One of the reasons for creating CPO Connect was to bring together the two halves of our community. 57% of NZ executive product leaders (my guess is it's the same in Australia) have never held a more junior product role. Many came from other senior leadership roles in other functions, many are domain experts, lots were internal hires, some are reformed founders. The rest of us came from more junior product roles, so bring an understanding of product principles and a deeper understanding of what dedicated product leadership looks like.

So in the spirit of learning from each other, this week we're bringing product leaders from both sides of the aisle to share their experiences.

Thank you Tas for bringing this one up - love it!

As AI becomes more integrated into our toolsets, workflows and the products we're bringing to market, many companies are working on defining their official AI policies/strategies. What are some ways of thinking about this given the fast moving nature of this beast? What has/is your company doing? Have you seen good examples?

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What happens if the promise of products like Lovable, to ultimately remove the need for engineers, comes true? Do we all become Product Managers? And if everyone is, is no-one?

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Great conversation about how we're using tools like Lovable now and what we expect to see in the future.

Melissa Firth has been working with a couple of companies recently working on product packaging. She's keen to share her approach and some learnings. Which is great, cause we want to hear it!

Great group today with some shared stories of how we've approached starting in a new job. Building trust, developing relationships, learning, sharing and lots more - get stuck in!

Making the most of having Vidya Dinamani back in Wellington for a while - you may have heard Vidya speak at last year's Product Aotearoa Conference, read her book Groundwork: Get Better at Making Better Products or tuned in to her podcast, Product Rebels - she is full of amazing insights and a lovely human :)

It's easy to focus on the challenges of working with overbearing founders (!) but what can we learn from those that are doing it well and how can we bring this reflection into our own practice? At today's drop-in we're super fortunate to have Sandy Hall (Leadership Coach and Managing Director of Recognition) join us and chat with me (and you!) on her work with leaders and founders.

We'll discuss the parallels between founders and senior product leaders,

1. leading and influencing cross functional teams
2. knowing when to lean in and when to empower
3. accepting and effectively engaging in conflict
4. thinking strategically
5. being someone others want to follow
6. and more

and hear about Sandy's experiences working with founders who are looking to build on their own leadership practice.

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Plenty to discuss here!

If you have time, please listen to Brian Chesky on a recent The Verge podcast talking about his approach to leadership/management (from 38mins), preferring functional leadership over divisional leadership. It goes deeper than Paul Graham’s post which created confusion with micromanagement, founders not being able to let go, disempowering other leaders…At AirBnb, Chesky describes himself as the only non-functional person in the organisation. Everyone else is a leader of a function (marketing, finance, technology…) area. There are no pure managers, or divisional GMs, and presumably no Product Managers (who by definition are non-functional leaders)He believes, functional organisations force you to focus, where “you only do as many things as the CEO/Founder can be over (and in the details)” - in divisional organisations, each division can go off on tangents and the CEO/Founder loses the ability to create a consistent vision.

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Following a great thread on our Product Aotearoa Slack, we dropped in to talk about the importance (or lack) of the names product people are given.

We've often read that being a CPO is a great training ground for becoming a CEO, but in NZ it's a fairly rare occurrence. But they do exist and today we're super fortunate to have Simona Turin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonaturin) join us to discuss her journey to becoming the recently appointed CEO of academyEX after spending almost 2 years as AskNicely's Chief Product and Experience Officer.

We're super lucky to have Sandra Davey (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-davey) join us in this session to discuss what's happening in the Australian product market. Sandra's product career began in the 90's and since then has been a PM, product leader, board director, board chair and since 2015 has worked as an organisational facilitator, coach and consultant at Organa, a collective of likeminded Australian business leaders.

A great discussion on how product teams are enabled, motivated and structured - lots of good challenges and different ways of thinking about this topic!

Another Question and Experiences session. Today our questions are posed by Hannah and me and we're talking about building a product practice and communicating with boards.

This session is all about showcasing how product, and other functions, are represented in different company org charts. Who reports to who, what roles have been defined, what's working, not working...

Thank you Lydia, Tana, Tim and Matt for sharing how you do things where you work :)

Question and Experiences sessions are all about posing a question to the group and, rather than recieving advice, you get other people's experiences dealing with similar issues.

Today we're exploring Handling Uncertainty (Matt), Getting (Engineering) S@1T Done (Lydia) and Communicating Roadmaps (Shane).