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
Product Leaders Weekend 2019
Themes
This year, candour matters more than ever. We'll open up honest conversations about the themes that matter to you.
Building resilience
In times of extreme uncertainty, resilience is a superpower. Let's explore the ways in which we can bounce back from adversity, turn hardships into lessons, and thrive in a fragile world.
Building stronger teams
Your product is only as strong as the team behind it. Whether you're learning the ropes as a first-time manager or leading a large team already, you know that enabling people to do their best work is critical. From making the right hires to creating a strong culture, you have to wear many hats. Let's explore the practices, mindsets and processes that will make your product team stronger.
Growing in confidence
Talking about tools and processes is easy. What about the 'hard stuff'? The soft skills, struggles and doubts that often come with a leadership position? How do you deal with uncertainty? Manage yourself to better lead others? How do you stay sane in the face of pressure and deadlines? Let's lift the curtain on what product leaders think, but never say out loud, discuss shared challenges and come up with collective solutions.
The line-up
Tim Herbig
Product Management Coach, Herbig.co
Tim is an experienced Product Management Coach and Author, who has been working with partial or fully remote teams for over four years. He doesn‘t consider remote collaboration to be just a necessity, but an opportunity to bring out the best in product teams.
Jane Honey
Product Director, Intercom
Jane is Head of Product, Design and Research and and co-site lead at Intercom London. She has nearly 20 years of product management experience and a proven track record of launching and developing commercially successful, innovative customer experiences across multiple industries. Career highlights so far have included stints at Reuters, Channel 4, UKTV, Tesco, Moonpig and Canon, as well as her most recent experience leading a large cross-discipline team including product, design and research at Intercom.
Tess Cooper
Founder, Collaborative Future
With nearly 10 years experience of leading and developing product teams across FutureLearn, The Guardian and Comic Relief, Tess is adept at understanding people and team dynamics. This, alongside her passion for diversity & inclusion issues, lead her to move from product management to becoming Director of People and Culture in her most recent role. She has recently left FutureLearn to start Collaborative Future and help a wider range of companies and non-profit communities to build inclusive teams and organisations where individuals are empowered to be the best they can be.
Antoine Sakho
Head of Product, busuu
On a mission to break down language barriers, Antoine is Head of Product at busuu, an app used by over 80 million humans around the world to learn new languages. Antoine started as sole product manager at busuu in 2014 and was quickly promoted to build and lead a team of exceptional PMs and designers. Antoine dived into product as he co-founded France's first mobile payment startup, Skimm, in 2012. After a failure rich in learnings, he leveraged his experience to help fledging startups build their products, most notably Voodoo.io, the world's #3 app publisher, which recently raised $200M from Goldman Sachs. A polyglot himself, Antoine likes to eat his own dog food (or drink his own Champagne) and just passed his A2 Goethe Institute certificate.
Aurelie de Sainte Preuve
Product Manager, Facebook
Aurelie has over ten years of product management experience focusing on revenue growth and onboarding for companies such as Spotify, Viadeo and Figaro Classifieds. As Chief Product Officer at Seenit, a platform enabling brands to create community-driven video content, she has grown the product team to 12 people and increased adoption of the platform by 30% in the past 2 years. Building upon her experience bringing the company to product-market fit, at JAM Weekend 2019 Aurelie shared genuine lessons and stories on how to scale your product organisation while staying sane along the way. Aurelie grew up in China, Shanghai and Beijing and speaks mandarin, not as well as she used up, but if you want to learn a thing or two, she will be happy to share her experience!
Kevin Shanahan
Co-Founder & CEO, Paired
Kevin is the Co-Founder & CEO at Paired, an app focused on making couple relationships happier and healthier.
When he spoke at the JAM Weekend he was the Head of Product at Memrise, a language learning app used by half a million people every day and winner of the 2017 Google Play App of the Year award. Kevin lead the product organisation at Memrise, which includes hiring and developing the team of PMs and supporting the squads to execute effectively.
Prior to joining Memrise, Kevin was Head of Growth at Peak, the top-grossing brain training app, until their successful exit to Hachette Livre in 2016. In an earlier life he worked at Bain & Company, a strategy consulting firm, working on projects across the construction, telecoms, and restaurant industries.
Koin Beyer
Director of Product, Freeletics
Konradin joined Freeletics as employee #5 in early 2014. The first product person at the company, he built the product and design teams from scratch, and helped scale the company to 150 employees and a successful exit.
He is currently following every Gen-Y cliche— traveling around the world, with the goal to eventually start his own company.
Ellen MacKay
Product Manager, Monzo
Ellen is a Senior Product Manager at Monzo, the bank with an ambitious goal of making money work for everyone. Founded in 2015, Monzo has amassed a cult-like following, as well as many industry accolades. Most recently in October 2018, Monzo topped Which? consumer survey as Britain's best-rated lender. Before she joined Monzo's lending team, Ellen was Head of Product in the competitive edtech sector. At Lingvist, she saw the app's user base grow from a few hundred to over 2 million, and scaled its product team to meet new challenges along the way. Coming from a lean startup with 50 employees, she fully expected to be faced with slower processes due to the 600+ head count and financial compliance demands at Monzo. To her surprise, she found the product development cycle to be 10x faster. At JAM Weekend 2019 Ellen shared the practical lessons of working with speed as a habit, and how to keep product momentum as your team and organisation grows.
Nikhil Tibrewal
Engineer, Google
When he spoke at the JAM Weekend 2019 Nikhil was a Product Manager at Spotify, a digital music, podcast, and video streaming service that gives users access to millions of songs and other content from artists all over the world. Nikhil first joined Spotify as a Data Engineer in the music discovery and personalization space, working on products such as the Home Personalization experience, Discovery Weekly and Release Radar. After 3.5 years in this role, he transitioned into Product Management to help build out Spotify's monetization infrastructure. A day in his role involves working with peers across all of Spotify's departments, including engineering, design, business, sales, and more. Nikhil is based in Spotify's New York City office, and has seen the company go through immense growth and success. He will share some of the ways that Product Managers at Spotify continually make tough decisions.Nikhil is now an engineer at YoutTube.