My name is Inês (pronounced Inez) – she/her. I am originally Portuguese, I have been living in London for the past 9 years (and half!). I am a product & venture coach and I have been working with start-ups and scaleups, focusing on product innovation and transformation initiatives. My experience in tech has spanned across big data, gambling, financial regulation, and IOT, within B2C and B2B contexts. I have built product teams from scratch, implementing innovation and delivery processes, creating professional development programs and, more recently, coaching founders and product leaders at Founders Factory. This covers multiple business areas, such as finding product-market-fit, working through viable business models, funding and pricing. People have described me in the past as an empathetic leader, highly collaborative and who creates a safe and non-judgmental place for the team (and anyone I will work with). A lot of my time is spent contributing to the tech community, through writing, speaking and mentoring; while also learning from others’ experience via attending conferences, following up with industry newsletters and podcasts. Outside of tech, I tend to go back to my very analogue origins (back in Lisbon I had a cake design business). Most recently, I’ve been split my time between painting and sewing (already have a dress planned in case I make it as a speaker at AOTB!).
More about Inês Liberato...
Inês Liberato is talking about
Uno! Losing ideas to win the game
- Have you ever thought “there must be something between Marty Cagan’s process free professed world and the demotivating claws of SAFE”?
- Are you tired of flip flopping between “the business doesn’t get it” and “I need an estimate for when x will be done”.
- Do you feel stuck in between paradoxes where you struggle to align, coach, empower and manage?
If the answer was “yes”, to at least one of the questions, “welcome to the party, pal!”.
I too have struggled with all of the above, until I found myself saying more often than not “look, I know this is a bit like when you start playing a board game: the instructions are super confusing until you start playing”.
At some point the penny dropped - when introducing this whole product discovery (or just general product thinking) angle to organisations it will always sound confusing. On one hand, they have never “played the game”, on the other, they still need to feel like they’re in control of what’s happening and when it will happen.
Long story short, the talk looks into the perspective of the product discovery program as if you’re designing and playing your own board game. I will walk you through:
- How to "sell" discovery to the organisation
- Common mistakes (based on mistakes I’ve made)
- Hints & Tips on how to increase your chances of success
Key takeaways…
Hopefully, you will walk out of this session with:
- A set of principles on how to design and play your product discovery “game”
- How to get the organisation involved, at a level they can engage at usefully
- Techniques to achieve a higher rate of success
- Some of the “traps” I fell into (so you don’t have to)