade Walton from Spektrix gave us all the reassurance to ask those awkward questions, and reminded us that it's often our responsibility to do so.

There was a real air of pragmatism in Jade's cheatsheet (which I’ll be stealing) for those times when you’re deliberating about whether or not to ask the awkward question. Perhaps the all-hands isn’t the right time. Perhaps you could broach it with SLT in a separate forum. Or perhaps you just need to vent about in a 1-1 or with your “work best friend”.

And sometimes it’s okay not to ask the question. Right even. Don’t beat yourself up about it either way!

Last up, Paul Wilshaw took us through the rollercoaster ride at zally® in their mission to eradicate passwords, condemning them as “super shit” (and rightly so - they nearly cost me Oasis tickets at the weekend!).

Jokingly titling himself C3P0 having had a three different C-suite titles this year (stealing this also 🤣), he enraptured the audience as he took us through the lessons learned over several pivots born of product discovery over the last few years, and left us all in anticipation of zally®'s mobile app which is on the cusp of release, with their proprietary tech and intriguing business model.

As ever, thanks to Holly and Andy for organising, and the speakers for sharing their journeys and insights.’

Our shiny new organisers, James Gunaca, Product Career Coach and Founder of Product Sphere, shared his thoughts after the meetup:

‘Last night was my first ProductTank London event as their newest organiser. I appreciated the chance to greet the diverse professionals interested in gathering with other Product people and learning from Shreyas Deshmukh in our first Fireside Chat.

Kunal Miyani did an amazing job facilitating a thoughtful and deep discussion on all kinds of topics across Shreyas' career at Google, Microsoft and more.

Tons of insights for Product folks were shared.

And, in typical PM fashion, we asked attendees for feedback on the new Fireside Chat format (in contrast to the typical 3 speakers / topics).

If you didn't get a chance to share your thoughts, let me know down below!

The replay is also up on YouTube (there were some audio issues early on in the stream but they get resolved!).'

A huge thank you to our incredible speakers, Krete Paal and Andres Aava, for sharing their valuable insights, Katana Cloud Inventory for hosting the event, and to our talented photographers for capturing the energy of the evening! 🙌

Andres walked us through how AI is transforming the way Katana analyzes customer feedback, leading to deeper insights and smarter product decisions.

Krete’s talk left us well-informed and prepared to navigate the new EU AI Act, with a practical approach to upcoming regulations.

Thank you to all 60 participants for joining us, networking, and contributing to the buzz!

Meg Aronson, our ProductTank organiser, wrote:

‘Steve Cook (Product Rebels) and Kirsten Thayer (Cast & Crew) presented the “The art of scrappy research; how to get big insights with limited time and budget”.

Scrappy Research is a scalable and structured insight-gathering practice based on a small number of customer interactions to test hypotheses quickly—within five working days.

They shared how to do scrappy research and interview best practices.'

From ProductTank Vilnius page:
'💙 This week, over 70 product people gathered at the EPAM Systems office in Vilnius to discuss the challenges and lessons learned when transitioning from a project to a product mindset.

🎤 Special thanks to our speakers Vaidas Adomauskas, Fractional Chief Product Officer at smeGo, and Dmitry Vanitsky, Director of Experience Design at EPAM Systems. The meetup was hosted and moderated by Aleksas Drozdovskis, Director of Strategy & Experience Consulting at EPAM Systems and one of the ProductTank Vilnius co-organizers.

Shubham Bhattacharya, our Oslo ProductTank organiser wrote:

‘We did an event focused on B2B product development and had wonderful response from the community. For the first time in the 8 years I have been doing this, we saw a 75% turnout! Our pizza calculations haywire, but the content was enough to keep feeding into people’s enthusiasm.’

October will start with our first-ever ProductTank Organizer Summit in Raleigh, and through the month there will be plenty of meetups around the world, so make sure you don’t miss out on these free community events! Check out a ProductTank near you.