Bear in mind: A product learning journey with Product Dojo

In December this year, I took some time away from sprints to join a facilitated Product Dojo course to loosen up my mind, learn and ultimately to make better products for our customers ahead of 2022.

Initially, I was excited about meeting new networks of product techies and gathering some new frameworks and tools for strategy, customer discovery, ideation, prototyping and build on digital products.

I came away with much more than this. It was a surprisingly fun and very educational week in the dojo.

We killed ideas in a way that I would never have done at work. Played new roles in scrum to run customer discovery surveys, design thinking and prototype our ideas, which gave me great perspective outside of the usual Product Owner approach. It also taught me not to be a perfectionist, there were no consequences if we started again or iterated in a different direction. We had space to learn and fail, test and iterate.

Our group's product idea and prototype pitch "Bear in Mind", a widget to give warnings and transparency feedback on users shopping online, presenting the user with a happy or sad polar bear, 'on thin ice' or smiling, was then presented to Ecosia.

The process and pitch was very rewarding and gave us all a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps we will even continue this prototype now that it has been received well and accepted for further development by their judge. Certainly, it was a great group of people to work with.

If you get a chance, I would recommend taking yourself out of your own product to try this course https://podojo.com/events/product-dojo-online-oct-2021/