A user centered approach to measurement

Workshop Overview
Every product manager understands that they need to gather evidence to help them make decisions and set the right strategy and priorities, yet simply having a massive data warehouse and analytics skill sets doesn’t help you ask the right questions or come to the right conclusions.

How can product managers take a human centered approach to measurement? The third full-day workshop offered by Mind the Product seeks to answer this question; how can we take a product mindset on metrics.

This workshop will be framed very differently from the usual Metrics workshops because it specifically focuses on the role of the product manager in driving a common understanding throughout the product development lifecycle.

In the workshop we’ll address how product managers can work with their teams to create a strong metrics practice that’s set-up for long-term success, answering the following questions:

-How do you put a product mindset around metrics?
-How can Product Managers flesh out the One Metric That Matters and locate it within the ecosystem of other metrics?
-How do you work with data to help experiment towards the most valuable experiments?
-What can a product manager do to ensure that metrics are implemented and tracked properly during the build process?
-What does a product team need to report on as they track metrics?
-How can you create a metrics-driven culture?

Although these are simple questions on the surface, the answers to them are seemingly infinite. This course is a practical, actionable life raft in a sea of competing terms, formulas, theories, and approaches. It was created to ensure that you take the ideas and frameworks within it directly to your job the following day.

Take this course if you:
-Want to hear specifically how product managers work with metrics
-Prefer pragmatic, actionable insights over theories that sound good but never tie back in to your job as a product manager
-Want to understand the “one metric that matters” for various types of business models and stages
-Want to hear specific details and scenarios about working with cross-functional teams to implement metrics tracking
-Want to get hands-on with business scenarios that will let you work with metrics concepts throughout the course of the day
-Want to hear about pitfalls you should watch out for along the analytics journey
-Want to spark inspiration from the 100+ different metrics – used by businesses of all sizes and verticals – that are sprinkled throughout this course

This class is tailored towards working product managers, ideally who have worked with products through various stages of development. The class is hands-on and requires deep reflection from participants on what has worked for them in the past, and how their process could evolve. Metrics and analytics inform almost everything you do. Whether you’re refreshing your memory or expanding your understanding, you’ll be practicing all day to apply metrics and analytics to real-world situations. Come to class with a product, service, brand, or entire company in mind – there will be several opportunities to explore how you’d apply these theories and frameworks to real-life situations.

Key Takeaways
At the end of the session participants will come away with a sense of what frameworks they can implement immediately, as well as a grounded understanding of how to ensure that your users stay at the heart of the measurement process.

Mind the Product Trainers
Every Mind the Product trainer is a working product manager who has worked with multiple products and domains. Your trainer’s product management experience enriches the curriculum by delivering diverse perspectives on best practice in different scenarios. You will hear about the products they have worked on in the past, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and how they tried to make improvements. Our trainers’ main goal is not to provide participants with all of the answers, but help facilitate them in asking the right questions.

About your Trainer
Chris Ivester, Agile Product Leader

Chris has spent the last six years working product roles within fast-paced startups. His experience ranges from seed round startups still exploring product-market fit to launching and leading a startup within a publicly traded company.

Chris strives to build teams that have a profound understanding of their customers and the problem domain in which they perform their daily work. Furthermore, Chris coaches his teams to fail fast and iterate quickly using lightweight data-driven experiments.

Chris co-organizes the local ProductTank chapter and is active in the local Austin product community.