Day two of Pendomonium kicked off with sunny weather and a great keynote presentation from Katie DeGraaf, Senior Vice President of Product and Design at General Motors. In his session, he guides participants through the product development landscape, particularly in industries that are transitioning to adopting modern product practices.
Product development is expanding beyond traditional boundaries
DeGraaf emphasized the importance of adapting product development practices to meet the challenges of an industry where hardware and software integration is becoming increasingly important. Key takeaways from his session include:
- The future is on the rise: Product development expands beyond traditional boundaries.
- Understand customers: Deep customer insights remain important.
- Create attractive products: Focus on developing hardware and software that customers truly value.
- Practice continuous iteration: Continuously improve the intersection of hardware, software and data to create better products.
And DeGraaf’s keynote was just the start of day two. The theme of magical intersections continues, with more sessions from Pendo users and experts. Here are some important things:
Thank your internal PM
Andrei Zimin, Senior Product Manager at Asana, opened The Lawn stage with a session on how our internal product managers (PMs) an unsung hero for the organization. While product managers are not new, the focus and role of an internal PM is something we cannot ignore. They are the voice of our users and own our internal roadmap by understanding problems and turning them into action.
Zimin warns PMs against falling into what he calls the “program management trap,” where PMs try to handle all non-engineering work, which takes their focus away from giving voice to customers.
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 a conversational language learning experience for its users. They recently launched an in-app video feature to help enhance learning, following four key principles:
- Make it authentic
- Make it entertaining
- Don’t destroy the metaphor
- Make it stress free
The internet loves talking 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 stage. Headquartered in Tokyo, KDDI is a major telecommunications provider operating in 62 cities at 100 locations. As they continue to develop their digital strategy, KDDI is looking to Pendo to help them improve their in-store experience with empower its employees in 2,000 stores.
KDDI member Pendo Analysis And In-App Guide to understand in-store issues and reduce the burden on support services. They will continue to work with Pendo to improve the in-store experience and let data guide development. This ultimately makes their customers happier And increase employee productivity. Win-win!
Around noon, the session breaks for lunch, round table discussions, speed networking, and a meet and greet with a book signing before heading to the first afternoon keynote. Many attendees also took the opportunity to visit House of Pank for some pre-session ✨glitter✨.
The power of sports, Wordle and analytics
Our afternoon kicked off with a double header keynote featuring Hunter Calvert, Director of Analytics for Games at New York Timesand Jessica Gelman, CEO of Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR). With extensive analytics experience, the two talk about the challenges and possibilities of creating better user experiences and using analytics.
About buying internet darling
Who remembers the spread of the virus words at the end of 2021? ✋Yes! After being acquired by The New York Times (NYT) in 2022, digital gaming became even more popular and amassing 3.4 billion players in 2023 alone.
In Calvert’s session, we took a peek at NYT’s strategy and growth strategy after they purchased Wordle, such as success metrics—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 them AI-powered insights.)
The main learnings are:
- Understand your audience and think about where your users come from
- Figure out your growth mechanisms, such as retention
- Learn which behavioral data needs to be analyzed
If you’re curious about how your product metrics stack up, check out our Think Product interactive benchmarking tool.
Benchmark your product performance
Use this tool
Loves the unknown in sports
“I cheated at Wordle,” Gelman admitted laughing as he took the stage. As a self-proclaimed data nerd who has made sports his career, he talks about the descriptive, predictive and prescriptive nature of analytics and how it relates to the ticket purchasing journey. Gelman also said analytics has the power to level the playing field and make sports more accessible around the world.
I just want my donette!
A bad hotel vending machine experience led to Yahoo! Principal Product Manager Kameron Canbaz’s session on using Pendo improve platform performance. We’ve all been there—lots of small issues that make us neglect important actions (like a failed vending purchase).
Canbaz talks about how Yahoo!’s Demand Side Platform (DSP) UI satisfaction scores decreased, while complaints increased. To fix the problem, they used Pendo to track event data Data Explorer to drill down to a specific error issue.
“Pendo Data Explorer allows us to address these challenges faster with continuous tracking and reduced back-and-forth.” – Kameron Canbaz, Principal Product Manager, Yahoo!
Data is also for designers
In one of the last afternoon sessions, Caitlin Cataldo, Lead Experience Designer and Anna Boyle, Digital Product Manager from PNC, spoke about combining product and design with a strong data strategy.
They encourage teams to ensure you don’t over- or under-leverage or collect data. The good news? Collecting data is easy with Pendo. The hardest part for PNC was learning how to empower cross-functional teams use the data. Boyle encourages product designers to lean on data, saying, “Data has a lot of power in design conversations, and our Pendo data positions design as more active decision makers.”
Make impossible goals possible
One of Pendo’s Key Product Managers, Tiffany Kitchen, discussed the need for a centralized, shared understanding product and user data in the afternoon session. Even when product teams don’t achieve their goals, it’s important to take a step back, reflect on learnings, iterate, and persevere.
“One thing remains true—it’s about entire teams with diverse perspectives and skills working together to break down barriers and achieve seemingly impossible goals.” -Tiffany Kitchen, Pendo Principal Product Manager
Make your rocks roll
We closed the day with a A laugh-filled keynote from Dan Heatha best-selling author, speaker, and fellow at Duke University’s CASE center. And is one of the authors of the long-running business bestseller Made to Stick, Divert, DeterminantAnd The Power of Moments. Meanwhile, his new book, Resetcoming out in January 2025, Heath previewed some of its content to audiences.
His talks focused on how to change things that aren’t working and how to overcome obstacles, no matter how big or small. The metaphor he used during his session was the obstacles or boulders we find in our path. This may be happening for a reason, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to move it if we redeploy our resources effectively. Heath says that shifts happen when you change the system itself, rather than trying to change what’s in front of you.
In true Pendo style, we ended Pendomonium with a bang: Pendopalooza, featuring Rev Run, Ellie Sax, and lots of dancing.
Pendomonium is the product festival of the year. We are very grateful to all the wonderful speakers and participants. We can’t wait to see you all next year at Pendomonium 2025!
Gaming Hub
A gaming hub can refer to a central platform or space dedicated to gaming, where players can access games, interact with other gamers, and enjoy related content.