Product Academy for Teams - San Jose
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the three-day Product Academy for Teams course at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose.
This brought together members of our team from across different disciplines - design, product management, user research, and engineering. It was fantastic to spend time face to face with other members of the team that we usually only work with remotely and to all go through the education together learning from each others approaches and ideas. The API Connect team attendees were split into three smaller teams to work on separate items and each was joined by a facilitator to help us work through the exercises.
We spent time together learning about the different phases of the product development lifecycle and in each looking at the process some of the best practices and ways to apply them to our product. It was particularly effective to use real examples from our roadmap in the exercises so we could collaboratively apply the new approaches and see how they apply directly to our product plan.
Each day of the course looked at a different phase of the product development lifecycle - Discovery, Delivery and Launch & Scale:
Discovery - Are we building the right product? - looking at and assessing opportunities and possible solutions we could offer for them, using evidence to build confidence and reviewing the impact this would have on our North Star Metric.
Delivery - Are we building it right? - ensuring we have a clear understanding of the outcomes we're looking for, how we can achieve them and how we can measure success.
Launch & Scale - Are customers getting value? - ensuring we enable customers to be successful in their use of the product and that we are able to get feedback and data to measure this and improve.
Each of these phases has an iterative approach to it and we looked at how we could apply these to our product plan. We also looked at some of the tools and techniques that can be used to help us apply this and members from the different product teams attending shared how they are using these today.
On the final day of the course I also had the opportunity to share some of our journey with instrumentation, how this has evolved and some of the lessons we learnt along the way - such as the benefits of having a data scientist on the team. I am looking forward to sharing this with the wider team and seeing how we apply some of the learning to improve our systems going forward. For example, better validation of decisions through measuring and improving our use of data.