The ProductTank awards 2020

June 10, 2021

5 min read

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Will Barritt

Community Manager at Mind the Product

Will joined the Mind the Product marketing team in 2018, and moved into Community Management for ProductTank in August 2020. Will has extensive experience in business communications, hosting community projects as part of his work for Cambridge BID, such as free outdoor cinema events, as well as assisting in setting up AGMs. During 2020, Will experienced being on furlough and is open to discuss how this was a massive knock on confidence and productivity, and how to break the negative mindset that comes from staying indoors. Will is an avid gamer and is always up for hearing terrible jokes. While Will grew up in Pembrokeshire in Wales, he moved to Cambridge to do a degree in animation, fell in love with the city and ended up staying!

Most viewed stream of 2020

🥇 Our winner for the most-viewed stream of 2020 is ProductTank Brazil, a regional collaboration of all ProductTanks in Brazil for World Product Day 2020. The stream received 3357 views and 172 likes. It featured a selection of talks from ’How to make operations work with Product innovation’ and ‘New use cases for old features’, to ‘Five lessons that I learnt by failing’ and ‘Product Discovery with no-code tools’

🥈 2nd place is ProductTank London’s Building Product Strategy event from June 2020 with 3046 views and 57 likes. ProductTank London has been hosting regular events throughout 2020, each with 3 speakers giving different perspectives on the same theme.

🥉 3rd place is ProductTank Delhi with their Building for Bharat event from September 2020 which received 2,756 views and 105 likes. In this stream, 6 product people discussed their thoughts and tips on building for Bharat customers.

Up and coming ProductTank

🥇 In 2020, our best newcomer was ProductTank Louisville.
Despite having been on the cards for a while, ProductTank Louisville didn’t get off the ground until the pandemic made it a priority. “The impact of Covid-19 meant that the lead organiser, Alex Jacobs felt the timing had never been better. He wanted the ProductTank in place so that product people in the area had a way of staying connected while remote,” says Mind the Product’s Community Manager, Will Barritt. “Alex, and his co-organisers John Saxon and Mark Lorence, have been so proactive in finding speakers and trying to organically build the community. They’ve also been hugely supportive to other organisers, and the Mind the Product community throughout the last year.”

Most ProductTank events in 2020

🥇 In first place for most events in 2020 is a tie between ProductTank Edinburgh and ProductTank Auckland, both with 15 events!
Edinburgh wanted to share coping strategies during the Covid crisis and keep the community connected with regular Zoom events. As a result, they ran 30-minute weekly web lunches and sometimes web suppers!

ProductTank Auckland on the other hand has been able to run in-person events since July 2020. This meant they could deliver a combination of in-person and online ProductTanks for their product community.

🥈 In second place is another tie, both with 11 events throughout 2020. It’s ProductTank London and ProductTank Brisbane! Both have been going strong with an event each month (and taking a well-deserved break!)

🥉 Finally in third place, (you guessed it…) another tie! ProductTank Pune and ProductTank Birmingham both delivered 10 events to their loyal communities.

All of these ProductTanks work hard to engage and learn with their communities. They are worth following for fantastic free events, top speakers, and provide the opportunity to connect with the loveliest of product people!

Most viewed writeup in 2020

Now we’ve come to our final award, the most viewed writeup in 2020. These are ProductTank talks that have been written up and put onto our ever-growing blog. While some of these talks happened before 2020, the writeups were published in 2020—so they still count!
🥇 In first place is ProductTank San Francisco with an insightful talk by Jeff Lash on What world-class product management teams do differently. In the talk—published on Mind the Product in 2020—Jeff shares some insight into high-performance product management teams covering the importance of customer understanding, clear roles, responsibilities, and structure.

🥈In second place is Tomer Sharon who spoke about key experience indicators for product managers at ProductTank New York. The key points of his talk include framing, principles, and the Google HEART framework. It’s definitely worth a watch!

🥉 And in 3rd place, we have the legendary John Cutler who hosted his talk Bets, boards, missions, and north stars at ProductTank Barcelona. In the session, John showcased some simple hacks he’s used as an advisor to help nudge organizations forward and get them thinking in new ways.

All of our ProductTank organisers have had to unexpectedly pivot into hosting digital events throughout 2020 and have done an amazing job crafting epic local product events for the entire world to see. We are so lucky to have such an amazing community of product people generating a wealth of insights and inspiration for us regularly. Be sure to check out and bookmark our amazing ProductTank content for future learning!

Enjoy more from ProductTank

ProductTanks are informal meetups, created by Mind the Product, to bring local product people together and to enable speakers to share amazing product insights. Today we have ProductTanks in more than 200 cities across the globe and there’s likely one near you.

Learn more about ProductTank – find your local meetup, explore more ProductTank content, see the latest ProductTank news, and discover ways to get involved!

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