​Laura is the ex-General Manager of Global Product Marketing at Xero, co-founder of Product Women Sydney as well as a Product Mentor and Leadership Coach. Laura believes that amazing things happen when you align different types of people to a common purpose. She wants to live in a world where vulnerability is celebrated and is passionate about building cultures and environments that encourage everybody to bring their whole-selves to the table.

Laura is one of the speakers at Product Lab 2019 – here we get to know Laura a bit better in the lead-up to Product Lab being held on 12th September:

Parity Consulting: What made you realise all teams need to work together to achieve the best customer experience?

Laura Cardinal: I’m pretty sure there wasn’t just one big a-ha moment that led to a revelation here – but when I look back on past product releases over the years, those that truly delighted customers all had one thing in common – they were realised through collaboration with multiple functions and teams across the entire business.

A few years ago, I attended a dinner with key Xero customers and I can still recall the look of surprise on one particular customers face when they found out a feature that they had been desperate for had existed in the product for several months already. Launching a product or feature smoothly to customers requires much more than simply building it and hoping that they will discover it on their own. The product team in this example could have worked much more closely with marketing or sales to ensure that the knowledge of this new feature reached the right customers and it could be adopted as per their expectations.

Parity Consulting: As a customer yourself, is it noticeable when a company creates a product but does not align their teams? If so, what stands out for you?

Laura Cardinal: When teams aren’t aligned it can become visible to the customer through a disjointed customer experience. A product landing page might promise something completely different to what the product delivers, or it could be something subtle like a lack of consistency in terminology or language throughout an experience which can become confusing.

Parity Consulting: What is the biggest challenge when teams don’t work together?

Laura Cardinal: As a product manager, your key role is to ensure the company you are working for gets the best possible return on their investment. Decisions and activities that impact success rely heavily on input and initiatives from experts across sales, marketing, research, design, legal and engineering (just to name a few).

“When teams don’t collaborate and share expertise or insights, the customer experience risks being designed from a biased or limited perspective and opportunities may be missed.”

 For further information about our Parity Plus events, please contact us on +61 2 8068 2016 (Sydney), +61 3 9016 8606 (Melbourne) or events@parityconsulting.com.au.  Alternatively, if you are interested in participating as a speaker for our future events, please feel free to drop us a line – we’d love to hear from you!