Day two of Pendomonium started with crispy weather and an incredible keynote presentation from Katie DeGraaf, Senior Vice President of Product and Design at General Motors. In her session, she walked attendees through the landscape of product development, particularly in industries that are transitioning to embrace modern product practices.
Product development is expanding beyond traditional boundaries
DeGraaf emphasized the importance of adapting product development practices to meet the challenges of industries where hardware and software integration is becoming increasingly critical. Key takeaways from her session include:
- The future is up and out: Product development is expanding beyond traditional boundaries.
- Understand the customer: Deep customer insight remains crucial.
- Create lovable products: Focus on developing hardware and software that customers truly appreciate.
- Practice continuous iteration: Keep refining the intersection of hardware, software, and data to build better products.
And DeGraaf’s keynote is just the start of day two. The theme of magical intersections continued, with even more sessions from Pendo users and experts. Here are a few highlights:
Thank your internal PM
Andrei Zimin, Senior Product Manager at Asana, opened The Lawn stage with a session about how internal product managers (PMs) are our organizations’ unsung heroes. While product managers are not new, the focus and role of the internal PM is something we cannot overlook. They’re the voice of our users and own our internal roadmaps by understanding pain points and converting them into action.
Zimin cautioned PMs not to fall into what he calls the “program management trap,” where PMs try to tackle all non-engineering work, which takes their focus away from being the voice of the customer.
Be entertaining and authentic
Zan Gilani, Staff Product Manager at Duolingo (the internet’s favorite owl), also took the #mtpcon stage to share how Doulingo uses AI to create conversational language learning experiences for their users. They recently launched a video feature in-app to help enhance learning, following four key principles:
- Make it authentic
- Make it entertaining
- Don’t break the metaphor
- Make it stress-free
The internet loves to talk about Duolingo, and now we know why!
Empower your employees
Takaharu Nakanishi, Manager at KDDI Corporation, made Pendomonium 2024 his first visit to the United States to grace our stages. Headquartered in Tokyo, KDDI is a large telecommunications provider that operates in 62 cities across 100 locations. As they continue to develop their digital strategy, KDDI has leaned on Pendo to help them improve their in-store experiences by empowering their employees across 2,000 stores.
KDDI used Pendo Analytics and In-app Guides to understand in-store pain points and alleviate the strain on support services. They’ll continue working with Pendo to improve their in-store experiences and let data guide development. This ultimately made their customers happier and increased employee productivity. Win-win!
Around noon, sessions broke for lunch, roundtable discussions, speed networking, and a meet-and-greet with book signings before heading into the first afternoon keynote. Many attendees also took this opportunity to visit the House of Pank for some pre-session ✨glitter✨.
Sports, Wordle, and analytics awesomeness
Our afternoon started with a double header keynote featuring Hunter Calvert, Director of Analytics for Games at The New York Times, and Jessica Gelman, CEO of Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR). With extensive analytics experience, both talked about the challenges and possibilities for creating better user experiences and using analytics.
On buying the internet’s darling
Who remembers the viral spread of Wordle in late 2021? ✋We do! After being acquired by The New York Times (NYT) in 2022, the digital game became even more popular and garnered 3.4 billion players in 2023 alone.
In Calvert’s session, we got a peek into the NYT’s strategy and growth strategy after they bought Wordle, like metrics for success—aka app downloads and retention. They realized that users who played 2+ games a week had stronger retention. (By the way – if you want insights like this, Pendo Analytics now includes AI-powered insights.)
His key learnings were:
- Understand your audience and think about where your users come from
- Figure out your mechanisms for growth, like retention
- Learn which behavioral data needs to be analyzed
If you’re curious about how your product metrics stack up, check out our Mind the Product interactive benchmarks tool.
Loving the unknowns of sports
“I cheat at Wordle,” Gelman admitted to laughs as she took the stage. As a self-proclaimed data nerd who has made sports her career, she talked about the descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive nature of analytics and how it relates to ticket-buying journeys. Gelman also said analytics has the power to equalize the playing field and make sports more accessible around the world.
I just want my donettes!
A bad hotel vending machine experience set the stage for Yahoo! Principal Product Manager Kameron Canbaz’s session about using Pendo to increase platform performance. We’ve all been there—many minor issues lead us to abandon an important action (like a failed vending purchase).
Canbaz talked about how Yahoo!’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) UI satisfaction scores were going down, while complaints went up. To correct the problem, they used Pendo to track event data in Data Explorer to drill into specific error issues.
“Pendo Data Explorer made it possible for us to get to work on these challenges much faster with continuous tracking and reducing the back and forth.” – Kameron Canbaz, Principal Product Manager, Yahoo!
Data is for designers too
During one of the last afternoon sessions, Caitlin Cataldo, Lead Experience Designer and Anna Boyle, Digital Product Manager from PNC, talked about merging product and design with a strong data strategy.
They encouraged teams to make sure you’re not over- or under-utilizing or collecting data. The good news? Collecting data is easy with Pendo. The hard part for PNC was learning how to empower cross-functional teams to use the data. Boyle encouraged product designers to lean on data, saying, “Data has a lot of power in the conversation of design, and our Pendo data positions design as a more active decision maker.”
Making impossible goals possible
One of Pendo’s Lead Product Managers, Tiffany Kitchen, discussed the need for a centralized, shared understanding of product and user data in her afternoon session. Even when product teams don’t hit their goals, it’s important to step back, reflect on lessons learned, iterate, and persevere.
“One thing remains true—it’s about an entire team with diverse perspectives and skills working together to break barriers and achieve seemingly impossible goals.” -Tiffany Kitchen, Pendo Lead Product Manager
Make your boulder roll
We wrapped up the day with a laughter-filled keynote from Dan Heath, a best-selling author, speaker, and fellow at Duke Universtiy’s CASE center. Dan is co-author of the long-running business bestsellers Made to Stick, Switch, Decisive, and The Power of Moments. While his new book, Reset, comes out in January 2025, Heath previewed some of its content with the audience.
His talk focused on how to change things that aren’t work and how to tackle obstacles, no matter how big or small. The metaphor he used during his session was the blockers or boulders we find in our paths. It might be in our path for a reason, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to move it if we redeploy our resources effectively. Heath said that shifts happen when you change the system itself, not trying to change what’s in front of you.
In true Pendo fashion, we ended Pendomonium with a bang: Pendopalooza, featuring Rev Run, Ellie Sax, and a lot of dancing.
Pendomonium is the product festival of the year. We are so grateful to all of our speakers and incredible attendees. We can’t wait to see you all next year at Pendomonium 2025!
