Doors open to the Westin workshop room at this time. Pick up your badge and registration credentials for World Congress in advance of the workshop – and network with peers with a welcome coffee.

How product is impacting transformation, speed-to-market, and how work gets done. Workshop led by Product Initiative lead Jodie Hopperton

Whether you are a product expert or brand new to the discipline, today’s INMA Product Innovation Workshop will focus on how to bring a new idea to fruition. For non-product people, this will help give you an understanding of what it takes to create, evaluate, and launch a new product. For seasoned experts, this is the time to stand back and spend some time thinking through the one thing you’ve been meaning to get to, getting perspective, advice, and help from product people that have been various product processes many times (and have the scars to prove it!). You’ll bring a new idea, or something you’ve been working on, and take it through INMA’s 7 steps. This means that you can return to the office equipped with a plan of actions, knowing what information you need to collect, which stakeholders you need to get buy in from, and how to articulate the story.

Looking at the first part of the product process, we will see some examples of working from a true product perspective. This means sometimes reverse-engineering suggested solutions to really understand what the real problem is. The approach opens the doors to wider possibilities of solutions that may fit better with overall objectives. This will give you food for thought around the idea you are looking to develop and may help you to rethink how you approach it.

Often we get wrapped into thinking about our own businesses, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to what our consumers want. In this session, we’ll look at different methods to truly understand our customers and determine what they want, which may not be what they say they want! This will give you the tools to identify questions you want to ask or data you want to gather to validate your ideas with your actual or future customers.

To leverage what you now know about your customers and take advantage of forward-looking opportunities, you will need to understand macro-level trends that may impact your goals. In this session, we’ll look at how you can setup for success by identifying emerging macro-level trends, discuss how you can get ahead by embracing them in your customer user journey and look at examples of news and digital media companies who successfully seized upon real, macro-level threats and opportunities.

We know what we want to do, we’ve validated with customer data, and now we want to get out a prototype or MVP. Through a set of examples, we’ll look at identifying what is the minimum that we can get away with to test the idea without over-investing, while giving enough to see if customers love it – a minimum lovable product. This will help you decide what you want to test to validate a go/no go – and so what you need to build.

Once we have an MVP out in the world, how do we know if it's successful? What should we be testing, and how do we iterate it based on the feedback and data points we have available? In a series of case studies, we’ll look at examples of product launches, what the feedback has told the product owner, and how the product has been developed (or not).

INMA will take you through the final part of the product process and introduce the table talks.

During this interactive session, we’ll break into smaller groups where you will have the opportunity to dig deeper into one of the four topics with the relevant expert. Talk among peers, ask questions, and share ideas of products or features that are proving a challenge.

INMA will wrap up the workshop, summarising what we have learned and taking you through the INMA Product Initiative’s focus for the rest of 2023.