Insights from the speakers of PDC’20 Virtual

After two full days of talks, discussions, and networking roundtables, the first edition of Tech in Asia’s Product Development Conference’s regional series has come to a close.

It was a bustling event – over 1,300 attendees joined in virtually to learn and forge connections with product thinkers from all over the world.

Here are some highlights from the conference.

Grab’s best practices: Product marketing amid Covid-19

Photo credit: Grab

As the pandemic hit, traffic and human activity in some of the most congested cities in the world fell to an all-time low. As a result, a lot of the small businesses which relied on foot traffic suffered.

Kaia Lai, head of product marketing at Grab, shared the things the ride-hailing giant did during the early days of the pandemic to overcome the situation. For one, the team changed the illustration of the app’s splash screen to one that shows its drivers wearing masks, which encouraged consumer trust.

They also changed the copy of their banners for GrabMart – from “On-demand convenience shop” to “From anything to everything. Delivered free within 30 minutes” – a move that highlights the service’s convenience and accessibility.

But how did Grab move so quickly? One approach Lai shared was to throw out the rulebook – quarterly planning, processes, and timelines – and focus on listening to what the customers needed and innovate based on that.

How to build the right things and escape incremental traps

Photo credit: Cookpad

“I have iterated many times on this product, but why are we still not moving the needle?” This is a question that product managers are probably no stranger to.

But Dilla Anindita Purnawan, lead product manager at Cookpad, said that it’s actually more important to ask, “Have we even built the right things?”

In this session, Purnawan shared a lot of great insights into product management, one of them being product discovery through macro discovery approaches such as in-depth user interviews and setting desired outcomes.

She also spoke about micro discovery tools like the “opportunity solution tree” and the cadence of internal product demos. These macro and micro discoveries, she said, should be applied iteratively to ensure that product teams are continuously improving.

Building a hardware startup 101

Photo credit: Eric Migicovsky

In 2012, Y Combinator partner Eric Migicovsky, started a smartwatch business before smartwatches were even popular. Called Pebble, the watches would display emails, texts, the time, weather, and more on the screen. Migicovsky sold over 2 million units of Pebble, and in 2016, Fitbit acquired it.

He talked about his experience of building a hardware startup from the ground up – from 3D printing the first version of Pebble, launching on Kickstarter, to moving his team to Shenzhen to start a supply chain.

The lessons he learned? Launch early with a minimum viable product using off the shelf hardware, spend time keeping your community (aka customers) super engaged, and know that the most valuable feedback is from paying customers.

Besides the great insights we heard from business leaders during the conference, we also held roundtable networking sessions where product thinkers met people with the same goal to learn, share, and grow their network. We even had a Google Cloud Hero hands-on challenge where attendees got to learn and gain skills using the game functionality on Qwiklabs.

Here’s a shout-out once again to the top three winners of the Google Cloud Hero challenge. Great job, Rio Wisnu Aji, Reza Juliandri, and Dita Farastika!

Join us at our biggest conference of the year

We’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who helped and contributed to making this conference a huge success! It was our first time holding PDC virtually, but our attendees sure didn’t disappoint. Everyone was as excited as we were, posting introductions, updates, and polls to keep conversations going on our activity page. We’ll be back again – bigger and better – next year for sure.

Now, we’re setting our sights on our Tech in Asia Conference happening this October. The theme this year is “Winning in the post-Covid-19 economy,” so get ready to learn about the steps to recovery and how the disruption caused by the pandemic offers a unique opportunity to reinvent your growth.

Be sure to keep a lookout for all our events. You can do so when you sign up for our newsletter.