Chris Butler
Chaotic good product manager
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Chris Butler is a Chaotic Good Product Manager and Staff Product Operation Manager at GitHub. His role focuses on PM'ing the PM experience for the AI & Productivity group. Chris has worked previously as a product leader at Microsoft, Facebook Reality Labs, Cognizant, Google, KAYAK, and Waze.
Writing good product fiction
All product people write fiction. Unfortunately, it usually is pretty boring.
In this talk, Chris Butler will outline how he has taken notes from science fiction, speculative futures, design fiction, role playing games, and worldbuilding to create better product concepts. This allows the team to have a real conversation about the products we build rather than some perfect idea that lacks the key problems and externalities.
Aligning the product “spine”: day-to-day strategic decision making
The product spine is the way that we connect the high-level strategy to the day-to-day tasks, like the spine of our bodies, bad things happen when it isn’t aligned. When it gets out of alignment the team is no longer as effective as it could be. Decision making becomes scattered. Work that is shipped doesn’t contribute to the strategic aims of the organization. And the strategy gets stale and disconnected from the reality of the world.
In this talk Chris will introduce the concept of the spine, how to tell when it is out of alignment, and methods to rehabilitate the product spine without causing more harm. You will take away a valuable model and signals that will help you avoid the fate of an ineffective organization.
Make learning look like work
Does your team take enough time out of their schedules to improve their practice? Or do they find that they are in non-stop status meetings? When do they find time to improve themselves as an individual and a team?
Today's roles require experience and constant practice to be effective. Without taking the time to hone their craft your team will not be able to wrangle the increasingly complex world that they need to deal with daily.
If you don’t put aside the time for the team to learn it will fall to the individual. A small number of people will take on more hours to improve themselves but burn out. While other people that don’t have the extra time will improve at a much slower rate through their experience. The core of the problem is that we separate how we learn from the work we do on a regular basis.
In this talk, Chris Butler will help you understand how you should replace, restructure, and repeat meetings to help the team grow individually and together. By making our learning and training look more like work we will help everyone grow.
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