Catastrophic success: Staying agile when you win that big contract

Many start-ups and scale-ups experience a similar problem at some stage in their growth.They’re set up for agile, iterative delivery of a product that will delight as many users as possible.

But then suddenly they win a huge contract for a customer. It's exactly the injection of money they need, but the customer expects fixed deliverables to a fixed timeline and budget.

This session explores how to avoid these big wins turning into catastrophic success, how to stay agile in a fixed-scope world, and how product managers can meet the demands of project management without compromising on best practices.

Leadership: the overlooked critical product manager skill

In this session I will talk about the importance of leadership as a core, and critically-overlooked, product management competency. I draw on my experience as a commissioned officer in the British Army, and the leadership styles and approaches that allow a generalist with low technical ability to get the best performance out of a group of experiences specialists with high technical ability. An experience that, I believe, aligns closely with that of product managers in many organisations.

Aimed at product managers and other product professionals. Talk can be adapted for 20-45 mins.