Michelle Laska

Director of Product
Erblotse

Speaker Name

Ich liebe es Probleme für Kunden zu lösen und Produkte mit echtem Mehrwert zu bauen.
Zur Zeit brenne ich dafür das Thema Erbschaften durch Digitalisierung einfacher und transparenter zu machen.
Davor war ich als Product Lead im B2C und B2B Bereich in der Games, Ad-Tech und Reisebranche tätig.

What drives you in your job?

I love solving problems and making hard things easy. Products shouldn't make you struggle and think but be easy to use. And most of all, they should make our lives easier by solving a real need. That's the reason why I love working in the product space - we all have it in our own hands to make the world a tiny bit better.

What 3 skills/behaviors are crucial to doing your job really well?

1. Staying curious: Only if you want to learn new things, you'll be able to understand what people might need and want.
2. A general interest in humans: From customers to stakeholders, developers and designers - when it comes to building a product you'll need to interact with a lot of different people. This will require good listening and communication skills to form a successful team and to grow a happy user base.
3. Data for breakfast - I love to start the day with numbers and user recordings to understand what works and what doesn't - because data-driven decisions are the easiest decisions to make.

Was heißt „Führung“ in agilen Teams für dich?

From the product managment perspective it means to have a clear vision for the product that the teams can follow. It needs to be concrete enough to align the company but loose and exciting enough for teams to take action in coming up with their own ways of achieving success. I'm a big fan of maximizing focus (rather do only one thing really good instead of multiple ones poorly) as it fosters creativity. Beautiful things happen when everyone in a team understands the "Why" but this requires room for experimentation and failure in order to succeed in the long run.

What is the most important insight that the participants will take away from your talk?

Building a successful digital product nowadays means generating revenues. This sounds simple thus it's fascinating how often we forget about it when we build "the next cool thing". Software development is still seen as a mere cost saver in a lot of companies. But why should we continue to save cents when we could earn euros instead?