Designing for Play – Melissa Pickering on The Product Experience [Rebroadcast]

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Melissa Pickering

As we start to wrap up the year and panic shop for gifts, our thoughts naturally drift to everyone’s favourite part of the holiday season: playing with toys! Our go-to person to learn more about creating a great play experience is Melissa Pickering, Strategic Product Director at The LEGO Group.

Melissa joined us on the podcast to talk about designing for children, ensuring that parents are happy, and designing to ensure that your customers take pride in what they accomplish.

In this episode, sponsored by Mind The Product Training, listen to learn about:

  • Product experience
  • Translating consumer insights into business innovation
  • Evolving your product

Quote of the Episode

‘Intrinsic motivation’ is one of the key principles of play, another being ‘active engagement’ and another being ‘joyful moments’. And we find that it’s so important when we have kids in an unstructured or free-play scenario, it’s because they are inherently motivated to play just for themselves, they’re not trying to accomplish some external reward or win a certain game.

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Our Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. She’s currently Head of Innovation at Go Compare and has spent 13 years in the tech industry working with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She’s worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank Bristol (which now has 800+ members!) and runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

Randy is a product consultant and coach who has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. A recovering music journalist and editor, he launched Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, and has worked across sectors including museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Randy’s book, What Do We Do Now? A Product Manager’s Guide to Strategy in the Time of COVID-19 is out now, with all profits going to COVID-19 relief efforts.