Holly Bielawa

Head of Product Coaching, Jeff Patton and Associates

Holly is Head of Coaching and Consulting at Jeff Patton & Associates. As a tech start-up founder and transformation executive, she launched many successful products around the globe and has had the pleasure of working alongside some of the most talented engineers and thought leaders in the field. Her experience working with organizations large and small as they work to create Products has revealed patterns of both success and failure. Along the way, she has dedicated herself to helping individuals and organizations use Product Thinking as the predictable path to success. At Jeff Patton & Associates, she and her team of experts help organizations implement ways of working that shift their focus away from creating output and empower teams to optimize delivery of valuable outcomes and impacts. More at hollybielawa.com and jpattonassociates.com

Hands-On Session

Why Working with Product is Hard

As an technologist, your goal is to make useful software ready for release. You even may be "Agile," and use Event Storming with a cross-functional team of to create the ability to deploy working code in iterations. Even so, meaningful collaborations with Product Owners and Product Managers are usually a challenge. Often these roles only show up just before a release or when there is a customer-facing error. This behavior leaves the team solving the problem of how to prioritize their work for the maximum benefit to customerrs, users, and organization. Getting this wrong can lead to re-work or costly product failure. This lack of engagement is a wide-spread problem that seems to have gotten even worse in recent years. Why?

This lively workshop will reveal three key causes of this this lack of Product engagement. Participants will also be introduced to Product Thinking tools such as OKRs and User Story Mapping that tend to get better engagement from Product Managers and Organizational Leadership at large. You will go home with practical tips for fostering valuable conversations with Product and other roles who desperately need to understand the importance of collaboration.