A night to remember: Product Leaders Meet-Up 2023

We recently hosted a Product Leaders Meet-Up event at The Up Group HQ, with the backdrop of the London skyline. It was an evening filled with enriching discussions, learnings via valuable insights, and just a very fun opportunity to connect with some of the brightest minds in the London scale-up tech community.

We welcomed 40 Chief Product Officers and Product leaders from companies including Bumble, WorldRemit, Tide, Soldo, Marshmallow, Instagram, Bloom & Wild, Onfido, TIER, Spotify, Expedia, Lyst, and many more. It was inspiring to have such a diverse and talented group of individuals gathered under one roof. The highlight of the evening was hearing from Vivienne Sung, Ritu Soni and Vinay Ramani. Each brought a unique perspective and deep experience to the event, providing our audience with a wealth of insights.

“Great product organisations are customer focussed and commercially driven.”

Vivienne kicked off proceedings, discussing the reasons why product leaders fail and how they could, and should adapt to the current macro-economic environment. She shared the trials and tribulations of her own career and flagged the hurdles that continually trip up product leaders. She argued that to combat this, product leaders must ensure they have a deep understanding of their organisation and its objectives. Further, building a robust relationship with the leadership team – particularly the CEO / Founder – is a key pillar to continued success of the product function. She emphasised the value of having a network of other product leaders to act as a sounding board for when challenges arise.

Ritu too was candid with her career highs and lows, how to lead product differentiation and the tangible success that diverse teams deliver. Ritu took attendees through her approach to building product differentiation, her methods of building a deep relationship with the customer to driving product development against specific pain points. She gave real-world examples from her own experience as a CPO to emphasise how teams with diverse backgrounds solve customer problems more efficiently, ultimately building a more refined end product.

Vinay, our final speaker, discussed the topic of building and managing high-performance teams. Vinay emphasised the importance of always being able to answer the questions; “Why does this team exist?” and, “What is their mission?” He argued that the lack of a north star quickly leads to inefficiencies and how he expects his teams to not just state the KPIs of their mission, but to articulate how they are going to achieve their goals.

In addition to hearing from our speakers, our annual Product Meet-Up provided an exceptional networking opportunity for London’s leading product execs. We had vibrant conversations, ideas floated, problems debated and new connections made. We all left the evening inspired to continue to push boundaries, innovate, shape the future of product development and play our part in the ongoing growth of the product community.

“KPIs are easy to identify as it is easy to measure the height of a mountain, but who can articulate how they are going to climb each phase of the mountain?”

Feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive, some of which is shared below…

“Thank you so much for the invite, it was a wonderful event.”

“Thanks for organising a great session - was good to see old friends and make some new ones whilst having some thought provoking sharing (and great views).”

“Thank you for the kind invitation to the event, I greatly enjoyed the evening. I had a lot of fun meeting old acquaintances and making new ones. I thought the group size and the format of the talks (speaking from within the room) worked really well.” 

“Thank you for the invite. It was great to see your offices and meet all the attendees. Being relatively new to London it’s a great way to meet new people in the product and tech community.”

”I liked not having slides, it made the presentations more conversational and genuine. I also liked it being a standing event that allows for continual mingling. Good all around!”