MEETUP: "A look into what every Product Manager forgets " at ProductTank Brighton

Three varied viewpoints and interesting talks at tonight's ProductTank, around what Product Managers usually forget. First up was Mark Rodgers sharing how they overlooked things in the first iteration of the new image search functionality at Brandwatch. I can completely relate the situation in my own work. That thing where when you see the product with real data and a real usage situation you suddenly notice something and think "how did I miss that?!", since it now seems so obvious. This made me feel a bit better that if someone, as experienced with Mark and with his team at Brandwatch, can make that mistake it's not surprising I do.

Next was Ben Sauer from ClearLeft. His talk was a more abstract look at companies culture. For example, how it is all around us but that we don't notice it. And consequently (or maybe because of?) we don't discuss it enough. He recommended a couple of books to read Creativity, inc  by Ed Catmull and 
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall Rosenberg that I am looking forward to reading. Especially as he said the lessons of applying NVC to his life had improved his relationships. One particular piece of advice that stuck with me was to use comedians for change. That is if you are using videoed user feedback to convince "higher ups" that something is a bad idea, get someone funny. He put forward the suggestion that it helps if people can laugh at themselves when admitting a coursed of action was wrong.
The final talk was Tim Stamp from Rakuten talking about security and how this can damage business reputation when done badly. I know that I have thought about user permissions a step too late in the design process before. One piece of advice he gave was to get someone in with a security focus when discussing the user journeys so that they can suggest how attackers could abuse the system. A related point that Ben made in the panel Q&A after, was that we don't have discussions about security/usability tradeoff enough. So get security in at the user journey mapping should help that happen as well.

 It was also very satisfying listen to Tim talk about passwords, and if possible avoiding them by using single sign-on. Exactly the approach, and for exactly the same reasons, why we have avoided them on my side project!

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