Best of Product Management Webinars 2020

Nitin Murali
January 6, 2021

With more than a 100 webinars conducted in 2020, we kept our community engaged with a lot of lessons delivered by global product leaders across the globe. With the cumulative number of attendees hovering over 10,000 enthusiastic participants from across the globe, we’ve helped launch product management careers for a lot of people.

With so many webinars, we’ve taken both qualitative feedback and quantitative data into account and have zeroed in on these five webinars. Without further ado, here are the top 5 product talks for 2020.

1. Product strategy for tomorrow’s CPO. Secrets learned from Apple by Subhayu Ghosh, Product Manager, Amazon

Apple has been one of the most innovative companies in the world. With the launch of the M1 chip, they’ve evangelized “Disruptive Innovation” like no other. What can we learn from a company that has been continuously innovating for the last 40 years?

Play Video

Differentiation strategy: How Apple differentiates its own products and creates an urgency for the buyer to buy the newest version of their products. People who have recently bought the iPhone upgrade to the newer version as and when it’s released. Not a lot of companies can boast of this factor.
Willingness to pay: How do you make a person who has recently bought an iPhone to upgrade to a recently released version? Perception of quality has a direct impact on WTP in much the same way as rareness. The higher the quality, the higher the willingness to pay and we all know the quality of Apple products.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: It starts from physiological needs (food, water, shelter), then comes safety. Next are the belongingness needs (intimate relationships and friends). Then comes the need for esteem and at the top of the pyramid lies the self-actualization needs. Keep this in mind before building consumer products as building such products require a deep understanding of human psychology.

2. Making Smarter Decisions as Product Managers by Arindam Mukherjee, Sr. Director of Product, Flipkart

Product Managers take a lot of decisions every day and the decisions themselves are very diverse in nature. One moment, you take an engineering decision and the other moment you’re deciding if the design is pixel-perfect. Hence, it’s important for PMs to make use of frameworks to important decisions.

Play Video

Second-order thinking: Your decisions will result in actions that you can mostly anticipate. But you have to think about the consequences of your decisions. Use funnels and loops to decipher that.
First-principles: First-principles are foundational assumptions that stand alone. These principles cannot be deduced from any other assumptions. This thinking is required to break down complex problems into smaller ones and then go about solving them.
Inversion Thinking Technique: A way of thinking to uncover what you don’t want to go wrong. First, define the problem that you want to solve. Then, invert it. What would you have to do to guarantee the failure of your objective? Then, fix the same problem by preventing it from happening. This technique helps you figure out potential errors or roadblocks that may not be evident at first glance.

3. Quantifying Value by Mark Stiving, Chief Pricing Educator, Impact Pricing LLC

Pricing is a very tricky part of launching a new product. When the product is entering the market for the first time, you don’t have the resources to measure the value of the product. How do you go about pricing it at just the right rate?

Play Video

Adopt Value-based Pricing: Charge what a customer is willing to pay. If it’s anything less or more, then you’re making it difficult for the customer to purchase your product.
What is Value: It can be broadly classified into two categories- Value in use (does it solve the problem) and Value in choice (the value your product carries in comparison to your competitor). Identify the type of value you want your product to deliver and then price it accordingly.
Van Westendorp’s Price Sensitivity Meter: A technique for determining consumer price preferences. Asking these four questions to your TG can help you set the right price for your product.
1. At what price would you consider the product too expensive to consider?
2. At what price would you consider the product to be priced so low that you would feel the quality couldn’t be very good? (Too cheap)
3. At what price would you consider the product starting to get expensive, so that it is not out of the question, but you would have to give some thought to buying it? (Expensive/High Side)
4. At what price would you consider the product to be a bargain—a great buy for the money? (Cheap/Good Value)

4. Lessons Learned in Building a Growth Team & How to Get Started by Nancy Hensley, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, Stats Perform

Dropbox had a 3900% growth in less than 15 months with a first-of-its-kind referral program. Facebook became the first online service to have 1 billion MAUs. Slack has the highest conversion rate (more than 30%) among freemium software products. What makes these companies grow at such a high rate?

Play Video

Think of growth like a treasure hunt: Stay open and agile so you can respond when you find clues. Growth can happen anywhere and it’s important to stay cognizant of the low-hanging fruits as and when they arise. As a growth person, you want to be insanely curious all the time and have an eye for opportunities.
Thinking about Product/Market Fit: Product/Market Fit is not just a competitive view. It’s about finding the unserved need, knowing your target market and creating a differentiation.
Why build a Growth team: While PMs are great at getting a product to market, they’re not too focussed on growth tactics. Growth people are highly analytical and know how to accelerate the growth of the product. If your product isn’t growing at a fast rate, then it’s time to hire a Growth PM.

5. Design Thinking For Non-Designers by Lital Sherman, Head of UX Design, PageUp

Design Thinking is slowly becoming one of the top skills needed for Product Leaders. If you aren’t designing keeping the end customer in mind, whom are you designing the product for?

Play Video

Here’s the five-step process for incorporating Design Thinking into building products.

Empathize – Gain an empathetic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. It will help individuals to set aside their own assumptions and biases about the world to gain insight into customers and their needs.
Define – Analyze your observations and synthesize them to define the core problem which is identified at the point.
Ideate – Always “ think outside the box” to identify new solutions to the problem statement you have identified and can start looking for alternative ways of viewing the problem.
Prototype – In this experimental phase, identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the initial stages.
Test – In the final stage of the Design Thinking Process, results generated during the testing phase are often used to redefine one or more problems and inform the “understanding of the customers”.

We thank all of our speakers for their time and knowledge and for making it possible for us to enable product enthusiasts across the globe increase their understanding of Product Management.

Subscribe to our Youtube channel and never miss another Product Talk.