MTP Engage Round-up: Learnings, Takeaways, and Other Resources
Since 2017, I have teamed up with Arne Kittler to organize, curate, run, and moderate the MTP Engage event in Hamburg. This is one of my favorite ways to give back to the product community—and it also happens to be a lot of fun!
MTP Engage Hamburg is a three-day event packed full of workshops, panel discussions, keynotes, and networking, so rather than try to cram everything into a single blog post, I’m writing a mini-series of MTP Engage Round-up posts. This third post focuses on the learnings, takeaways, and other resources from the event.
What we’ve learned (our key takeaways)
I’ve already shared my key learnings from the conference program in an earlier post. Here are a few other learnings and observations:
We’ve learned that in person-conferences are still a thing and making new product friends is way easier in this setting. And we hope your newly formed connections will become mini-communities and attendees will continue helping each other.
We’ve learned that directional clarity and clear goals are as important as great (but maybe from now on incomplete) product documentation and good roadmaps.
We’ve learned more about interviewing users and what user research and design thinking can and can’t do.
And we’ve learned more about why it is important to take care of our personal development and how our decisions as product people are having a big impact on the world and that this responsibility is one we should handle with care.
Now that I’ve shared my perspective, let’s have a look at what others said.
Other people’s reviews
Curious to hear what others had to say? Find all the related LinkedIn posts here and all the tweets here.
Several productive attendees have already written their recaps and reviews of the event.
Power of people by Dan Gorman
Why humility can create better products (and people) and why it is so important to exercise it in Product Teams by Lara Orrico
What we’ve learned by Lauron Pratt on the Mind The Product blog
What we learned at the 2022 #mtpEngage Leadership Forum by Nils Neubauer on the Mind the Product blog
Why meeting in person is so important: We get the chance to really connect with fellow attendees!
The attendees’ takeaways
At the beginning of the day, we prompted all attendees to ask themselves this key question: What are you going to do differently?
And they actually listened! Here are a few of the takeaways attendees shared with us on social media.
Nadine Oldorf sharing her learnings with the LI community
Wes Royer sharing his learnings
I really love to see what people are taking away from these few, intense hours. So if you shared something about the event, thank you for bringing others along.
My personal takeaways as a community event organizer
Now that we’ve extensively discussed our program and the key learnings, I want to share my personal experience as the co-organizer of this event.
Curational courage pays off: We’ve made some pretty big changes to the way we put our line-up together and it looks like this paid off. We ditched the Call-for-Sessions and fully curated our line-up. We picked the topics that we think matter the most or we think need to be discussed more and then thought about who would make a great speaker for this topic. And we deliberately aimed high and skipped the “basics” so there was no talk on product management foundations or anything like that. We felt that the world needs more content for the product practitioner or product folks already in the role.
Times have changed: What took us days pre-pandemic took us weeks this time, e.g. ordering roll-ups and branding material that used to ship after three or four days took 21 days to arrive. Luckily they made it just in time for our events this year. But it is just one of many examples where sourcing materials and staffing was way harder than three years ago. And we don’t expect that to change for the better anytime soon. So if you are an event organizer yourself: have a plan A, B, and C, and plan way in advance.
Attendees are back, sponsorship is coming back slower: You can’t run an event like this without sponsors (or tickets would need to be much more expensive), so we were lucky that Sisense, Mux, Amplitude, Productboard, Delivery Hero, and Okta decided to go with us. And they not only showed up to promote their stuff. They brought their product people or made sure to have some great swag on-booth plus great success stories to share. And as the exhibitors’ hall was pretty busy throughout the day, I think the attendees liked the idea of getting some insights on tools directly from the companies building them.
You need a strong team and your family supporting you. Lisa Radel, Antti Heikkonnen, Christopher Müller, Mirja Bester, Shaun Russel, Tobias Freudenreich, and many other volunteers helped us make this event a success. And for me personally: without my husband being 100% supportive, this would not have gone well. I was basically off family-duty for a complete week and pretty stressed for more than a month. So it was one of my personal highlights that he and my daughter came over for the closing remarks and the party.
Having my daughter join me on stage for the closing remarks was a personal highlight of the event.
Product Management != Event Management. You need to be ready for event management being a super deadline-driven, chaotic, “adapting to change” kind of an experience. And you need to be ready to make 100,000 decisions for an event of our size. Just catering for the three days—the breakfasts, snacks, lunch buffets, sweet treats, beverages for attendees, speakers, and team… Someone (Arne and I in this case) had to think about all these details and decide on each calorie people consumed.
It has been quite a ride this year—so many challenges on many levels. I once again learned that Arne and I are a great team even in times of chaos and pressure. So thanks, man!
Finishing up with a few fun things
Check out our Spotify playlist for the event (Curated by Arne)
Matt’s One Page, One Hour Pledge aims to limit busywork and boost productivity and collaboration. Check it out: https://www.onepageonehour.com/
Catch the vibe and the highlights in this two-minute video recap: https://vimeo.com/724466226
Want to learn more about the Product Leadership Forum? Find that post here. Or, if you’re looking for a recap of the workshops and conference program, you’ll find that post here.
If you want to get updated on our next big event, make sure you follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Or, if you’re managing product people and want to learn about product leadership development opportunities, sign up for my quarterly newsletter!