Products Kaizen is the EBU hub for the roles of Product Owners and Product Managers who are working on audience facing digital media products for public service media companies.
Broadcasters deliver their content in digital products: We build websites as well as apps for mobile, TV, connected cars and smart speakers. Crafting these products is cross-diciplinary work where content, technology, design and an understanding of end-user needs go into digital media products for our audience.
The aim of this group is to help our participants improve their skills on how product work is done. This we will do by looking at why the work is done, then how it's done and lastly what gets built.
Our aim is to improve the knowledge of the people who build products, so they in their turn can enchance the products they build.
We will sometimes touch on product strategy, but the main focus is on the work that happens on the tactical and operational levels of product work – i.e in the trenches.
Skills, concepts and methods we look at will include feature prioritization and slicing, opportunity selection, product shaping discovery and vision, solution validation hypotheses testing, user journeys, story mapping and other useful things.
We seek to inspire each other, sharing and learnings from both our failures and triumphs.
Our work happens on three levels
Products Kaizen Lean Coffee: Monthly self-organized lean coffee-style meetings
Products Kaizen Deep-Dive: Quarterly products deep-dive by one or two members
Products Kaizen Gathering: Yearly in-person meeting for talks, workshops and networking
A note on the name
Kaizen is the term for the approach of creating continuous improvement based on the idea that small, ongoing positive changes can reap significant improvements. We choose the name because the Kaizen method simply inspires us. It can also serve as a cue-word for those interested in product work who will recognize it and get interested in joining our group.
The Japanese signs for "Kai" (change) and "Zen" (good).
Collaborative Developments
An open toolbox for transcribing and translating audio, audiovisual and text content. Removes the complexity of integrating with different vendors and tools by providing a single, unified API, as well as a web-based tool to easily transcribe, translate and transform content.
Additionally, developing tools to harness realtime transcription and simultaneous translation for online and broadcast captioning and subtitling.
The personalization and recommendation ecosystem built by broadcasters for broadcasters, enabling Members to provide a personalized cross-device experience to the end-user. Also including discussions on data science, analytics, algorithms and user profiling.
The News Pilot provides journalists with real-time monitoring of the news. Those are rich articles containing images, audios and videos, automatically translated into English using EuroVox.
This hub also powers a new digital News Exchange between 13 Members called A European Perspective.