3 sessions at TIA SG 2016 to help you make better decisions for your product

When you’ve been toiling tirelessly on perfecting your startup product, you can end up with a shortsighted vision on what works and what obstacles lie ahead.
One way to avoid this pitfall is find new perspectives from the experts – and that’s exactly what you’ll find at Tech in Asia’s Product Stage.

Featuring seasoned product gurus that have taken their products through to success, this expert stage will discuss in-depth arguably the most important aspect of your startup. After all, if you don’t get your product right, no silver-tongued salesman or magical marketing can convince your users to stay.

Here are three must-catch sessions from the Product Stage:

1. Is it Time to Kill Your Product?

Startups shed blood and sweat building products, but the market is unpredictable. Unfortunately, the amount of time one spends doesn’t necessarily guarantee proportional success.

In the face of slow user growth and with limited resources available at hand, many startups eventually arrive at a crossroads where they have to make a painful – but necessary – decision: is it time to kill your product?

We invite experts Honey Mittal, vice president of mobile at Wego, and Justin Lee, head of product at Shopback, to join us in a panel discussion moderated by Katrina Too, product marketing manager at TradeGecko, to help us understand how to interpret user behavior for products that have not yet reached a breakthrough.

Join us to identify when to persevere with an idea and when to pull the plug.

Honey Mittal is the vice president of mobile at Wego, a search-driven online travel marketplace operating across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East and backed by top tier investors Tiger Global, Crescent Group, and Square Peg Capital. Honey is a veteran of the mobile apps industry, having built top-ranking smartphone and wearables apps that are featured on various app stores and used by millions.

Justin Lee is the head of product at Shopback, where he is responsible for developing the product pipeline for the company. He is the mastermind behind major projects that refresh and enhance the ShopBack user journey. Prior to his current appointment, Justin was director of ecommerce solutions at SingPost eCommerce.

Katrina Too is a product marketing manager at TradeGecko where she develops go-to-market strategy and sales and marketing enablement. She is also a chief ambassador at Startup Grind’s chapter in Singapore, where she moderates monthly fireside chats with founders and investors.

2. How to Ship, Scale, and Succeed with Hardware

Hardware is hard, much to the chagrin of many crowdfunding supporters. 3D printing startup Pirate 3D proved a case in point last year when it delivered a mere 40 percent of its Kickstarter orders, despite having raised the highest-ever crowdfunded campaign by a Singaporean company. Their main obstacles? The unexpected costs of R&D, building the hardware, and shipping. Their struggles echo the sentiments of many hardware startups.

Jerry Yang, now general partner at investment firm Hardware Club, is ready to share his 15 years experience of shipping hardware products to make things simpler for you. If managing hardware products to completion – and for scalability – is on your to-do list, this is one session you cannot miss.

Jerry Yang is general partner & hardware lead of the Hardware Club, a private global community for hardware entrepreneurs with over 120 exciting hardware startups from more than 20 different countries, including Misfit Wearables, Thync, Prynt, Blocks, Click & Grow, Reach Robotics, etc. The Hardware Club provides capital investments as well as manufacturing and retail resources to its member startups.

3. The user psychology of winning products

How is it that we can spend countless hours scrolling through Facebook mindlessly? Why did we start turning to Google automatically whenever we seek the answer to a burning question? What did Uber do to become our go-to mode of transport? For these three and other elite tech companies, it all boils down to one thing: effortless UX and UI.

If you want to give your products a critical advantage, take a seat at this keynote session by Akiko Naka, CEO of professional social networking service Wantedly, to learn what’s on your users’ minds – and more importantly, how to get on them.

Akiko serves as a founder and CEO at Wantedly, Inc., touted as the leading professional networking service in Tokyo with over 1 million monthly active users and 15,000 corporates on board. Prior to founding Wantedly, Akiko was a growth coordinator at Facebook Japan, contributing to marketing and product development.

Whether you’re a seasoned product manager or a new founder looking to take your beloved startup to the next level, one thing’s for sure: your product is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Figure the best way forward by drawing on the hard-earned lessons and experiences from our product experts.

The 15 percent promotion off all passes to Tech in Asia Singapore 2016 has been extended until the end of this week – get your passes using the code tiasg15 to Tech in Asia Singapore 2016 today!

The full agenda for the Product Stage can be found here.