Hint: I will write a different post on the content of the talks, this is my meta-view of the conference. Meta with a small m. If you’re only interested in upskilling, skip this one.

One of the tasks I like to ask in product interviews is: Why? I’ve written about why is there no Amazon Maps. It’s highly speculative AND fun. I see the candidates’ product sense at work in their answers. I went to the June 2023 inaugural edition of Product at Heart, a conference for curious product people

So, let me indulge in a little thought experiment: Why do product managers go to conferences? What job-to-be-done does it serve for them? Some ideas, right after the break: 

• Connecting with the Tribe: Product at Heart, the conference, saw some 750 participants. That’s five times the Dunbar number, so there are probably multiple tribes present. When you stand in line, you pick up a conversation with your neighbor and find out that their problems are a lot like yours, even though they work in B2B/B2C/B2B2C/industrial product management / pick your flavor which is very different from yours. My tribe (I self-identify as a reformed product leader) was at the Leadership forum especially.
• Re-Connecting with your peers: I have met more former colleagues and former managers than I would have thought. It pays to be nice. 
• Learning: Listening to and synthesizing what is presented is the product manager’s core job. It’s also tantamount for a conference to derive value from it. I took a lot of photos of slides and spent the train ride home organizing it into something coherent.
• Star experience: The people on stage are rockstars in our product world. You know their books, podcasts and mental models and frameworks. When they leave the stage, you can say Hi! And they actually like it. Some of them are introverts and stage appearance are the best intro to a meaningful discussion. (I am still happilyremembering one of these after-events chats with Megan Murphy, back in 2021.)
• Enjoy: The conference offers an after-party with free beer and food and also longish coffee breaks to mingle with your fellow product people. 
• Meeting as a proxy for learning: We all know that product managers like to call a meeting to end the pain. Meetings are second nature. It solves the problem of making time for learning in your busy schedule. You’re somewhere else, it’s content consumption.

And I would venture, doing the conference also serves a couple of jobs for the organizers. 

• For example tribal leads. They bring the tribe together, they enjoy coaching and mentoring. Much like the product leaders’ job is the team, getting the herd together is one more abstraction layer up. The conference gives them scale to train and to further the craft (thanks for this excerpt from your vision, Mind the Product), much like Teresa Torres trains thousands in product discovery. 
• Stating the obvious: Diversification of revenue. One of the organizers, Petra Wille, runs a product coaching business. She also wrote a book. The conference is a natural extension of her personal brand. 

And now for something completely different. The customer experience of the conference is very joyful and extremely thoughtful. The organizers definitely have product people at heart.

These are the things I noticed:

• Shortly before the conference, the organizers send an email with tips on what to do in Hamburg.
• Book raffle: The library of product management books on display gets raffled to participants. (I want to play a game: Sync this list with your Amazon/e-commerce shopping history to see how many of these you’ve already got at home)
• They also curate a list of places on top of Google Maps which is long enough to give you ideas for multiple trips
• They actually set up match dates for dinner on the evening before the conference
• The vegan and vegetarian food options are plenty and central to the catering. Even special dietary needs are being served.
• Schedule printed on the back of the badge – classic, but always helpful in a place with several hundred people within one or few mobile cells.
• Help for the confused few (me and one of my new queue friends): I had problems with my tickets that were being addressed within two hours. A waitlist for tickets was in place, even though the event was sold out.
• Music: after-party had two DJs for those wanting to dance.

Thanks to Petra and Arne and their team for making this inaugural edition of Product at Heart a blast. See you in September 2024!