In today’s competitive landscape, it’s never been more important for product teams to continuously innovate to avoid being blindsided by another player with a better product. When time is not on your side, what choices do product leaders need to make from day one to avoid going too far down the wrong path, wasting resources and falling behind the competition? From picking the right problem to solve, to putting together the best possible team, to how to approach user growth, Jeetu will go through what choices product leaders should make (and not make) to ensure their teams and resources are focused on what’s most important.

As product managers, we’re highly proficient at putting together a roadmap for our products. What happens when we use the same focus and creative thinking when we think about our careers? Join Andrea Chesleigh, VP of Product at One Kings Lane, as she shares her experiences and learnings at companies like Zappos and Rent the Runway to build out her product career roadmap. Andrea will talk about her thought process and highlight how she uses the same critical thinking skills we normally use in our Product toolkit when shaping her career.

Shoot-Ready-Aim. It’s the classic recipe for failure. Let Scott walk you through his 14-point checklist for determining when it makes sense to do just a moderate amount of planning up front.

Monetization of social platforms has historically had a tension between the needs of the consumer and business sides of the product. Instagram Product Head Vishal Shah shares how Instagram eschewed this notion and embraced the business ecosystem to build a powerful Feed and Stories Ads business. He also talks about the future of the platform and how Instagram is evolving from place where businesses are discovered to a place where business is done.

What is innovation? How do you build a blockchain platform that accelerates the advent of an open financial system? How do you go about transforming complex industries like finance and insurance? Coinbase CPO Jeremy Henrickson shares stories from his career and other experiences about how meaningful innovation emerges from first principles. Jeremy will explain why he usually eschews conventional wisdom and why he believes that great products, great teams, and even great music grows from first principles thinking.

At one point in my product management career, I found myself sleeping under a desk for 2 nights straight, eating vending machine chips for dinner and brushing my teeth in the office bathroom before jumping back into launch readiness with a team of engineers and support staff. I had no room for the concept of balancing my work & life under that desk. 

We’re hiring! Our fast growing organization is one of the largest networks of product managers and early adopters in the world. We’re looking for a highly motivated and forward-thinking Strategic Sales Director to have a direct impact on the bottom line. To apply, email resume and cover letter to sc@productsthatcount.com with subject “Strategic Sales Director Candidate.”

How can Product leaders lead design organizations when they’re not designers themselves? When done badly there is tension between the product and design teams because the business can easily distrust the intangible benefits of a thriving design team. Jet.com fmr Product VP Sarah Bernard shares a tried and true framework Product leaders can apply in their organization to insure their design thinking is performing to its highest potential. Product leaders need this performance from design because it is an essential element for solving really hard product problems and getting to inspired solutions.

Leading a product team is hard work in the best of times. But are you equipped for a crisis? YouTube Premium Product Head Will Aldrich has learned to lead successful product teams in extreme circumstances, from the recent mass shooting at YouTube to the sudden passing of SurveyMonkey’s CEO. He will share some advice he wishes he’d had for helping a team heal during hypergrowth.

If building products is hard, building platforms is uniquely challenging. Customer segmentation is tricky, prioritizing features and defining MVPs incredibly complex, and maintaining quality without creating bottlenecks exhausting. “But the rewards of seeing products and services flourish and scale on your platform is both exhilarating and fulfilling,” says Snap, Facebook and Microsoft product exec Ash Wahi. In this talk, he draws on his experiences working on the Facebook Open Graph, Snap monetization platform, .NET Framework, and early Azure ServiceBus, to share best practices to building platforms that scale.