Season 2 - Newsletter 05 --> Micro-edition | Amplify 2022 Conference Hangover
Friends,
Last Week Amplitude held its annual conference Amplify 2022 in
Las Vegas and in person. I had a chance to attend and came back really invigorated at the energy and talent of fellow product managers and speakers.
In this edition, I’ll run down a few key themes that emerged from the conference and what they could mean for product management going forward. I also answer what you should do post-conference. In other words what to do with all these new ideas.
As always we appreciate you sharing this newsletter if you think it could help a peer of yours improve their product skillset.
So on to the content and my takeaways from Amplify2022 and a few words on how to deal with conference hangover. Newsletter 05 let’s go 👇
Q: So you attended Amplify 2022, what are the things that stood out to you and that will impact Product Managers in the near to mid-term?
Regardless of where you are in your product management journey, I would encourage you to attend virtually or in-person conferences. There is nothing quite like meeting other like-minded individuals and organizations that are trying to build better products.
Last week, I got the opportunity to attend Amplify 2022 and hear from luminaries like Melissa Perri, Diya Jolly, and of course John Cutler. My key takeaways are as follows:
It’s the data stupid. And data is everyone’s responsibility
Product is the business. Product is the distribution
Know the destination. Don’t lose the forest for the trees
On #1, it’s clear that product managers who leverage data to make decisions will have a key advantage over their competition. Tools are becoming much better at inferring not just funnel data but behavioral analysis. What can take an organization months to analyze, with the right tool can take another just seconds. As a speaker mentioned, building a product without data is akin to playing roulette, you won’t understand the why and thus make it hard to reproduce even if you get some traction. I would even go further as saying as should the product and data stack an organization leverages become a qualifier for product managers looking for a new home?
On #2, and this was somewhat surprising to me, another theme in talking to attendees and listening to speakers was a disconnect between a feature and the business outcome. Whether at the individual contributor level or at the CPO level. One thing we must remind ourselves as product managers is that we must serve both the customer and the business. Furthermore, going beyond understanding how our outcomes tie to business outcomes is key in enabling us to ascend within the org. A simple rule is to remind ourselves that we are the business and not some special group.
On #3, in a world where there exist wicked and complex problems along with a push towards Agile, it’s easy to break everything into bite-size chunks. A large number of teams use that lever to simplify things and break them down into more manageable chunks. The danger however is that the upfront exercise to define a destination is skipped. What we do instead is an exercise to simplify the solution. As Varun Parmar stated, defining the destination does and should take some time, however, bets can be quickly built and laid out to test which hypothesis gets us closer to that destination.
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