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by Tahmida, Swamy, Mary and Catherine
The Idea
As a newly-formed “specialist network” for Product Management folks in healthtech, we wanted to run an event for our community. One of One HealthTech’s focus-areas for this year is “accessibility, inclusion, and co-production in design”. We wanted to do something aligned with this theme, but we aren’t designers! We hypothesised that the aspect where product managers could have the biggest impact is by making our user research, which feeds into the design process, more inclusive. And so the idea for the event was born!
The Planning
We decided to run an online workshop, with the goal of building a sense of community by working on something together. We also wanted to make it fun!
We worked through various iterations of plans and proposals, with some being quite ambitious, but in the end we took a “product” approach and decided to try out a single workshop and see how it went. An MVP, if you like.
We split the workshop into two sections: first, Catherine led a session on identifying the missing voices. Mary then followed up with a session on engaging inclusively. In each session, we presented a “how to” guide at the start and then challenged participants to complete a series of tasks, in teams, to practice applying these techniques to an example scenario.
The Day
When the day of the workshop finally arrived, all our planning paid off (the good thing about organising an event with a bunch of PMs is that we do love to be prepared!). Everything went to plan, and we even stuck to time!
We had 15 super-engaged participants who all really got stuck into the tasks in the breakout rooms and had some brilliant discussions picking apart the tasks and sharing insights. Keen to not be the only voices in the room, Mary and Catherine left the breakout rooms soon after explaining the tasks. Participants naturally self-organised and figured things out themselves (with the help of facilitators Swamy, Tahmida and Kevin) - that approach really seemed to work! Having great participants also helped of course 😉
The Next Steps
We got great feedback since the workshop, which we hope to learn from going forward. People appreciated the hands-on task and a chance to hear ideas they could apply in their own work. We also got a fab suggestion to make the resources and links available in a library, which we’ll share in the community and update as we go along
We are now planning our next community-building activities and are excited about trying out some new ideas. We look forward to sharing them with you soon! In the meantime, why not join us in our Slack channel (#oht-sn-productmanagers) within the One HealthTech workspace. See you there!
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