Product Camp San Francisco

Grab bagels, cream cheese, coffee, tea.  Step into the Product Ballroom and propose a session, get it on the voting mirror, and vote for your choices for afternoon sessions.

Welcome everyone, what we're doing here, thank you sponsors, invitation to participate, post on job board, network and present.

Everyone speaking in the morning quick overview AND everyone proposing sessions for afternoon quick pitch

Are you a Product Manager tired of describing what needs to be built to the development team and getting back something that completely misses the mark?

Is something getting lost in translation?

Do you often hear from developers that they want more detail in the stories you write?

Do you have UX designers who spend weeks or months creating designs that never get built?

I want to address some of the common problems that exist in the Product Manager-UX-Development chain by showing that getting UX designers to write Agile stories actually leads to a better execution of the PM vision and improved usability of products.

The target audience for this session is product managers working in Agile environments who are looking to improve communication with developers and want help bridging the gap between their idea and what gets built.

All organizations leave a digital exhaust that can be seen across the Internet. While more true for larger publicly traded organizations smaller or mediums sized businesses also leave a large smoke trail that can be followed to it’s source.

You can leverage this type of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) to better understand the assumptions a company is making about it’s market, the strategies that they have employed in the past, the capabilities they have in abundance, as well as gain insight as to what drives them to compete in certain markets.

During this presentation attendees will learn:

• Best Practices for using over 20+ web based tools and sites that they can use to better collect and analyze OSINT from the web.
• Ways you can use OSINT to paint a picture about competitor intent, future investments, and growth.
• Where and how OSINT usage varies based on the country(s) you are targeting for your CI efforts

Techniques will be based in part on one of Cascade Insights books – Going Beyond Google: Gathering Internet Intelligence, due to be published in it’s 5th edition by early 2014.

We’re so careful crafting benefits for our products and understanding their selling cycle, but wander into job interviews mostly unprepared – hoping our resumes will speak for us. This will be a workshop-style session starting from a hiring manager’s perspective – with the entire group helping “position” a candidate for the job. Applying our product marketing skills to ourselves. I’ve been coaching product folks on job searches (one-off) for a long time. Let’s see what we can learn from/share with each other.

What’s the best way to communicate: a document or an index card? How do you find the balance between not enough and too much process? What’s the best way to research your customers?

Steve Johnson writes, “I once worked for a large company and we had so many procedures and processes that we couldn’t get anything done. Then I went to work at a startup and in a week I was pulling my hair out; these people need some process!”

In this talk, Steve Johnson explores 1-5-5-5:
one research tool that gives the best insights;
five questions we should be asking our customers;
five living documents; and
five principles that ensure the right amount of process.

ProdThink is my third start-up. I sold my prior two companies to LivingSocial and TripAdvisor.

In this session, I will walk through a case study of the tactics we used to:
– Validate the need/pain point without writting any code
– Get our first customers using $50/day marketing budget
– Iterate on features to determine the “needle movers”
– Validate pricing
– Validate the Go-To-Market model

By now, pretty much everyone has embraced Lean Startup principles. It’s hard to argue with learning from customer feedback and iterating to achieve product-market fit. But how exactly are you supposed to do that? In this presentation, Dan Olsen, a startup veteran and leading PM voice, will discuss how to apply Lean Startup principles as a product person. Dan will be covering best practices in understanding customer needs, prioritization, UX design, user testing, and analytics that can be used to optimize your product. Check out my talks from last year’s Silicon Valley Product Camp, Web 2.0 Expo, and other events at http://slidesha.re/dPQATi

Spontaneous discussion with people seeking product positions and product management mentors

Identify your 2 to 3 areas of depth and how to craft your unique PM story. Get 1-on-1 feedback.

Working in either large or small organizations, PMs are set up for frustration. There are never enough resources, always too little time, changes in directions, constant interruptions, high level demands, overwhelming tactical details and last minute surprises. These add up to a recipe for a lot of heartburn. So what’s a product manager or product marketer to do?

Although product managers need to be creative in leveraging their time and resources, they also need to know how to best interact with executive management teams. This is a two-way street where executives can support PMs in formal and informal ways but they also have expectations and requirements that need to be met. Navigating the balance between what often seems to be competing goals is a skill PMs and PMMs need to develop.

This session will begin with a presentation of key executive issues and needs;
critical success factors in dealing with them;
expectation setting;
and some of the dos and don’ts in working with execs.

In addition it will provide examples and war stories drawn from personal experiences to illustrate these points. Following the presentation we’ll use the Town Hall format to field questions from the audience in an interactive discussion.

Other presenters include Linda Francis – Human Experience Consultant and Darius Chris Dunlap – Lean Startup Advisor

In this fun interactive workshop, we will present core elements of 3 key aspects of business: marketing (Lean Startup), design (Ux) and implementation (Agile) as actual puzzle pieces and guide participants through exploring the various ways they can fit together to repeatedly generate compelling products and services.

We will suggest detours around common misfits such as Lean Startup MVPs that stand for MediocreViableProduct, Ux designs that are all dressed up and have nowhere to go, and Agile Engineering teams building exactly the wrong product perfectly.

Everyone will leave seeing the Big Picture on on how better to fit together each of these three critical functions for multiplied advantage.

“Building Insanely Great Products” is the untold story of the lessons strong product management have learned that enable their companies to succeed and the lessons not learned that cause products and companies to fail.

This presentation provides attendees an example rich insight into those lessons – ones they can remember, use everyday and take back to their teams. It traces the history of product management from Procter and Gamble to Hewlett Packard to Apple and predicts its future. This presentation is based on an upcoming book and is informed not only by personal work experiences but also from having trained and mentored over 200 product managers and from having done groundbreaking work on product manager job descriptions and competencies.

What makes a Product Manager truly successful?

Being able to manage relationships – whether it be with senior executives and business stakeholders in inception or with the Technology team members in implementation.
How does an organization take the ideas from the business stakeholders and deliver technical solutions?

Conway’s Law states that “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”

If Conway’s Law is true, improving the flows of communication could be the most effective approach to improving the design of the system. Human relationships are defined by communication. We’ll explore some challenges and techniques to deliberately improve the communication structures.

Do you have positions to fill? Are you looking for a new position in Product Management? Are you looking for PM training?
Join me for a discussion on the future of Product Management education by discussing your job search or recruiting experiences!
Feedback will be rolled into programs for the Startup Product Academy – generating tomorrow’s PMs!

Description:

Why education & apprenticeship are important for job seekers:
1. Product management is a massive chicken and egg situation – you need experience before you can get experience
2. There’s a saying that no one intentionally becomes a product manager, that people come into the role from other areas of the organization (business analysis, customer support, engineers…) That’s not the case. People registered for this event LOOKING for a PM role are evidence of this!
3. There’s no good way to ‘test the waters’ especially if you’ve been in the workforce for a while. Internships are available for those coming out of college, but those looking to SWITCH into PM are left with few resources.
4. Explore the differences between B2B / B2C and startup / large companies. The role of a PM changes based on these factors.
5. Determining the area you would like to focus on is critical, as it’s sometimes difficult to switch (e-commerce, enterprise systems, mobile apps…)
6. There are also significant differences between PM for new  products (e.g. starting your own startup or joining one) and maintaining an existing product
7. Apprenticeship will give you access to hands-on-learning!

Why education & apprenticeship are important for recruiters & companies:
1. Access to fresh ideas is an important source of innovation for companies. Get access to people who are passionate and have work experience that interns may not have
2. Join us for a discussion about the traits and skills you look for in a PM. We are starting the Startup Product Academy soon and your input would be helpful in tailoring the coursework
3. Have access to people trained to do what you need!

For everyone:
1. Product management is still developing as a space and ironically the definition of PM is not well defined. Help us determine the role, skills, and needs for product managers today!

When PMs or entrepreneurs tackle a new product venture, they need to acquire and combine skills and tools from the Development, Business and Design fields. In this Town Hall session, the following topics will be introduced and then opened for discussion:

Is there really a formula for new product or startup success?
What is Design-Thinking and how it is driving innovation around the world?

Building a Toolkit:
a subset of practical tools curated from the Lean Startup, Customer Development, Design-

Thinking and other methods, to really help entrepreneurs to accelerate and find a scalable business model.

A perfect storm is accelerating the dialog and pace of product innovation between companies and their customers. It’s changing the very nature of how we will compete going forward. To be successful in the market environment that storm is creating, product managers must learn how to harness that storm.

Most companies wrestle with the storm as individual elements: Big Data, Platform and Cloud Computing, Social Media, Content Marketing and Marketing Automation, Agile practices and more.

This presentation provides a clear vision of that storm and the “how to’s” needed to harness it to identify and engage “Insanely Great Customers in an ongoing dialog of mutual learning and innovation – the basis of how we will compete in the future.

This is a team-based exercise designed to build consensus among stakeholders and produce a clear, prioritized product backlog. This method is simple, but effective and can be used with both co-located and remote teams. You may come alone and join a team to prioritize a “dummy” backlog or bring your stakeholders to receive training and practice for your own product.

Instructions for the latter option can be found here: http://goo.gl/zw6ozp