Opticon: Through the eyes of a Product Strategist
true’s product strategist, Amy, experiences her first Opticon. She shares the ideas that are shaping Optimizely’s digital experience.
Opticon '25
I recently attended Opticon, Optimizely’s annual conference that showcases how technology (in particular Optimizely’s Opal), is reshaping how businesses think about growth, creativity, and customer experience.
Here’s what I took away — and why it matters if you’re shaping your product strategy today.
The power of Optimizely’s Opal
A standout moment was the introduction and deep dive into Opal, an agent orchestration platform for marketing teams, purpose-built to solve marketers’ daily problems. Opal understands the context of your brand, connects to your CMS and can help teams with real action, such as scanning the site for outdated content or optimising landing pages.
Bringing together data, content, and experimentation into a single environment, Opal allows teams to identify optimisation opportunities faster and takes out the guesswork. This means more time can be spent focused on your product strategy and acting on insights that actually move metrics towards your goals.
The real power of Opal lies in enabling faster, smarter, and more confident decision-making.
Importance of humans in the AI creative process
A clear message that came through in a number of talks at Opticon this year was that teams using AI in creative ideation are coming up with fewer bad ideas – but also fewer great ones. This concept arises from the idea of humans' satisficing, where we settle for a good idea rather than striving to find the best one. With AI generating quick ideas at our fingertips, teams are falling into the pattern of accepting the first good idea they come across rather than pushing boundaries to ideate and raise the bar.
In product strategy, there’s an important balance to strike - AI should stimulate human creativity, not take its place. The strongest results come when teams use AI to move faster and explore more possibilities, while still relying on intuition, imagination and experience to deliver truly best-in-class ideas.
How to create successful personalisation experiences
If every personalisation you create has a high success rate, then your personalisations aren’t bold enough. When it comes to personalisation, while the work you do should be measured and informed, to see real value, you need to take risks, and learn from the failures.
A successful approach starts by mapping out the customer journeys and defining where those personalisation opportunities are, based on where the user is in that journey. This will help the experience feel relevant and supportive, rather than random or forced.
When it comes to your product strategy, personalisation is not a one-off initiative; it’s a total shift in mindset. It’s about testing, learning, and iterating in ways that drive meaningful connections with customers, even if that means some of those experiments fail along the way.
Developing outcome-aligned roadmaps
A key shift in strategic focus that was outlined amongst speakers at Opticon was that roadmaps are shifting from maximum feature delivery roadmaps to outcome-aligned roadmaps, with ROI at every step.
Stakeholders today expect more visibility into what’s being built, why it’s being built, and what impact customers and the business are going to see. Success should not be quantified by the number of features that you are delivering, but by the value of those features and their short, medium, and long-term impact.
When you build a roadmap that aligns to measurable outcomes, it becomes more than just a delivery plan; it becomes a strategic tool to drive focus and accountability. This approach keeps the overarching objectives in sight at all times and navigates change with clarity so every feature contributes meaningfully to business and user value.
If you’d like to find out more about how true can support with your product strategy, drop us a line info@truedigital.co.uk
