Running our first Let's Talk Product meetup - we did it!

Date posted
15 April 2019
Reading time
8 Minutes
Chirag Agarwal

Running our first Let's Talk Product meetup - we did it!

This post was written with Olivia Sharp, Kainos Product Consultant

We're proud to say we ran our very first public product meetup last month, Let's Talk Product, in our lovely new London office.

40 people working in and around product management joined us for an evening of talks over beers and pizza. Our theme was product discoveries - what they are, different ways of running one, and what you should definitely avoid.

The talks

Here's a run-down of the brilliant talks from our 4 speakers, all experienced product leaders at Kainos.

Lean start-up discovery - Jayti Thakker

Jayti told us how to apply a lean methodology to discovery when there's only a limited brief and vision from senior managers.

Learnings:

  • A kick-off is essential to define a vision and success criteria, and agree ways of working
  • The principles of lean start-up can help the team to define, refine and conclude one or more hypotheses over the course of their discovery
  • This approach can work in a discovery 'heartbeat' (see image) even though usually you see a lean start-up or hypothesis-driven approach at the prototyping stage of product delivery
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<h3>Discovery on a live service - Chirag Agarwal<br> <br></h3>



<p>Chirag talked about how to do continuous, time-boxed discoveries on a live service based on his experience on the UK passport service. </p>



<p>Learnings:</p>



<ul><li>Most services go live with their MVP and need further discoveries to make things better</li><li>Continuous, time-boxed discoveries allow you to meet deadlines, pass on benefits to users early and learn by failing fast</li><li>For each improvement, do a discovery to work out if it is something you should be doing and how you should go about it (see image)</li><li>If you take this approach you need a mature and established team that's experienced in doing discoveries and understands the stakeholder landscape. You need an environment that allows you to fail and try again</li><li>User research recruitment can hold things up   get this working smoothly</li><li>Time constraints mean focus. We found 3 rounds of usability testing was enough for us to feel confident about making something live</li></ul>



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Keep an eye on the Kainos twitter channel for news.

About the author

Chirag Agarwal