Johannes Mayer

Just before the old year ended, I completed my “Organizational Leadership” specialization by Northwestern University on Coursera. I love the way how MOOCs changed how we are able to learn new skills, further increase our knowledge in such a flexible way. 💪

I recently completed the five-weeks online course “How to manage a remote team” created by GitLab Inc. on Coursera and found it excellent. I can only recommend it to all leaders who would like to learn more about remote work or reflect on their current ways of working. 💪

You can find the course here: https://lnkd.in/eJj2uqT

A couple of weeks ago, I was approached on LinkedIn if I wanted to give a talk at ProductTank Vienna. As I’m passionate about everything Product and wanting to do more public speaking anyways, this was a nice surprise and I accepted. 😊

When it came to which topic I actually would talk about, one thing came up my mind pretty quickly – I think there are not many topics which are as essential to the overall culture, motivation, buy-in and lastly, success of your company as having a purpose that people stand behind and a compelling mission that drives them, both based on a user-centric mindset. So this Thursday, I was having my talk at ProductTank titled “The importance of a compelling mission and a user-focussed strategy”.

As the session was recorded, you can watch it on YouTube in case you’re interested.

There’s a couple of things I learned from the talk yesterday:

1. I need to check my sense for timing. The talk was scheduled for about 20 mins and I took somewhat around 27-28 mins, so I’ll do test runs and watch this more closely in the future.
2. Generally being someone who doesn’t like sitting still, yesterday I realised I really like to walk around a lot also while presenting. This works perfectly fine on a stage, but can be tricky in a more “cramped” home-office setup, which led to me walking out of frame a couple of times. 😁
3. Also, as much as I love interacting with people in real life, I realised that in a remote setup I sometimes find it a bit awkward to maintain “eye-contact”, i.e. looking directly into the webcam, which could lead to people feeling I’m not addressing them directly.

Besides those topics, I’m really happy with how the talk went and I’m very much looking forward to repeating this on further occasions!