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Product Management
MAY 5, 2017

Engaging Product People – the Hamburg Way

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Last week the first ever MTP Engage took place in Hamburg and gathered over 300 product people – the largest gathering of product people in Germany ever! – for a day of keynotes, sessions and a number of side events to facilitate exchange among those who attended.

We wanted to live up to the event’s name and help people engage – and it worked out: Several attendees compared the event to a “class reunion” and spent the day’s long breaks chatting with old and new contacts. Many of these new contacts were established the day before the event in smaller groups at the side events (workshops, curated group dinners, volunteer drinks etc.) – icebreaking made easy!

MTP Engage Hamburg
This open atmosphere also showed during the 12 sessions in which product people from around Germany and Austria shared best practices and gave insights into their work – before opening the room to lively discussions with the audience.

In terms of keynotes Marco Boerries kicked off the day with his explanation of why bold answers to complex problems won’t come overnight (and why he spent 7+ years building his latest company enfore in stealth mode). Johanna Kollmann took a more theoretical route towards tackling complexity and shared what she learned from Systems Thinking about understanding and changing systems as well as collaboration around products.

Sebastian Deterding challenged the audience to remain conscious of our ethical responsibility as product people instead of acting as “Thieves of time” (as in Michael Ende’s Momo). Lastly John Cutler took us on a journey through his thoughts regarding the feature factory and why many of us keep falling back to it.
Videos of all four keynotes will be published here in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

MTP Engage Hamburg

They day ended with a dance-heavy afterparty in the belly of the legendary MS Stubnitz, a former fishing trawler turned club, with Justin Faust & The Beatifikation on decks – both of them product managers by day and excellent DJs by night!

Many thanks to all the volunteers, speakers, workshop moderators, crew, and last but certainly not least everybody in the audience who actively engaged with others! We hope to see you again next year!

All the photos from MTP Engage

(and our photographer @mr_mo is product manager, too):
MTP Engage Hamburg 2017

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