So long, and thanks for all the fish.
They say that all good things must come to an end. Today we’re announcing that after six wonderful years, Jam is closing down.
To this day, we have thoroughly enjoyed everything we’ve done together. Our events were fun, different, and a pleasure to organise and run. You brought them to life and we couldn't be more grateful for all the great moments we enjoyed in your company.
In this announcement, we’d like to share the rationale behind this decision.
2020 has had a disastrous impact on society and the economy as a whole. From a business standpoint, companies operating in the events industry have been hit particularly hard.
Our revenues crashed, and we lost a considerable amount of money in deposits paid to venues – including Hawker House, who we were saddened to hear, are also in the process of closing down.
We successfully ran several online events throughout the year, but it quickly became clear to us that it was going to be impossible to recreate the experiences we'd created in the past, online.
But we didn't throw in the towel. At the end of the year, we attempted a pivot, and launched – Jam Club – an online community for our most committed members.
Our vision was to build a thriving space for growth-minded product leaders, offering intimate virtual workshops every month.
Pivoting from an in-person events company to an online community has proven significantly harder than we’d originally hoped, and the losses we accumulated in 2020 have proven too significant for us to overcome. And so now we’d rather stop here, celebrate the journey, and say a proper goodbye.
What now?
We’ll keep Jam Club open for the next six months. We won’t be moderating it or running any workshops, but you'll be able to access all workshop recordings, discussions, and member profiles. We hope you’ll be able to use it to reconnect with friends made at past events.
To claim your free invite just drop us a note at hello@makingjam.io.
You can also find all past talk videos on our YouTube channel.
Thank you
A huge thank you to our amazing team of staff and volunteers; Marta, Sunil, Jessie, Maria, Francesca, Stephen, Joan, Monica, Ecem, Steve, David, Michael, Mahtab, Eva, Gizem, Antoine, Jeff and all those that helped run our events every year. We’re deeply grateful for the friendship, shared memories, and support you’ve shown us over the years. We couldn’t have achieved everything we did without you.
Thank you to Doug and Chris at Intelligent People. You supported us from day one, and have always been a pleasure to work with.
Thank you to all our speakers and workshop instructors for all the brilliant content you’ve delivered over the years.
And thank you, for the good times we created together.
Seb & Mathilde
About
Blog
Hacking Your Product Leader Career
Gibson will help you learn from his successes and failures, and take your career wherever you want it to be.
Summary
Technology has evolved so quickly, that in order to be a successful product leader, you need to learn and grow even faster. What are the skills required to be a successful product leader and how do you accelerate learning? In this workshop, Gibson ('Gib') will help you learn from his successes and failures running large PM, data, design and technology teams at Electronic Arts, The Learning Company, Mattel, Netflix, and Chegg to take your career wherever you want it to be.
Gib will drill down into a few critical skill areas presenting tools, models and templates that you will apply to yourself and your own products and companies. These include:
- How to position and brand both your product and yourself
- How to develop cogent product strategy, metrics and tactics
- How to make great decisions about people, product and the business
There will be a printed workbook that includes all of the day’s materials, exercises, plus the many articles Gib has written about product leadership.
Who it's for
The workshop is for product leaders who focus on product management, project management, design, data or technology. For many of the exercises, Gib will break participants into groups with similar function, skills and stage of career, to help you connect with peers with similar issues and challenges. There will be a variety of product leaders – from startups to large companies – from both consumer and enterprise technology companies.
Key takeaways
In this workshop, Gib will share:
How to take a highly experimental, hypothesis-driven approach to your career
The technical and leadership skills needed for a successful product career
How to assess and develop your unique "superpowers"
How to constantly build and evolve a "personal board of directors" in order to accelerate learning
Timing & schedule
__Intro to Career Hacking__ - The technical and functional leadership skills required of product leaders - How a highly strategic, experimental approach to careers accelerates learning, and how a “personal board of directors” helps jump-start and extend your career. - Discussion/exercises using shared Google slides/handouts
__In-depth Skill Development__ - Discover how exceptional teamwork between marketing and product creates a hard-to-copy, strategic advantage. - Learn two positioning and branding models and how Netflix applied these models to build a brand and product that more than 130 million members love today - Apply these models to your own product/brand.
__Product strategy, metrics and tactics__ - Gib will share three product strategy models: DHM, GLEe, and GEM. - You'll see how these models applied to the growth of Netflix then apply them to your own product/business - This is a case-based approach from Netflix, highlighting key marketing, research, data, design, business and technology issues
__Branding Yourself__ - Gib will share how he combined introspection of his product leader skills and stages, with the positioning/branding models to position and brand himself - You will apply the models to yourself and share your work with others for feedback
__Bringing it all together__ - Chegg: Wicked Hard Decisions: Chegg is Gib's latest startup: the textbook rental company that he helped take public in 2014, now worth $3.5bn. - We'll see how Chegg applied the tools from today to help product leaders make great decisions. - There are four "what would you do" case studies that reinforce how to make great decisions about people, product and the business.
__Conclusions and Reflections__ - Write a letter to yourself, outlining changes you'd like to make in the next three months, based on today's discussion.
Requirements
None – we'll just need you to submit your LinkedIn profile link in advance so Gib can learn more about you and your career (we'll send an email in due course).
About the instructor
Gibson was VP of Product at Netflix starting in 2005, then in 2010, he became the Chief Product Officer of Chegg, a textbook rental company that went public in 2014. Today, he’s an adviser for multiple consumer tech companies, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford.