Shifting Mindsets: Embracing Product Thinking with Esra Yetis - Productized 24 TalkInTen

We’re excited to bring you more exclusive content from Productized 2024, our third conference of the year! This series continues our TalkInTen format, where we deliver concise, impactful conversations with industry leaders driving innovation in product and business agility. Each episode is packed with fresh insights, actionable strategies, and real-world examples to help teams and organisations thrive.

In this episode, we’re joined by Esra Yetis, who co-facilitated the Enabling Product Thinking Mindset workshop with Chris Compton. Esra shares her thoughts on how a product thinking mindset can transform how teams approach problem-solving and innovation. She dives deep into the key principles of product thinking, explaining why it’s essential for teams to move beyond project-based thinking to embrace continuous learning, experimentation, and growth.

Esra on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/esrayetis/

Episode Highlights:

• Shifting from a project-based model to a continuous learning and experimentation mindset
• The importance of being data-informed rather than solely data-driven in product decisions
• How product thinking fosters team growth, innovation, and adaptability
• Practical exercises from the workshop that helped participants apply product thinking to real-world challenges

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Use code PROD24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev – https://www.sheev.co.uk

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Product Agility Podcast

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Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we're going to be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadat, creator of radical product thinking and rich Morinov, author of the art of product management, helping us all find some joy in what we do. But it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here and we're going to be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Sheev Limited. Sheev is a company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with action tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. Esther. Hi, Beth. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. Yes, we were booked in this morning, weren't we? But it was too early. Too early I was drinking my coffee at that time. I'm glad you said coffee there. Black Americana. Black Americana. Like how everyone should be having their coffee. I've got into just ice coffee. Oh yeah. You know, really quite refreshing. Yeah, it's good time. I think we can still have ice coffee. I still can't close the summer season yet. But the fact when you get back to the UK, it's definitely fucking close. Yeah, it's Americana side. That's the hardest family close. Anyway, before you go back to the United Kingdom, before I go back to the United Kingdom, we're going to record a podcast episode because this week, in fact, yesterday you were co-facilitating a workshop with Chris Compton. The name of the workshop was Enabling Product Thinking Mindset, which was a fantastic workshop really. It was fully booked, absolutely booked. I was really, really happy to be there. When I say I co-facilitated, I did 1% of the job. I have to say Chris did the 99% of the job. So 99% of the credit goes to Chris. It was fun preparing for the workshop as well. There was lots of papers, post-its. I have to say it was really full-on. We collected some feedback at the end as well. One of the words was like rich. So I really thought that really summarizes the workshop. It was very, very rich. It included introduction to Product Thinking Mindset, but also the nine principles of Product Thinking Mindset, which Chris came up with, and the linkability cameras. It all actually built up and led to the workshop itself, which we found a fictional business idea, which was really, really fun to work with. People teamed up and they were really engaging and everyone really put their maximum effort. It was really fantastic. How would you describe the Product Thinking Mindset? How would I describe Product Thinking Mindset? I'm going to generalize a little bit because it's easier to speak that way. But let's say some organizations are actually working product teams. When we say product team, hopefully they are cross-functional teams that actually produce a product. But that can be just actually building things that we've been told to build. And it is actually not too difficult to do. It might be also relaxing to do. But that is actually not being in a product team. That is a project team. So if we are operating in a project model, that means we are closely managed and the requirements are very clear. There are some a lot of positivity of being in a project model. And it works really well for some organizations where they don't need to maybe compete that much. And it's clear that what they need to do, especially maybe in physical products, let's say. But that means if they are not in Product Thinking Mindset, they are less likely to be innovative and ahead of the curve. Because having Product Thinking Mindset means you are constantly innovating, constantly learning. And you have experimental mindset, experimental practices. That is a Product Thinking Mindset, because you are constantly thinking about the product and how it evolves. And not only the product, you are actually thinking about yourself as well, your mindset as an individual. That actually is good for people. It's good for their growth. That means they are growing, they are learning, they are constantly active, their brains are constantly active. As I said, isn't it easy for someone to just take their requirements, apply it as it is? Some people enjoy it very well. And it's actually good for them. And as I said, it's not really a bad thing. Sometimes we might have to be in the project model time to time. Yeah, that is for me what Product Thinking Mindset is. What is your day job? So I am a product consultant, product innovation strategies, and also design strategies. I'm coming from a user experience background. So that's why I'm always also passionate about design thinking and product thinking mindset. They are basically the same thing. It's just wearing different hats. Currently, I am a consultant at SmartCo, a consultancy firm, and my client is London Stock Exchange Group. I've been working with them for about one and a half year now. How funny. I know a few people at L-Sake. Not everyone says L-Sake, so you know. Because when I say L-Sake, people don't get it all the time. So that's why... If you know, you know. When it's changed some names afterwards. Yes, it's now everyone knows. Yeah. So it's during the workshop. I mean, what were some of the light bulb moments for people? Do you think around their product thinking mindset? I would say because we talk about the nine thinking principles, but they are very, very carefully selected. Every word that has been chosen, they were actually considered thought out, considered, and then chosen very carefully. And when we talk about each of them, it actually makes people think, from their perspective, every business is different. Every business operates differently. And when we run the workshop, and one of the examples is actually in the link capability cameras is to actually force you to have your own statement of what a high performing team means for you. And one of the words that actually Chris has used as an example is the data inform. And that also always actually gets people thinking that it was actually a surprising thing for me, because we talk about a lot of the things. And one of the things people actually pick up on more than other things that we talk about, which that is data informed. And what that means is not necessarily being data driven. I don't think data driven is also completely a bad thing. But the reason it's informed and not driven is because we don't want people to solely rely on the data. And a lot of the cases, which is in B2B, which we were talking about before the podcast is sometimes you don't even have that data. So you cannot be data driven either. So you want the data, you need to build products that can generate the data. And that can be an internal platform too, because this is overlooked in internal platforms in B2B, data generation is overlooked. And it's mostly more important to organizations that are on B2C space. What do you think is overlooked? It's because most organizations think that they can actually make decisions without the data because they know the business. So B2B, especially, and also internal products are built around specific domains. And people work in organizations for like so long, they know the domain in and out. They know how that organization operates in and out. They know the best. But that can be a bad thing too, because knowing the best, it can also create an illusion. Imagine a manager, imagine a director on a very senior leadership that actually didn't use the tools for so long. Maybe they started off in a company in that level. They were doing the day to day business. Business evolves, technology evolves, tools changes. You are not the one using it. Therefore, having all this knowledge kind of creates the illusion of like knowing everything. Therefore, especially in the internal operations, data generation, measuring the outcome, and the quality of like how you would measure in B2C is definitely overlooked and not prioritized. If we were able to collect as much as data in an internal facing organization or in B2B product, we could find many ways to optimize and shorten and simplify the process. Because usually that is the priority in internal tools and stuff like that. You want to optimize things, you want to shorten the service, you want to also decrease the learning curve. And data helps. But when you cannot generate data, you cannot be informed by data. Therefore, you have to trust your gut. You have to trust your manager to make a decision for you. Therefore, again, going back to the project model, you become in a project model, and then you are losing the muscle that actually makes your brain like think constantly and then lose your creativity. Therefore, you are as a person, as an employee, not learning as much. So I can't remember which guest it was, but we were speaking earlier today, I think it was. And the question came up here, how many product managers actually use the product which they are managing on a daily basis? As a user, and actually what benefit they can be, and I think often, yeah, internal products particularly, it could be somebody that used to be a really avid user or super user of it who then just doesn't do that anymore. And I remember going back over, wow, 13, 14 years, and we had some users join some teams. And it worked really well. We were getting the users next to the developers getting to work through a lot of the minute detail together, worked so fantastically well. But I said to somebody, I said, oh, we've got users on the team. And he's like, they haven't. And I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, well, we're not users anymore. You've taken them out of their job and you put them on a team, which is a great thing. But in the moment you did that, their knowledge began to stagnate. Yeah. And so while soon as you take a user away from their job, depending up on them using the thing, they're no longer a user in the same way. They can be incredibly valuable. But it's a real interesting delicate balance. Absolutely. And unfortunately, we're at time, we've run out of time. I want to just talk more. Maybe we can make it happen. Let's make this 30 minutes. I was just actually telling you that actually 10 minutes and short podcasts are perfect. But you just want to talk more about that. Yeah, I changed my mind now. I changed my mind. Well, it will meet up in London, make them dull. Yes, let's do that. We'll bring some mics. Yes. George can come over from Porto. In the middle of Dostin. Let's do that in the middle of Dostin. Oh, yes. That's do I be for it. Okay. I be for it. Yeah. So I be for it. We're going to record it. One 30 minute podcast. We will record it in like different countries, three different countries. Oh, it's wonderful. Yeah. We seem to get a sponsorship for it. Oh, yeah. We need sponsorship. Definitely. Okay. Well, we'll be all good on it. Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. It was my pleasure. It's been really nice. If people want to find out more about you, I take it linked in as a great op. Yes, I'm very easy to find. Just type my name, S. R. I. T. A. You will find me. Well, make sure that your link is in the show notes as well. Thank you so much. Well, if you're thank you so much for coming along. My pleasure. So good to meet you. And everyone, thank you for listening. We are joined to a close. Our time at productize. The conference will begin to kind of wrap up slowly now over the next few hours. I think at 3 p.m. I'm going to be told that I've won some clothes and a raffle. I think I've made really certain I've told them exactly what I want to win. So I'm hoping that's going to happen. I'm sure that they got the memo. If it doesn't, it looks like such a fix. Good luck. I've been really, really like pushing to win the pink baseball cap. I want to see. And then we've got one more episode to record. Maybe an extra special long episode of Radikantut. Radikantut. I'm just going to chat shit. I think is a technical term for it. So let's see what topics we cover. So everyone, thank you for listening and thank you for coming on the podcast. And yeah, this is a penultimate episode at productize24. Sad times. But please do like and subscribe and share and do all the things that make us more and more successful because more successful that we are better guests we can entice on. Thank you. Which means better content you get. So thank you very much everyone. Thank you. Call it a day.