Proposed Sessions for ProductCamp Austin 19
(V) = selected and presented sessions
(S) = slides available in description (click on title)
| Category | Title | Audience | Session | Session Leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Go-to-Market | 1 – The Big Fat Myths of Product Launch (V) | PM Essentials | Roundtable Breakout | Diane Pierson |
| Product Development | 2 – 5 effective actions for your next week | PM Essentials | Town Hall | Drew Bixby |
| Product Development | 3 – Cloud services and Agile (V) | PM Essentials | Town Hall | Drew Bixby |
| Go-to-Market | 4 – How to deal with bad press as a product manager… Also, what’s bad press? | PM Essentials | Case Study | Nathan Betzen |
| Entrepreneurship | 5 – Whiteboarding Your Business Model (V) | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Jan Triplett, Ph.D. |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 6 – 5 Lessons I learned from 15 Austin Product Leaders (V) (S) | PM Advanced | Presentation | Reza Shirazi |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 7 – Managing Stakeholders – 5 Tips from 2 VPs (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Robert Anderson |
| Data Analytics | 8 – 15 Ways Product Managers Can Improve Their Technical Skills (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Dan Corbin |
| Product Development | 9 – Small Shop Agile Transition (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Alex Boase |
| Product Strategy | 10 – Google is not a viable exit strategy | PM for Entrepreneurs | Presentation | Matthew Hellinger |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 11 – 5 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Hack Networking (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Catherine Jewell, The Career Passion Coach |
| Go-to-Market | 12 – Win like a Targaryen: two persuasion techniques for product people | PM Essentials | Workshop | Glen Ford |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 13 – 5 Steps to Survive Change & 6 Skills to Build Resiliency | PM Essentials | Workshop | Terea Bitner, PMP, M. Ed., ACC |
| Requirements Definitions | 14 – Writing Excellent User Stories: Let’s Practice! (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Workshop | Betsy Stockdale |
| Product Strategy | 15 – How to Position a Product and Define Your Product’s Unique Value (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Roger L. Cauvin |
| Go-to-Market | 16 – Trial by FIRE: Lessons Learned from Bootstrapping my First Product (V) | PM for Entrepreneurs | Case Study | Sean Merron |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 17 – Vibrant Leadership – Embracing the Best, Building a New Model | PM Advanced | Workshop | Jerry Llewellyn |
| Go-to-Market | 18 – Get Strategic and Master the Value Story Supply Chain | PM Advanced | Presentation | Britton Manasco |
| Marketing Execution | 19 – The10-Minute Social Media Article Curation Methodology | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Michael McGrail |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 20 – Why Are You Not Being Found? Try Thinking Like a Recruiter (V) | PM Essentials | Presentation | Marc Miller |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 21 – Low Emotional Intelligence Personae (LEIPs): Exploring Their Impact on Agile Teams (V) (S) | PM Advanced | Roundtable Breakout | Casey Flinn |
| Product Development | 22 – Deliver value-driven products by ditching the project-mindset (V) (S) | PM Advanced | Workshop | David Hawks |
| Requirements Definitions | 23 – User Stories suck! Upgrade from this old unnecessary process (V) | PM Essentials | Workshop | David Hawks |
| Customer Experience | 24 – Twyla’s Design Sprint Journey (V)(S) | PM for Entrepreneurs | Presentation | Douglas Ferguson |
| Product Development | 25 – Agile = No Planning = Bull$h!t (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Workshop | Reese Schmit |
| Product Development | 26 – Story Mapping: How to build it right the first time (V) (S) | PM Essentials | Workshop | Reese Schmit |
| Requirements Definitions | 27 – Optimal Product Decisions – Letting the Genie out of the Bottle (S) | PM Advanced | Town Hall | Andre Piazza |
| Go-to-Market | 28 – Mastering Pricing in tech: Good, Better and Best | PM Advanced | Town Hall | Andre Piazza |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 29 – Demonstrating the Value of Product Management | PM Essentials | Presentation | Robert Anderson |
| Go-to-Market | 30 – 4 Pillars That Will Transform Your Marketing (V) (S) | PM Advanced | Presentation | Craig Andrews |
| Go-to-Market | 31 – Great Product Managers Are Great Story Tellers!! Which Stories Are You Telling? | PM Essentials | Presentation | Tom Evans |
| Product Strategy | 32 – Secrets of Customer Discovery: How to Beat the Odds and Build Products That People Want (V) | PM Essentials | Workshop | David Eckoff |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 33 – Grinding It Out: Lessons Learned in 4th Year Start-up | PM for Entrepreneurs | Case Study | Kent Odland |
| Marketing Execution | 34 – How to be a Buddhist when the World is on Fire (V) | PM for Entrepreneurs | Presentation | Elizabeth Quintanilla |
| Marketing Execution | 35 – References Sell: Your Customers are Your Best Sales Team | PM Essentials | Presentation | Lauren LeRoy |
| Requirements Definitions | 36 – Buried in UX Feedback? How We Went from Overwhelm to Prioritized Backlog (V) (S) | PM Advanced | Presentation | Stephanie Schuhmacher |
| Product Strategy | 37 – Lean Product Discovery: Build the Right Sh*t (V) | PM Advanced | Presentation | Dan Katz |
| Requirements Definitions | 38 – Dude, Where’s Your Data (Model)? (V) | PM Advanced | Workshop | Megan Jackson Stowe |
| Product Lifecycle Mgmt | 39 – The Product Death Cycle (V) | PM Advanced | Presentation | Leon Sabarsky |
| Requirements Definitions | 40 – More Tools for the Business Analyst Toolbelt | PM Essentials | Presentation | Leon Sabarsky |
1 – The Big Fat Myths of Product Launch
This interactive discussion kicks off with me sharing a launch myth I learned the hard way, the mess it made and the mitigation I used to get back on course. Campers will then share your myths in breakout groups, and suggest or solicit help to solve. Led by Diane Pierson, a Pragmatic Marketing instructor with over 15 years of product launch leadership experience.
Presenter: Diane Pierson Diane Pierson has more than 20 years of experience in product management and marketing. She’s delivered more than $100 million in revenue to SaaS, publishing and big data companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, InfoGroup and Copyright Clearance Center. She founded Shelftacular! Wire Shelf Covers and brings a comprehensive understanding and executive mindset to her role as Pragmatic Marketing instructor.
2 – 5 effective actions for your next week
What are 5 actions you should start doing next week to be more effective in product management? This is an interactive session to create a list of actionable ideas to improve your product development processes. We will solicit ideas from the participants in addition to the ones brought by the presenter. We will discuss each idea briefly, then cull the list so that everyone walks away with 5 (or more) of the best actionable items for their next week. What can you bring to share? Items you learned from Product Camp Tried & tested techniques you use One key takeaway from book you read (recently or long ago but still resonating) Software tools Something learned from others An actionable task learned from experience What will you take away? You will gain (at least) 5 actionable items to consider doing next week to be more productive.
Presenter: Drew Bixby Drew Bixby is a Director of Product with 20+ years experience wearing many hats, from finance (former CPA) to entrepreneur (built & sold a company) to developer (self-taught) to Director of Product on large enterprise products. Yet, he is always asking “why” and seeking to learn more.
3 – Cloud services and Agile
AWS, Azure, Rackspace, Google Cloud, SoftLayer: What are they? Why should I care? Agile is about adaptability. Cloud is about adaptability. Are you leveraging cloud services enough in your Agile process? Which ones? Should you be? This is a “high level view” of clouds and some of the ways in which using cloud services may benefit your Agile product development, testing, and maybe even deployment. This will be a townhall session so your input and experiences (good & bad) are encouraged. We will discuss what cloud services are and why you should care. We will help make reserved instances, on-demand, and cloud test environments less foggy. This is non-technical, so you might learn what containers are, but we won’t discuss how to deploy them. We will also explore how to not get burned by clouds.
Presenter: Drew Bixby Drew Bixby is a Director of Product with 20+ years experience wearing many hats, from finance (former CPA) to entrepreneur (built & sold a company) to developer (self-taught) to Director of Product on large enterprise products. Yet, he is always asking “why” and seeking to learn more.
4 – How to deal with bad press as a product manager… Also, what’s bad press?
Good news! Your product is in the news! Bad news! No, seriously, it’s all bad news. People aren’t using your product the way you intended and the reviews aren’t great. What do you do? First things first: take a step back and think about what’s happening. Sometimes surprises can feel like bad news, when they aren’t necessarily. Nathan will describe ways to determine whether news is good or bad, and how to try to salvage a product with truly bad news using Kodi and the Alienware Alpha as examples.
Presenter: Nathan Betzen Nathan is a product manager for Kodi, the most popular 10 foot UI open source media center in the world and has worked with Google, NVIDIA, Dell, and others to slowly take over the set top box world.
5 – Whiteboarding Your Business Model
Don’t follow the Goldilocks model, try it and see if it’ breaks. Go right to “Just Right” by whiteboarding the models that fit your personal and business goals. Ideal for early stage businesses, those wanting greater growth, and those stuck in the mud. Interactive.
Presenter: Jan Triplett, Ph.D. Dr. Jan Triplett, CEO Business Success Center, is an entrepreneur, author, speaker and small business advocate. She has built successful business models and opened doors for professionals in businesses from accounting firms to zoos and is a very popular ProductCamp speaker & SXSW speaker/mentor. She founded and leads the Profit Mover™ business experts mentoring and investment assistance team. http://bit.ly/YoutubeJanTriplett
6 – 5 Lessons I learned from 15 Austin Product Leaders
Slides
I launched Austin VOP (Voice of Product) to learn from product leaders in Austin and bring these expert insights to the broader Austin product community. I have 5 lessons to share from the 15 product leaders that I have talked to in the last 2 months including P.J. Tanzillo of Favor and Michael Senftleber of Spredfast. Product managers are linchpins in the success of tech companies. Through these interviews and articles on austinvop.com, I hope to encourage collaboration and learning. My thesis is, that by making the product community stronger, we can help make our technology company ecosystem in Austin thrive. Come join the conversation and share your thoughts on what helps make product managers successful in Austin.
Presenter: Reza Shirazi Reza is a passionate product and agile leader. He is currently principal consultant at Rezonate Group providing advice to early-stage startups. He was formerly a product director at CLEAResult, the leading energy efficiency consulting company. He launched Austin VOP (Voice Of Product) in July where he interviews product leaders and shares these conversations with the Austin product community.
7 – Managing Stakeholders – 5 Tips from 2 VPs
Slides
Unless you are working by yourself, you have to deal with stakeholders. But how do you do it? How do you persuade those that control your resources (people, budget, and systems) that your idea is the best one for your product? What if this skill is the difference between a successful product manager and a mediocre one? Come to this session to understand how to manage your stakeholders, how to craft your message, how to say “yes” and how to say “no” to senior leaders, and how to get the outcome you want, as if your idea was the stakeholder’s idea. Here from two experienced product leaders and your peers to gain skills that could change your career!
Presenter: Robert Anderson As Vice President of Product Management for IDERA, I lead an incredible team of product managers and user experience designers that wake up every day seeking to build the most useful and profitable database and application development products in the industry.
8 – 15 Ways Product Managers Can Improve Their Technical Skills
Slides
In this session, you’ll learn specific ways you can increase your technical skills to become a better product manager…or improve your chances of landing a PM job. Considering the range of technologies a PM might encounter, it’s hard to know where to begin. We’ll cover the main areas you should focus on, how you can demonstrate your technical aptitude, and how to improve your effectiveness when working with engineers. This presentation is designed so all attendees can compile their own individual plan for improving their tech skills. There will be recommended resources in each technical section we cover. This talk is not about PM concepts or theories. It is all about giving people specific takeaways that they can put into practice immediately.
Presenter: Dan Corbin Dan Corbin is a Sr. Director of Product Management at Return Path. He’s a Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified Scrum Professional with over 15 years of product development experience. Dan is also the founder of The Product League meetup, co-organizer of the Agile Austin Product SIG, instructor for Agile Austin U, and a frequent contributor to other local meetups.
9 – Small Shop Agile Transition
Slides
This session is targeted at novices and provides a first-hand account of how to successfully implement Agile in a small to medium-sized team. Instead of highlighting lessons and extrapolating generalities, this session will focus on specific agile tactics. We’ll provide empirical and anecdotal evidence of those tools in action at our workplace, and how they evolved over time. Each tool will be discussed in terms of 1) how it is traditionally used, 2) objections in our office against those tools, and then 3) how we overcame those objections and adapted that tool to our team. Attendees will learn how to ease colleagues and management into Agile, by incrementally introducing low-tech tools like sticky-note-Kanban and paper-sharpie burndown charts. We’ll also cover how to maintain buy-in by keeping things simple early on and establishing rules for new processes like standups and retrospectives.
Presenter: Alex Boase Alex is a horned frog from Texas Christian University who has worked throughout the Lone Star State in many facets of the advertising industry including design, management, and new business. Alex works at an advertising studio in Austin, and also is a freelance product manager with CabForward. Before moving to Austin, he was a ski instructor in the Colorado Rockies.
10 – Google is not a viable exit strategy
With few exceptions, advertising is not a viable revenue stream, yet it forms the foundations of many start-ups. Failing to identify the real market value for a particular product or service inevitably leads to an unlikely acquisition model reliant upon Google. Building your product with a tangible market value makes your business attractive to a larger set of investors and dramatically increases the chances of a desirable acquisition. We’ll explore revenue models, opportune times to seek funding, retaining equity in your company, increasing your company’s attractiveness to potential acquirers, and maximizing your return from an acquisition event.
Presenter: Matthew Hellinger Matthew has 17+ years of SMB consulting experience. He has performed due diligence as part of a Birmingham-based angel investor group and understands the factors that determine the attractiveness of a start-up to investors. He is now involved with his own start-up, Buzz.Tools.
11 – 5 Ridiculously Easy Ways to Hack Networking
Slides
Everyone says you have to network. If you are looking for a job upgrade, you’re missing 80% of the market if you only apply online. Getting to the 80% of great jobs out there means great networking. As a Career Coach, my number one job is teaching people how to work their network – and make it produce job leads. We’re looking for leads that are on target for the position, industry and even the company they would like to work for. Come to this presentation if you want to know how to turn an ordinary conversation into a gold mine of career ideas. Watch out! You may get to use these ideas today.
Presenter: Catherine Jewell, The Career Passion Coach Catherine Jewell is the Career Passion® Coach and a Professional Career Manager (PCM). She works with salaried professionals who are rock star performers, and tired of over-delivering for an under-earning job. They know there’s a better job out there, but don’t know what it’s called or how to get it. She provides clear strategies and action steps for career changers.
12 – Win like a Targaryen: two persuasion techniques for product people
Whether you’re on Team Dany or not—of even if you haven’t read the books or watched the series—you gotta admit that the Khaleesi has marshaled resources and often triumphed, despite having started from nearly nothing. She’s built a following through influence. And dragons. But let’s focus on influence. A core part of being a strategic product person is staking out a position on important decisions and convincing stakeholders of the right course, using influence rather than authority. I will introduce two concrete techniques you can start using tomorrow. One is an under-appreciated diplomatic component of the Toyota Production System (from which all agile flows). The other, like our heroine, has an unusual name starting with T. In the workshop we’ll use it to put armor on an unconvincing proposition, and see how close we can get it to sword-proof. And don’t worry… NO SPOILERS!
Presenter: Glen Ford Glen Ford came to product management from services and programming, and before that, music education. After more than two decades building web-based software, he’s won many arguments, lost many arguments, and seen that effective decisions often come from tight, cold-blooded logic. Glen is currently a product manager at Alegion.
13 – 5 Steps to Survive Change & 6 Skills to Build Resiliency
Change is constant and how we respond to change defines us, our products, and our business. What if you and your team could become more resilient and thrive during major changes? Through resiliency it is possible to not only survive but thrive amidst change. During this interactive workshop we will examine change and it’s impact on us as individuals and businesses. We will discuss stages of change and loss and the real impacts of change. You will learn 5 steps for moving from surviving to thriving change. We will learn how our beliefs about change impacts our lives, products, teams, and businesses? Lastly, we will describe characteristics of resiliency and learn 6 Methods to grow and nurture resiliency skills. You will walk away with tools to you can put into practice today and grow yourself, product, and team. Come join me and let’s have some fun learning!
Presenter: Terea Bitner, PMP, M. Ed., ACC Teresa coaches determined individuals through challenging changes and works building resiliency within her clients. Teresa has 20 years coaching and mentoring professionals in various roles as an IT software developer, team lead, manager, project manager, educator, and mentor. She brings to coaching many unique and challenging life experiences including career transitions, personal loss of first spouse and mother and resiliency.
14 – Writing Excellent User Stories: Let’s Practice!
Slides
Writing user stories and acceptance criteria sounds easier than it really is. As an example, how does one deal with technical requirements and business rules? In this interactive session, you will learn how to handle the edges of requirements in user stories and acceptance criteria. Then attendees will practice, using either a case study or their own project.
Presenter: Betsy Stockdale Betsy is a Business Architect at Seilevel, a professional services company whose mission is to redefine the way software requirements are developed. Betsy leads projects to develop requirements following Seilevel’s Requirements Modeling Language (RML).
15 – How to Position a Product and Define Your Product’s Unique Value
Video
If you haven’t defined your product’s unique value proposition, you have a gaping hole in your product strategy. Moreover, most executives and team members are unfamiliar with sound positioning principles. This session will prepare you to demonstrate true product leadership and deliver products that transform people’s lives. We’ll cover: 1. What is positioning, and what is a unique value proposition? 2. Why defining a unique value proposition is the highest impact thing a product leader can do. 3. Principles governing sound product positioning. 4. How to determine a unique value proposition. 5. A visual model that will galvanize all team members around delivering your product’s core value.
Presenter: Roger L. Cauvin By empowering teams to make smart product decisions, Roger creates products that transform people’s lives. He is the founder and Director of Products at Dadnab, a mobile application that he grew to 2.5 million annual user queries. Roger is a past winner of the “best session” award at ProductCamp Austin.
16 – Trial by FIRE: Lessons Learned from Bootstrapping my First Product
I believe everyone has a product within them and there’s no better time than yesterday to start building the audience for that future invention. My overwhelming passion for seeking early retirement ended up producing a byproduct just from helping others with their personal finances and monetizing the information I learned. However, I am a software engineer by trade with zero marketing experience and in this case study I’m opening up to share the lessons learned and minimal startup costs it’s taken to get my product off the ground. For the same reasons why it’s important to start planning for retirement while you’re young, it’s also important to start planning and testing for your next product now.
Presenter: Sean Merron Sean Merron is a senior software engineer for a large enterprise but an entrepreneur at heart. He has a million ideas in his head and setup his life for early retirement to have the freedom to invent without financial risk. He is also the co-host of the 2 Frugal Dudes podcast.
17 – Vibrant Leadership – Embracing the Best, Building a New Model
In this highly participative session, participants will explore/share their concepts, values and core beliefs about what it takes to successfully lead teams of 3 or 4 team members or entire companies of 3 or 4,000 people. Integrating their collective knowledge, the group will create a model of leadership that expresses their values and desired outcomes for leading teams and companies. This session is great for anyone who has ever worked for a company, who has participated in a team project, who has been supervised, or who has led teams or supervised others – in other words, YOU. In this session you can step up and create with the group something of real value that you can carry with you throughout your career – a deeper appreciation of what works or doesn’t in leadership, and a path to making things better for yourself and others.
Presenter: Jerry Llewellyn Jerry Llewellyn, President, Amera Consulting • Former National Director of HR for Life Care Centers of America, the largest proprietary nursing home company in the world. • Developed high quality seminars on leadership, management-supervision, on regional and national levels. • Managed leadership development holding national HR responsibility for companies with 8,000+ employees; 80 business units with 75-150 employees each.
18 – Get Strategic and Master the Value Story Supply Chain
Product managers and marketers report that they spend just 28% of their time on strategic activities while spending 72% of their time on activities they consider tactical. Meanwhile, 90% of the material produced by the product marketers is going unused by sales. To make a strategic impact, you — as a product leader, managers, and marketers — are challenged to engage and persuade salespeople to present your offerings with confidence and conviction. You also want to ensure your offers and messages powerfully resonate with buyers. However, research data is shows there are some serious gaps – even potential breakdowns – in this Value Story Supply Chain. These barriers to successful performance now imperil the careers of product marketers and managers. Find out what product managers and marketers at top enterprises such as Oracle, Cisco, and Fiserv are doing to engage the sales force and make their stories matter with customers.
Presenter: Britton Manasco Britton Manasco is CEO and founder of Visible Impact, a strategic marketing and sales readiness firm focused on making sales conversations matter. He is a specialist in driving alignment between product, marketing, and selling teams to create buy in for value stories and messages. He is the author of Next Era Selling (Now + Next, 2016).
19 – The10-Minute Social Media Article Curation Methodology
– How to discover (i.e., listen) content online that meets your targeted audience needs and desires – Identify “Social Media Influencers (SMI)” in your subject matter area – Repurpose content from SMI – Increase “Engagement” with SMI & your targeted audience – Substantially Increase your number of likes, retweets, & followers – Understand my 90% to 10% Social Media Rule – How to become a SMI on Social Channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. etc.) – Why you need to create only one original Social Media Marketing (SMM) article per week – Create a SMM Article Performance & Posting Calendar – Free social media marketing article curation material provided: – Video overview of the key take aways from the session – LinkedIn SlideShare of presentation deck – Study guide/workbook – Audio transcription of the session
Presenter: Michael McGrail JinchiLearning Co-Founder (IT & Biotech Gamification Platform Startup), Startup Training Services: Pitching, Social Media Marketing, Infographics, Gamification, Inbound Marketing, Sales Training, Coaching (e.g., Employee Job Role Productivity, Leadership, Management Principals, etc.) Presentation (e.g., Pitching, Elevator Speech, Meeting & Presentation Best Practices, etc.), Productivity & Project Management Training (Based on Getting things Done (GTD) Methodology and Franklin Covey Best Practices)
20 – Why Are You Not Being Found? Try Thinking Like a Recruiter
Most of the time, the reason you are not being found is that you are not thinking like a recruiter. Recruiters are using LinkedIn to search for talent using specific strategies. Think of this like dating. If you want to find a mate, you need to hang out where the opposite sex can find you. When I was a young man, that meant belonging to social organizations or clubs and hanging out with friends. When I got older, it also meant going to bars and doing other activities—I met my wife playing volleyball through an informal Sunday evening volleyball group. If you want to be found by recruiters, then you need to understand the strategies recruiters use to search LinkedIn. This way, you can be found by recruiters…just like you wanted to be found by the opposite sex.
Presenter: Marc Miller Marc Miller is the founder of Career Pivot which helps Baby Boomers design careers they can grow into for the next 30 years. Marc authored the book Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life. He has been featured on Forbes.com, FlexJobs, Mashable, and PBS’ Next Avenue.
21 – Low Emotional Intelligence Personae (LEIPs): Exploring Their Impact on Agile Teams
Slides
I am currently working on a research project on this topic and would like to explore with the audience current hypotheses and findings. Additionally, we will use this time to conduct some interactive exercises with you all to flesh out some concepts and models. We will explore and refine some of the “popular” personae that are emergent, “card sort” behaviors, “cuss and discuss” the impact to agile teams as well as the prominent anti-patterns (and solutions) to address LEIPs.
Presenter: Casey Flinn Currently I am exploring my chapter of consulting and coaching after a long stretch leading and developing enterprise Product Management teams. My path to Product Management began in the field of Psychology, and I’m still fascinated by human behavior and learning the “why” 20 years later. I am passionate about cultivating the talent and community of “products people.”
22 – Deliver value-driven products by ditching the project-mindset
Slides
In this highly interactive workshop, participants explore how traditional practices like projects, budgeting, leadership directives, release cadence, etc slow product development down. The group will discuss the difference between a project-driven mindset vs a value-driven mindset, why the latter is the path towards valuable products, and what practices need to change in order to support this shift. Learning outcomes include: 1. Understand 3 ways projects hold us back from achieving max product success 2. The difference between a value-driven mindset and a project-driven mindset 3. 6 practices you can implement to support a value-driven mindset Attendees will leave with actionable items they can implement to help improve product value delivery.
Presenter: David Hawks David Hawks is an Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer who has played almost every role in product development: developer, architect, ScrumMaster, manager, Product Owner, and executive. He has a background of building productive Agile teams and a passion for helping teams achieve success. As CEO of Agile Velocity, David uses his experience to help organizations deliver innovative products faster.
23 – User Stories suck! Upgrade from this old unnecessary process
The goal of the Product Owner/ Manager is to ensure we are building the right product. User Stories support Agile delivery, but in today’s world we need to be more focused on Product Discovery over Efficient Delivery. Industry studies show more than half of the features we build are rarely or never used. Wouldn’t you like to know much earlier which features are not going to be valued by your market? In this session, we will explore the weaknesses of the current standard Epic/User Story process and discover some new practices to ensure we are building the right features through quick market validation. I will propose a new approach you can try to replace the musty old stale User Story method.
Presenter: David Hawks David Hawks is a Coach and Scrum Trainer who has played almost every role in product development: developer, architect, ScrumMaster, manager, Product Owner, and executive. He has a background of building productive teams and a passion for helping others achieve success. As CEO of Agile Velocity, David uses his broad experience to challenge and help organizations deliver innovative products faster.
24 – Twyla’s Design Sprint Journey
SLIDES
Designs Sprints are a process developed by Jake Knapp while work on Google Hangout and refined while a Design Partner at Google Ventures. Jake released a book detailing the process including examples from companies like Slack, FlatIron Health, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Twyla first ran a Design Sprint after reading some of Jake’s early blog posts on the subject. This talk details their journey from their early false steps to mastering the process after having the opportunity to work direct with Jake . The talk will begin with a brief overview of the Sprint process for folks new to the concept and then will focus on telling the story of Twyla’s Design Sprint journey.
Presenter: Douglas Ferguson Douglas is the founder of Voltage Control, a fractional CTO consultancy specializing in innovation workshops. Douglas was CTO of Twyla, Google Ventures backed art marketplace, where he facilitated numerous Design Sprints including several with Jake Knapp, author of Sprint. Douglas is an EIR at Capital Factory, sits on the Fusebox Festival board and is an Advisor to Austin startups.
25 – Agile = No Planning = Bull$h!t
Slides
Many development teams will tell you that in Agile they can’t plan, but in reality, we plan continuously. Doing Agile right and planning in an Agile way will get you more predictability. In this session you will learn how we estimate and plan work in Agile and what you should expect/ demand from your development team.
Presenter: Reese Schmit Reese has been in the software industry for 15 years and has worn many hats, from UX Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to ScrumMaster. The knowledge gained from each of these roles allows her to frame problems from different perspectives and drive change through empathy. As an Agile Coach, she helps organizations drive customer value, transparency, and collaboration.
26 – Story Mapping: How to build it right the first time
Slides
Product Backlogs are great but they tend to get unruly and hard to read as work is decomposed from epics to sprintable stories. That’s not helpful for anyone–for the team who has to understand how each piece fits together and for the stakeholders who just want to know what exactly the plan is. Enter story maps. Story Mapping is an Agile practice that minimizes documentation while providing context for the team and visibility for stakeholders. Most importantly, for Product Managers and Product Owners, a story map shifts the process from requirements delivery to requirements discovery. Before diving into the workshop, we’ll briefly talk about the difference between a requirements delivery and a requirements discovery process. Then we’ll spend the majority of the time working in groups to create a real story map.
Presenter: Reese Schmit Reese has been in the software industry for 15 years and has worn many hats, from UX Designer to Product Manager, QA Engineer to ScrumMaster. The knowledge gained from each of these roles allows her to frame problems from different perspectives and drive change through empathy. As an Agile Coach, she works to help organizations drive value, transparency, and collaboration.
27 – Optimal Product Decisions – Letting the Genie out of the Bottle
Slides
Product Marketing / Managers are pressed to make quality decisions to satisfy an increasing number of people, at a pace that is hard to keep up, in contexts where the stakes only grow. In this interactive presentation, we will apply 5 best practices to improve decision-making in the context of #ProdMgmt to help you hone your ability to build better products, gain new levels of user insights, create value faster, become a better leader, and ultimately accelerate your career. In this session you’ll learn: – The lessons can PMs learn from successful merge and acquisitions (M&A) – The key human cognitive biases used to elevate product design / experience – How to improve dialogue with cross-functional teams – Vital few questions to ask yourself / your teams to avoid getting in your own way – How Product Managers at Google, slack, Twitter, Apple and IDEO design to optimize user delight
Presenter: Andre Piazza Andre Piazza is a Product leader in tech. I believe in building intelligent products, creating memorable customer experiences. This session is the result of the best practices collected throughout the course of my #ProdMgmt career by either experience, research or benchmarks. Connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter: @apiazza.
28 – Mastering Pricing in tech: Good, Better and Best
Product Managers are continuously challenged to price their offerings for market success. The objective challenges include gaining clarity around customer value, willingness to pay, costs, and competitive benchmarks across multiple sales channels. Layer on top of that the subjective issues of having to please leaders (including the infamous HIPPO) or to satisfy the demands of customers, partners or cross-functional teams. In this interactive session we’ll discuss: . the key challenges affecting PMs in companies large or small . pricing for success: the 5 key elements to gain clarity when pricing a product . pricing for customer satisfaction: from price list to product presentations that sells . pricing for peace: aligning with leaders, peers, partners and prospects . long-term pricing : how PMs can leverage analytics, market and competitive intel to enhance value This session is based on experiences and best practices collected throughout 10+ years as a PM in tech.
Presenter: Andre Piazza Andre Piazza is a Product leader in tech. I believe in building intelligent products, creating memorable customer experiences. This session is the result of the best practices collected throughout my career either by experience, research, or benchmarks. Connect with me on LinkedIn or on Twitter: @apiazza.
29 – Demonstrating the Value of Product Management
Product management is arguably the most important function in any product-oriented company, yet most people don’t see this outside of the PM team. In order to grow funding for your team and gain new credibility to push your vision for your market and products, you need to know how to showcase the unique contributions of product management. This presentation provides practical techniques and examples that will send your PM team into overdrive!
Presenter: Robert Anderson As Vice President of Product Management for IDERA, I lead an incredible team of product managers and user experience designers that wake up every day seeking to build the most useful and profitable database management and application development products in the industry.
30 – 4 Pillars That Will Transform Your Marketing
Slides
Unless what you’re selling is both illegal AND addictive, then nobody wants to be in your sales funnel. That is pillar #1 and unless you’re highly unusual, you’re probably violating it. We will go into all 4 pillars with real-life examples. Transformative marketing begins with the right mindset. Are you getting the results you want? Doing more of the same won’t change that. Shake these 4 pillars and get the results you’ve been missing.
Presenter: Craig Andrews Craig Andrews is the founder of digital marketing agency allies4me. Allies4me works with companies who believe their website could drive more leads or sales but don’t feel like they’ve reached their full potential. Increasing the number of qualified leads and sales is the single focus while using multiple methods. Allies4me focuses exclusively on opportunities where they can make triple-digit gains.
31 – Great Product Managers Are Great Story Tellers!! Which Stories Are You Telling?
The best Product Managers and Product Marketers tell great stories. They are able to tell great stories because they know which stories they should be telling and how to structure them to communicate the right information. Come and learn as we discuss which stories to tell at which time, and how to develop and tell those stories, putting you in a position to be a much more effective Product Manager, or Product Marketer.
Presenter: Tom Evans Tom Evans is Principal at The Lûcrum Group and is an internationally recognized authority in product management, global marketing, business partnerships and entrepreneurship. In his extensive experience, he has helped start-ups through Fortune 500 companies create and launch winning products and has led business development efforts in the US and global markets.
32 – Secrets of Customer Discovery: How to Beat the Odds and Build Products That People Want
The mortality rate for new products and businesses is stunning. In this session, you’ll learn a practical set of actions you can follow to dramatically improve your odds of building products people buy and use. ► Learn a customer discovery process to get you moving fast. ► Understand cognitive biases that can result in big mistakes in assessing customer demand. ► Discover a powerful approach to testing your ideas. ► Learn simple but non-obvious hacks you’ll love. You’ll experience a fast-moving hands-on program led by an entrepreneur/product guy who has done it himself – and is dedicated to teaching you. For product managers and startup founders in companies of all sizes. “David Eckoff is a cannonball of energy, delivering passion and engagement through his presentations. Mr. Eckoff is a boon to any conference that values itself as speaking truth, not fantasy.” – Chris Brogan, New York Times Bestselling author
Presenter: David Eckoff David Eckoff specializes in working with teams to develop and launch industry-changing businesses. He’s defined go-to-market strategies and led teams in companies from startup to Fortune 500. Previously, VP New Products, Turner Broadcasting; pioneered online sports broadcasting, music, movies and games at Real; SVP, Rivals.com. David’s sessions have been voted “Best Session” and “Best Presenter” multiple years at ProductCamp Atlanta.
33 – Grinding It Out: Lessons Learned in 4th Year Start-up
Whether you’re thinking about starting a start-up, running a start-up while keeping your “day job” or have already made the jump to full-time entrepreneurship, getting (and keeping) a start-up off the ground is always tougher than it seems. Join us for an interactive discussion from a product manager turned co-founder. We’ll take a case study of a 4 year old Austin start-up and learn from everyone in the room about staying focused, being willing to pivot and ultimately grinding it out.
Presenter: Kent Odland Kent Odland is the co-founder of karmaPond which is all about friends helping friends find the work they love. He has a Finance degree from UT and has consulted with both Accenture and BearingPoint. Kent has 22 years experience in start-up and Fortune 500 software organizations including 15 years in product management.
34 – How to be a Buddhist when the World is on Fire
This session will be a fun filled session with a lot of Buddhist quotes as answers to key MARKETING questions that every small team and business owner faces. Join Elizabeth Quintanilla, Austin’s Marketing Gunslinger, as she weaves Buddhist lessons on how to implement Marketing Hacks while staying calm when the rest of the World is on Fire. She will show 10 hacks that you’ll implement today if you are not already .. all while enjoying how to stay calm when the storm of “Life, Work, .. dang UPS lost my booth again for that tradeshow!” happens to you. Look forward to a fun filled session from a Product Camp Best Session Winner!
Presenter: Elizabeth Quintanilla Elizabeth is a positive, creative, people-oriented, performance-driven Marketing Gunslinger. E focuses on understanding the customer perspective and consults on: marketing (traditional, online, social, content, Go-To-Market), product marketing, and demand generation.
She has a broad-base of experience in multiple industries including: aerospace, franchise, IT, software, and real estate. Elizabeth delivers high-quality creative solutions to ensure product and customer success. @equintanilla
35 – References Sell: Your Customers are Your Best Sales Team
Your customers will help drive sales for you if you nurture those relationships the right way. You can lead your happy customers to do what you want and need them to do as advocates, and they will benefit in return. We will talk about how to work with your organization and your customers to identify your best advocates, so the next time you need customers for your beta programs, marketing and sales activities, you will have an army of advocates ready to support your product.
Presenter: Lauren LeRoy Lauren is a Customer References Professional with 17 years of experience building customer reference programs for IBM and Alteryx. Lauren is passionate about telling customer stories to showcase success and build reference relationships that increase customer satisfaction and encourage advocacy.
36 – Buried in UX Feedback? How We Went from Overwhelm to Prioritized Backlog
Slides
Incorporating usability testing into your product design process reduces the risk of usability problems, but a beta release is when your customers truly get a sense of their day-to-day experience with your product. Evaluating user feedback on feelings, emotion, or aesthetics is already a challenge and the volume you may receive during a beta can quickly overwhelm your project team. At Lifesize we needed a way to efficiently triage new feedback — sometimes dozens each day — during the beta release of our redesigned Web and desktop apps. We’ll share the system we developed to give us an objective way to evaluate and prioritize subjective user experience feedback.
Presenter: Stephanie Schuhmacher Stephanie has designed and prototyped award-winning digital experiences for the Web and mobile apps since 1995. She’s currently the Manager of User Experience at Lifesize, and co-founded the Austin, Texas chapter of Ladies that UX, taught Web and UI Design at Austin Community College, and is a published author on user experience design issues.
37 – Lean Product Discovery: Build the Right Sh*t
How do you know what you should be building? Are your customers requests actually what they need? Do they know what they want? … and more importantly, what’s the real cost of getting it wrong? Lean Product Discovery is an easy way to help answer these questions and validate (or define) what you’re about to build. Reconsider your ever growing backlog of epics and stories into a validated list of customer value. Transform your team from being a “feature factory” to becoming a squad of strategic feature ninjas. In this session we will overview Lean Product Discovery, go over strategies, tactics and tips to establish an environment of testing and validation. Although I’m categorizing this under “Product Strategy,” this topic crosses into half of the categories offered. Nobody puts Lean Product Discovery in a corner.
Presenter: Dan Katz Dan Katz is a user-centric technologist who creates products that people want to use. He’s passionate about lean product discovery and user psychology, mixed metaphors, craft coffee and ice cream. Dan is a Director of Product Management at CA Technologies. When not focused on his users, he can be found masquerading as an Agile coach preaching the philosophy of kaizen.
38 – Dude, Where’s Your Data (Model)?
You might be thinking about boring database structures, entity relationship diagrams, and technical architecture jargon when I say “Data Model”. BUT, understanding how the business conceptually thinks about information and how it relates is critical for our products to be successful! In this fun and interactive session, we will use a game of Texas Hold ‘Em to start to understand the fundamentals of modeling data from the business perspective using the Business Data Diagram model. We’ll talk about what’s an object vs. an attribute, the implications of single vs. many cardinality, and end by exploring how this model can help us to identify user stories, technical stories, and business rules for our products (as well as help your architects make the right database decisions up front!) You might also learn a thing or two to help your poker game along the way 😉
Presenter: Megan Jackson Stowe Megan is a Senior Product Manager at Seilevel; as a Certified Instructor and practitioner, she helps ensure clients’ teams are building the right thing, while also building it fast. With a heavy focus on the agile methodology, Megan spends much of her time acting as a product owner while training other product owners on best practices within an agile framework.
39 – The Product Death Cycle
In a world where 80% of daily active users are lost within 30 days, there’s a lot of reasons why users are bouncing before they even get into the “deep engagement features” you’ve built out. Asking engaged users what product features they want won’t help much – instead you’ll likely get a laundry list of disorganized features that will push you towards your competitors. The hardest part of any new product launch is the beginning, when it’s not quite working, and you’re iterating and molding the experience to fix it. This is the “Product Death Cycle.” Is your product in it?
Presenter: Leon Sabarsky Leon Sabarsky excels at building high performing software development teams for all types of organizations. He has 20 years of IT experience and has been an Agilist for the past 10 years, primarily in the health care and government sectors. He is a frequent speaker at Healthcare, Pega and Agile/Scrum conferences and has many certifications with many letters.
40 – More Tools for the Business Analyst Toolbelt
Very often, BAs come to work with only one or two tools in their toolbelt. For various reasons, the tools in their toolbelt are never expanded, leading to limitations in their career and craft. This presentation will seek to expand the BA toolbelt, outlining which tools work for which situation and what to consider when using new tools. In addition, we will be addressing the BA career path and how to be a more effective BA.
Presenter: Leon Sabarsky Leon Sabarsky excels at building high performing software development teams for all types of organizations. He has 20 years of IT experience and has been an Agilist for the past 10 years, primarily in the health care and government sectors. He is a frequent speaker at Healthcare, Pega and Agile/Scrum conferences and has many certifications with many letters.