 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining this webinar. I'm Phil. I'm one of the heads of product at Holland and Barrett and focusing on digital and health well-being experiences. But I've been in product management since 2014 in various guises, some of them more agile than others and working in retail financial services, travel and fashion. And I'd like to make it clear that I'm going to share some ideas today and some thoughts today, but none of this is meant to be prescriptive. Hopefully it provokes some thoughts and some ideas from yourselves. And today, I'm going to be specifically about the power of fun. So we'll go through a few ground rules because what's more fun than ground rules? We'll go through why? Why is the power of fun so important to me? And why do I think it's so important as a product manager? And then some tips and tricks that you can try yourselves with your teams. So I think one of the first things I just wanted to say was for this talk, as you'll see as I go through, I've enlisted some help from some people who aren't product managers. And so you might be thinking, is this a product talk per se? And yes, you don't have to be a product manager to understand the power of fun. It definitely transcends product. It definitely transcends digital. But one of the reasons that I think this is an important product topic is as product managers, we're key influential roles within the team, driving the culture, driving the ways of working, influencing the tone, the tone of the meetings, the tone of the ceremonies, we're the conductor, the cheerleader, the coach, the leader, the teammate. And therefore I personally feel that the power of fun is a really important topic for product managers. It's something that's really important for us to think about and something for us to think about with our teams. So nothing says fun like ground rules. So I do want you to bear in mind some of these four important ground rules for fun. Number one, you need to be authentic. This means you shouldn't try and be a version of fun itself that isn't authentically you. Naturally, I think a lot of our definitions of fun is set by kids TV. We think it's colorful slides and memes, guilty. But we think it's that over enthusiastic, over energetic self. Please don't feel you need to change yourself. We do serious work with serious outcomes. We don't feel you need to portray a version that undermines you, your values or your product or your outputs. Fun is a diverse thing. Every product manager should interpret it and implement it in their own unique way. A really good example of this was some of the product comms that we had when I was at Argos. Each product manager brought fun to their comms, but in their own unique way. For some people, it was just not saying dear colleagues and saying happy Friday or hey, how's it going at the start of an email? For others, it was memes. I was guilty of that. For others, it was calling out what international day of celebration it was. For the payments team, they'd put in famous quotes about money from rappers all the way through to founders of countries. For others, it was calling out interesting stats. For others, it was sending videos. Other people were showing their process from end to end. This was the prototype. This is the finished feature. There's lots of different ways. Just remember to bring your own version of fun. Personally, this quote from Thomas Jefferson, in matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock, is a key philosophy and mantra for me. I think that this version of fun has to be aligned with your principles and personality. So when I'm using memes, I feel it's a fair reflection of me, but I don't want to say to you all go out and use memes. Only go out and do that if that is authentically you. A woman at the University of Pennsylvania called Abigail A. Mangers found that authenticity decreases your stress, your anxiety and depression. It improves the pursuit of authentic goals, allowing for perseverance and increased well-being. Basically, don't lose yourself trying to be fun because that's going to be far from fun. Rule number two is to keep it balanced. Remember that this is a style and it's an approach and every good product manager knows they always need to mix up their approaches based on the audience and the context. There isn't a need for 24 seven fun. So maybe when you're in refinement talking about an important customer decision, there isn't a need for fun and liberty at that point. I speak into Pedro, who's one of our tech guru that I've worked with and doing some research for this talk. And he says something really interesting to me that he measures the maturity of a team or an individual based on how quickly they can switch from fun to serious. And the way Pedro talked about this was liking it to the kids. We both have young children and at the minute we're both having to teach our young children and play times over. Now is time for serious stuff. Now is time for homework. Now is time for dinner. And it's a really good point. An immature team or the sign of a child who hasn't learned this lesson yet is that they can't switch off fun mode. And that's a really important thing. You need to keep it balanced and you need to remember when to switch off fun and when to turn it on. Rule number three is that timing and context is everything. So this is where fun for me is a little bit like comedy. I've actually got a lesson learned that I learned the hard way in this space, which I can share with you. I was looking after financial services in a retailer. And when it was a really tough space, the content was quite dry and it was very hard to understand. There was lots of impenetrable words. And I had some great early successes by bringing some energy and fun to my business updates. I brought in videos, images, memes. And so I was carrying on in that vein and it was the week of Black Friday and I had to do a leadership team update. And I used this meme that you can see in front of you to summarize the successes we'd had because we'd seen significant growth in our core metrics. And our digital director was not pleased at all. He questioned me, do you really think we've finished? Do you think we've nailed it and there's nothing more to do? So what was an attempt from me at Fun and Levity had landed the completely wrong message in the midst of a retail peak and the context of significant business pressures and demands and stakeholders wanting this and that. I should have realized that this was a tone deaf meme. And in actual fact, it didn't do justice to the long road ahead, to the roadmap, to the strategy that I'd been curating. Actually, timing and context for fun is everything. And this leads on to rule number four, which I think is the most important rule. It can't be tone deaf. We need to be really careful in this space. Fun has to be accessible. And to be accessible, it has to be resonate with the audience. Fun is really hard to define. It's really subjective. For example, the fun that I have watching back to back football games isn't shared by my wife. And this is something we need to keep in mind. If I roll back the years to like 2010, when I was first starting work, fun at work meant going to the pub. Likewise, after the pub, we then arranged a Christmas casino. And I've got a good friend and ex-colleague, Mohammed, who I was speaking to about this. So Mohammed is a service delivery expert. And Mohammed actually made us realize that this was all our ideas of fun were in contravention to his faith and his religion. And I asked for his thoughts and retrospects and you can see them here. And what he was saying was it's really difficult for the Muslim community in the workplace, because some people are too scared to say anything and not everyone feels comfortable highlighting it. So they end up making excuses and missing out on the fun or joining in, but feeling that they're compromising themselves and their beliefs. By understanding this, by not being toned deaf with our fun, we were able to establish lots of activities that didn't evolve alcohol and gambling, like reading clubs, badminton, football. And I know teams you've gone bowling, axe throwing to art galleries. There's so many things that you can do that aren't related around alcohol and gambling. If people in your team don't find that fun. And Mohammed's example is just one watch out. Another watch out is Maya, who's a product expert I've worked with. And she drew my attention to the fact that I always use the word guys. So if there's a group of women and men, I will always say, hey guys, bye guys, great seeing you guys. And she pointed out to me that this wasn't the most inclusive term and actually was quite offensive in some ways. And it's something I'm still working on. It's something that's very deep in my lexicon. And so I'm consciously having to remind myself not to say it. But the reason I use guys is because it's more fun. It's more fun than dear colleagues. It's more fun than dear co-workers. So my attempt at fun is actually offending someone. And so this is where it's really important to just make sure it's not toned deaf. And how do these lessons apply to you as a product manager in a team in terms of the tone deafness? My big advice is get to know your team. Know what inspires them or demotivates them. Also learn about any religious or cultural barriers that there are. Learn what they're passionate about. Learn what they're not passionate about. And then apply your product schools in terms of what fun looks like. So for example, my team at booking.com. The thing that united all my engineers was Star Wars. They all love Star Wars. And sadly, I have to confess and I'm really sorry. I've only watched two films. That's about say episodes. I've only watched two films. And so I didn't know anything about Star Wars, but I knew this was a topic of fun that could bond the team. So we did a Star Wars theme retro where our critical problems went in the desktop. Our minor issues were like Tatooine and our successes came from the rich forests of Endor. Just make sure you find out what works for your team and what goes over that line. Because if you go over the line, one final warning in terms of tone deaf fun, you could end up like one of these two bosses. And I think I say it for all of us. Neither of us wants to be either of them. So we've done our admin. We've got some grand rules. And now I know you'll be asking, well, why should I care? Why would I invest in the fun? And as all good product managers, we're always asking why. And so I found a few things that I wanted to share with you as to why. And I think one of the key ones is providing some balance. We don't make good products if we all agree and nod. Emperor's new clothes, if we're all staying, yes, that's a great idea. Let's do it. We're not going to build great products. So a lot of our jobs are about disagreeing, about critiquing and about debating. We'll get designs from a designer, features showcased from engineers, research shared from UXR. And we'll be constantly reviewing, critiquing, and giving constructive feedback. And I think as a product manager, bringing fun to the group is a really good way of offsetting some of these moments. Now Naomi is an iOS ninja that I've worked with. And she actually shared with me that this was a conscious thing that she did to counteract the negative reviews that she was giving on PRs. She didn't want to be known as a picky reviewer. So she made sure she also dialed up the fun side of her work and posting silly screenshots, having fun conversations about food. So she didn't just get seen as that PR critica or picky reviewer. And similarly, I worked with Nick during my time at Argus and Sainsbury's and he's actually been getting national news attention for his fancy dress challenges that he's been doing, which I would recommend you to look up if you get a chance. He's been wearing fancy dress to work in order to promote mental health awareness and charities, but also underlying that just to bring a bit of fun to work. And one of the things that Nick said is work doesn't have to be serious and sterile. It can be fun, it can be silly, it can be warm. In other words, it can be human. Now I think this is really key in terms of the balance. We need to make sure that our work isn't just serious and sterile all the time. Now I know sterile is quite negative, but it doesn't have to be serious all the time. We do serious work, we drive serious outcomes, but a bit of fun can bring a bit of balance to that team and the dynamic. One of the other reasons why is increasing learning engagement. Now I think that's something that we'd all agree is really key for all our teams. We all want them to learn more, we all want them more engaged. And I started the power of fun from an anecdotal gut feel position of I think this is really important. And actually I was really pleasantly surprised when I started to look into it as any product manager should and found that science had my back. And a large number of scientists have found that having fun releases endorphins, dopamine, and it increases your oxygen levels and these are all good things for learning. Ultimately, people learn better when they're having feeling positive emotions. So ultimately, fun is good for your health. I mean, this is something that Mark Rober talks about in his TED Talk on the Super Mario Effect, which I definitely recommend watching. He illustrates that the power of fun is imagine learning a long list of instructions where it says go left, then right, up for two seconds, left, left for three seconds. You're instantly thinking, no, I don't want to learn that. That's way too much. It's boring. And then he likens that to completing a level on Super Mario. Well, actually, you've memorized that exact same information. But in the context of helping Mario overcome and get towards the end of his adventure, bringing fun has definitely helped. And anyone who's worked with me or gotten this far in my talk will know that I like visual comms and in particular memes. And it's not just because I like memes, even though I do, but this is my attempt to leverage the Super Mario Effect that Mark talks about. I could give this presentation with text heavy slides, but as you can see from Naomi's feedback here, she said it was nice to get some add-on reading rather than normal informative boring messages or documentation. We've consciously styled our digital comms to be as engaging as possible, and the responses have been phenomenal. We've had marketing managers telling us, I don't normally read business updates, but yours always pull me in. And we've even had one of our retail colleagues who said, I look forward to your monthly app newsletter, which would update on our roadmap features, strategy, all things app. Bringing some of fun to our comms has meant people are more engaged than ever, and people are consuming and remembering our messages. One of the other reasons the power of fun is so important is psychological safety. It's a common factor that I found in my career that the happiest teams build the best products. A scared team is very unlikely to innovate and build anything worthwhile. In order to feel happy, it's important that people feel safe. In a study, Michael Chew's found that employees are more likely to try something new if their work and environment is fun. And did you know that 80% of people think the future is a significant source of stress? 80% of people think the future is a significant source of stress, and yet as product managers, we're often spending our time thinking about that future, immersing ourselves in what are the trends, the needs, the problems, what's going to emerge, reduce, or repeat. And what I found when I was looking into this was that two people, Katerina, Georgiana, and Anthony Montgomery did a study on workplace fun, and they found organized fun could create psychological safety. And once that psychological safety was created, there was healthy, positive, and fun interact. So Faith is a conversion rate expert who recently found ways to create psychological safety. And she did that by creating some chat channels at work, specifically designed to let people talk about non-work things. And as Faith says here, she felt psychological safety came from making those safe spaces for people to have fun, be silly, and still as freely, not overly monitored, but still feel safe. So Faith is a huge asset for the power of fun that fun can create that safe space that people need in order to then succeed and be happy. One of the key principles of the Agile Manifesto has been co-location. We've always said co-located teams are more successful than disparate teams. And yet the COVID pandemic's really put that under stress. And I think what we found is actually we found ways to make our work output good. We found ways for good product outcomes without being co-located. But personally, I feel that it's the power of fun that's been put under the most pressure and stress from remote working. Those fun moments tend to be water cooler moments or around the desk moments. And you're not going to schedule in a video call for fun, or you can, but is that fun? And so one of the things for the power of fun is something that Naomi shared with me, is in particular working through a pandemic with a globally distributed team, memes and gifts on a chat have become more important than ever. Those fun elements that we have digitally help recreate the fun elements of co-location. They help make sure that we don't miss out on what Naomi calls kitchen chit chat. And I think fundamentally, we're all trying to make good stuff and more stuff and better quality stuff. They're normally the aims that we have as product teams. And the power of fun can help increase those outcomes and outputs. David Ogilvy is known as the father of advertising and he's observed that where people aren't having fun, they seldom produce good work. Similarly, Dale Carnegie, who wrote how to make friends and influence people, said people really succeed unless they're having fun in what they're doing. And this is also something that our tech guru, Pedro, has found. He's found throughout his career, the strongest teams are the ones with the strong spine of fun. So the point where it didn't even feel like they were having work because they were having so much joking with each other. And it's not just what people are saying that is important. The science also bears this out. So did you know that happy employees are 12% more productive? Did you know that 62% of people who engaged in fun had no sick days in three months versus 38% who didn't? And that 55% of staff who've taken part in a fun activity feel more creative. These are incredible stats. And actually we did an experiment within our app team by accident when I was at New Look where we did a retro where we followed the basic Mad Sad Glad approach. We got a moderate output of 18 post-it notes from the team. We gamified it the next time. We went for a Harry Potter extravaganza retro. It included the teams being sorted into houses based on their personality types, linking values to characters. In this retro we got 60 post-it notes. And it's not just about the numbers. The post-it notes themselves were more honest and really getting into the crux of the topics that they focused on. We could see a massive difference between just doing a rope retro that we know well and have done many, many times versus doing one that had a bit more spice to it and actually appealed to the team who were all Harry Potter fans. And millennials. Millennials are a big reason that we need to care about fun. 79% of millennials think that fun at work is important compared to 55% of previous generations. And within the next five years, millennials will make up 75% of the global workforce. So the majority of the global workforce that is emerging think fun at work is important to them. And I think one of the last reasons that I wanted to share as to why is just life's too short. The average British employee will work 84,365 hours in their lifetime. I know it's a really old tied cliche. That's way too much time spent being serious or bored or sad. We should have a bit of fun during those hours. So I just wanted to leave you with a few tips and tricks. My hope is that you're convinced as a product manager you need to bring fun to your teams. And so here's some tips, tricks on unlocking that power of fun. Gamify your ceremonies. I've already talked about a few options here. In addition to sales and Harry Potter, obviously I've done Game of Thrones. We've done cricket. We've done types of pizza, types of car. We've done spin the wheel for whoever's going to be running stand-up that day. There's so many ideas. There's so many resources. If you just Google fun retro ideas, you'll find millions and millions of articles. My biggest advice is don't go for the same formula each time and cater it towards your team's interests and likes. Write how people talk. This sounds really simple, but it's something I see not happening far too often. People write fancier than how they speak. How many people would say out loud, dear colleagues, start your emails, start your comms in the way that you talk to someone. Don't overcomplicate your comms with clever-sounding words. Keep it simple and write how people talk. It keeps your comms accessible, but also makes them more fun to read. Keep your comms visual. Visuals are your friend. Don't describe a feature. Show it. Attach a video, a QR code, or an image of the new thing you've launched. As you know very well by now, I'm a big fan of memes. I find they can easily help solidify a point. For example, we had a tech debt release. It had bugs and stuff, which is quite demoralizing to stakeholders who want something entertaining, but also demoralizing to the engineers who've put as much work into the bugs and stuff as the sexy features. We badged this release as our merry condo release, and we used lots of merry condo memes around spring cleaning and getting rid of things that didn't bring us joy, aka bugs. It was still a bugs and fixes release, but with a few memes, we'd captured our stakeholders' attention and put focus on the good work that our engineers had done. Bring your personality to work. Remember, the key rule of being authentic, and so I think a key tip for any product manager is to bring their personality to work. People might not like the same things as you, but they'll definitely love your positive vibes and energy. For example, one of our product managers, Keith, would always give cricket updates as part of his role hosting our showcases. And it wasn't that people suddenly started finding cricket really fun, although we wish that was true. But it became fun in and of itself. Each segue between a different speaker had a cricket score injected. People would joke about missing out on cricket scores if they couldn't attend the showcase. Create a safe space for chit chat. So we heard about this from Faith earlier, and our team struggled with it as well. Make sure you find safe spaces and places for people to have chit chat, especially if you're in a remote digital world. Consciously create this space, but also as a product manager, your job is to make sure it stays alive and doesn't just gather dust. Music is your friend and silence is not. And I think this is a really key piece for me, which is we've all been in these digital meetings now and these remote meetings where you just have an ominous silence as people leave or an ominous silence as people do sticky notes. Just playing some music from a playlist helps massively. And I've been very lucky at New Look where I had the wonderful Dan House who made a playlist for the whole company, which meant I could offset all the blame on music choices to him. But don't have awkward silences. Use music as a way to maintain energy and avoid any energy sap in silences. It's been proven that anecdotes make facts more memorable. These are a really honest, personal, but most importantly, fun way for your audience to understand your story and your message. Name things, whether it's products, services, teams, sprints or something else, the act of naming things can be quite fun. How do you choose as a team what you're going to name it? Is it favorite foods, retro TV shows, which always sparks a good Google afterwards? Find ways to have new names for things. In August, we had a credit plan microservice, CPMS and a warranty service, PCMS. They were boring names. We let the team name them when we came up with C3PO, which you see in front of you and Bobby Desler. These are very cunning pieces of psychology here as well because the team felt more ownership from naming them. And our stakeholders with the anthropomorphic names started to engage in product conversations rather than project conversations. They started to say, oh, how's Bobby Desler going to mature over time? Or, yeah, C3PO, we don't want to start him off too fast, so we're going to start him on something easy to begin with, which basically talking through the concept of MVP, but using the names to replace them. Put energy into your meeting invites. Try to make sure people are looking forward to your workshops, your updates rather than dreading them as just another meeting. This particular meme I use in a lot of ideation meeting invites. And hopefully it makes people smile, but it also starts to create that psychological safety we talked about that's really important whilst also giving you a fun grounding at the start of that meeting. Sending something really small and basic like a Monday morning message to commiserate on that Monday morning feeling versus doing the same on Friday to celebrate that Friday feeling I've used to great success. Try new things to present things. QR codes, videos, device mock-ups, hair downs, different ideation techniques. I think the definition of funds fluid, but I definitely think it's not doing the same thing over and over again. Use the resources that are out there via Google and technology to help you. And smile, smiling so underrated. There was actually a large healthcare provider that used an approach called the 10-5-way, which said that when someone got within 10 feet of another patient, they needed to make eye contact with people. When they got within five feet, they had to say hello. Using that technique in this healthcare, they had an increase in unique patient visits, a 5% increase in patients' likelihood to recommend them, and an improvement in their practice ratings. They called it social support, which was simply smiling and saying hello. It didn't just lead to happier employees, it also led to happier customers. I'd just like to say a big thank you to everyone especially Nick, Maya, Sophie, Faith, Mohamed, Pedro and Corey, who shared their own thoughts and tips on the topic. I've been really lucky to have gone through this journey with lots of awesome people and teams. Far too many to shout out. So thank you for listening. Please do share your thoughts and comments and any feedback. And if you click the link in the slides, you can follow me on various social platforms. I would love to hear from you. Stay safe and hopefully see you soon. Thank you.