Proposed Sessions for ProductCamp Austin 22
(V) = selected and presented sessions.
(S) = slides available in
| Category | Title | Audience | Session | Session Leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 1 – Mastering the Product Resume | PM Essentials | Presentation | Dan Corbin |
| Product Strategy | 2 – Project Estimation Best Practices | PM Advanced | Presentation | Thomas Umstattd Jr. |
| Product Lifecycle Mgmt | 3 – What are cost structures? | PM Essentials | Presentation | Dan Crean |
| Customer Experience | 4 – Voice is the new UI: that’s what the AI told me | PM Advanced | Town Hall | Drew Bixby |
| Product Strategy | 5 – The 6 P’s of Product Success | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Rajesh Nerlikar |
| Entrepreneurship | 6 – How Low Can You Go — How High Can You Fly? | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Jan Triplett, Ph.D. |
| Marketing Execution | 7 – Should You Host A Podcast? | PM for Entrepreneurs | Presentation | Thom Singer |
| Requirements Definitions | 8 – Do You Understand your Stakeholders?? | PM Essentials | Workshop | Betsy Stockdale |
| Product Strategy | 9 – How Do We Survive in the coming in the Age of Digital Transformation | PM Advanced | Workshop | Bill Kleinebecker |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 10 – Communication neuroscience + exercises | PM Essentials | Workshop | Isaiah McPeak |
| Product Strategy | 11 – Product Innovation – Top 10 Disruptions by Tesla | PM Essentials | Workshop | Ahmed Zouhair |
| Product Strategy | 12 – Software product pricing considerations | PM Essentials | Presentation | Jay Kruemcke |
| Product Strategy | 13 – Is Agile Business Planning an Oxymoron? | PM Advanced | Town Hall | John Milburn |
| Product Development | 14 – Case Study: How to Launch 13 Products in 12 Weeks | PM Essentials | Case Study | Michael Magan |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 15 – The Many Types of Product Managers | PM Essentials | Presentation | Vaish Ravikumar |
| Go-to-Market | 17 – How to Engineer the Ideal Sales Conversation Using a Customer Value Journey | PM Advanced | Workshop | Craig Andrews |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 18 – Modern Tools for the Job Hunt | PM Essentials | Town Hall | Pamela Otten |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 19 – Leading through influence, up your Product Management game with Public Relations skills | PM Essentials | Presentation | Nicole Salzman Page |
| Go-to-Market | 20 – Bootstrap Marketing Strategy on a Shoe-String Budget | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Victoria Brooks |
| Product Lifecycle Mgmt | 21 – Inventory Planning – The one big difference between Hardware and Software Product Management | PM Advanced | Presentation | Ashish Moondra |
| Go-to-Market | 22 – How to Create a Compelling Messaging Architecture | PM Advanced | Presentation | Tom Evans |
| Requirements Definitions | 23 – User Stories That Improve User Experience | PM Essentials | Presentation | Karen Kelvie & Patrick Inman @patinman |
| Product Strategy | 24 – Building & Scaling a Products Practice – The OnTarget Framework | PM Advanced | Town Hall | Casey Flinn |
| Entrepreneurship | 25 – How Epic Failure led to Product Management Success | PM for Entrepreneurs | Case Study | Darren Smith |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 26 – Product Hiring Managers Panel – How to land the job you want! | PM Essentials | Panel Discussion | Robert Anderson, Nicki James, Teri Harwood, Dan Corbin, and Mark Stephan |
| Market Analysis | 27 – How good ideas can fail: Cultural Obstacles to Getting Internal Buy-In | PM Essentials | Presentation | Annie Hardy |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 28 – 5 Questions To Ask Before You Accept Your Next Product Management Job Offer | PM Advanced | Presentation | Reza Shirazi |
| Go-to-Market | 29 – Top 25 Go To Market Tips and Tricks .. | PM for Entrepreneurs | Workshop | Elizabeth Quintanilla |
| Product Strategy | 30 – Lessons in Roadmapping from the Back Seat of a Chevy Stationwagon | PM Advanced | Presentation | Mike Trujillo |
| Prod Mgmt Careers | 31 – Energy Leadership – 5 Steps to Emotionally Empower Teams into a Solution-Driven Mindset | PM Advanced | Other | Nelson Almanzar |
| Data Analytics | 32 – How Much is your Digital Data Worth? | PM Advanced | Presentation | Jose A. Briones, Ph.D. |
| Product Development | 33 – A Full Example of a Product’s Life Cycle from Beginning to End | PM Advanced | Case Study | Alex Boase |
1 – Mastering the Product Resume
Whether you already have a product role or are looking for your first job in product management, this session is for you. You’ll learn the best practices to use, what specific missteps to avoid, and how to clearly show your product skills so companies quickly respond to your resume. We’ll also focus on how to highlight your previous experience outside of product management so you can get land a job in product management. This session will include before and after resumes of real people so you can see how the steps described can result in a superior product resume.
Presenter: Dan Corbin @DanCorbin
2 – Project Estimation Best Practices
Misestimating projects can lead to huge losses. In fact, estimation mistakes can be some of the most costly mistakes project managers make. In this session, you will learn the best practices that will help you hit your estimates every time.
Presenter: Thomas Umstattd Jr. http://www.twitter.com/thomasumstattd
3 – What are cost structures?
Why don’t they just call them costs? Starting with the DuPont Equation, we move to the benefits and downsides of operating leverage. We then talk about some of the ways companies can avoid becoming locked in to one method of doing business. Does the past 20 years’ information revolution and expansion of globalization allow for more freedom? Can you hack your cost structure? Maybe.
Presenter: Dan Crean https://twitter.com/dancrean
4 – Voice is the new UI: that’s what the AI told me
In 2001, many people believed they would never use mobile devices. In the near future, we will laugh about how we used to take devices out to look at screens and use our fingers to look things up. Voice will be the new User Interface. We are beginning a major shift and this Town Hall will evaluate it. I will provide information about Voice and AI (Artificial Intelligence). We will talk through a few examples then discuss as a group what this means for our businesses, our interfaces, our design, and our products.
Presenter: Drew Bixby @BlameDrew
5 – The 6 P’s of Product Success
Having talked to hundreds of startups, my co-advisor and I have developed a new framework for evaluating the likelihood of product success, which we call The 6 P’s of Product Success: Problem Positioning Pricing Product People Process In this workshop, we’ll do a deep dive into each P to explain what we’re looking for and what specific actions teams can take to improve in each area. Then I’ll take a volunteer or two through our Product Success Score quiz and use their results to show the framework in action.
Presenter: Rajesh Nerlikar RajeshNerlikar
6 – How Low Can You Go — How High Can You Fly?
You’re thinking of starting a business but you’re worried about getting the money to get it going. How low can you go when it comes to funding? How about free or they pay you? Your new business has to make a profit and plan for contingencies. How high can you fly? When it comes to pricing and creating assets other than sales, the sky is literally the limit. There is always room at the top. Find out how to do both at this interactive workshop on how to apply the Business Success Center’s system to your business idea. Your takeaways: 26+ ways to fund a business, 4 ways to price for profit, and as many ideas as we can come up with for liquid assets you can bank on. Come prepared to explore your options. More information about the Business Success Center’s proven business building system at http://ownersview.com/.
Presenter: Jan Triplett, Ph.D. https://twitter.com/jantriplett
7 – Should You Host A Podcast?
It seems everyone who breathes air is starting a podcast. Additionally company brands are launching shows at a very fast pace. But is this really the right thing for every person or every company? In this session veteran podcaster Thom Singer will share his ideas on why or why not you or your company should create a podcast. He will also cover the advantages (for some people) of actively pursuing being a guest on other people podcasts. Thom’s “Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do” podcast launched in 2014 and now has over 430 episodes. He sees the show as a key to his business success in 2019, but it took time to realize the actual value. If “should I start a podcast” is a question you have asked yourself, this is a must attend session.
Presenter: Thom Singer @thomsinger
8 – Do You Understand your Stakeholders??
Stakeholders are a key to any project, and understanding our stakeholders, their wants and their needs is essential for any successful project. While we all know that stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement is important, how many of us really spend the time to understand our stakeholders? Too often we get wrapped up in features and functions of our products, instead of understanding what our customers really need. In this session we are going to look at some diverse ways to analyze our stakeholders. We will look at and practice creating journey maps and empathy maps to help us understand how we can build and use them as part of stakeholder analysis. We will also look at how we can use these tools to help us write better requirements and deliver better products.
Presenter: Betsy Stockdale stoel02
9 – How Do We Survive in the coming in the Age of Digital Transformation
I am a corporate strategist who has spent a career commercializing deep tech using the power of diverse teams. . Digital transformation is a foundational change in how an organization delivers value to its customers. I’d like to discover the hard problems we need to solve to thrive in this age. I’m proposing we take 20 minutes to describe the features we expect those technologies will have by 2025 using a starter list of technology areas and features. Then, spend the next 20 minutes identifying hard problems in the following areas: role of the customer/user, needed changes in the SDLC, dependencies on the organization and the outside world, and black swans. My intent is to document our findings for all product camp attendees. Please send me any comments pertinent to providing a starter list of features and hard problems to akleineb@strategicpathways.com by February 17th.
Presenter: Bill Kleinebecker billthek
10 – Communication neuroscience + exercises
By day I’m a product manager. By night I’m a communications coach, with an emphasis in neuroscience behind behavior, motivation, and dropping guard. I’ve found the two pair together again and again. In this workshop we’ll do a quick version of the basics of neuroscience, then dive right into some frameworks and drills focused on: – putting the audience in the right frame of mind – speaking to the wholehearted person, not just the “rational” brain – leading the elephant – gaining buy-in to hear a solution These are fundamental techniques for product managers as we sell and influence.
Presenter: Isaiah McPeak
11 – Product Innovation – Top 10 Disruptions by Tesla
Tesla is one of the world’s fastest-growing electric-vehicle (EV) companies. With reasonably priced, zero-emission vehicles and eco-friendly designs, it is disrupting the traditional fossil-fuel automotive industry. The company’s approach incorporates excellent customer service, superior products and services, innovative research and development (R&D), a talented workforce, and state-of-the-art technology. Tesla is not just an automaker but also a product and service conglomerate that integrates its automation, energy, neurotechnology, artificial intelligence (AI), and software solutions into its vehicles. This workshop investigates how Tesla disrupted the traditional automotive industry using its unique business strategy.
Presenter: Ahmed Zouhair https://twitter.com/azouhair?lang=en
12 – Software product pricing considerations
Pricing is a key tool for product managers and a fundamental part of product value, but many avoid dealing with pricing because it can be complicated and risky. Come to this session to understand some of the things you should consider when pricing a new product or changing the price of an existing product. We will talk about perceived value versus perceived price, pricing strategies, charge metrics, and licensing models. You can’t afford to ignore the impact of pricing on your product!
Presenter: Jay Kruemcke @phastflyer
13 – Is Agile Business Planning an Oxymoron?
Business Plans. We’ve all done them. Management and investors want to see them. We spend countless hours building them, and wonder if they ever make a real difference. Are Business Plans still relevant in today’s fast-paced, development-centric product models? In this session, we will present and debate the variables that affect the value of product Business Plans. We will discuss two models that you can use in your own Product Management organization: The Planning Data Relevance Curve and the Planning Maturity Model – which will help you answer how much business planning is “just enough?”
Presenter: John Milburn @JohnPMilburn
14 – Case Study: How to Launch 13 Products in 12 Weeks
Indeed University is a 12-week program designed to teach recent college graduates our product development philosophy. These new hires self-organize into their own teams to solve employer and jobseeker problems. Twelve weeks is a very short timeline to deliver a product, even for an experienced team. As a lead last summer, I needed to teach teams how to apply our product development philosophy so they could quickly, and effectively, build products that would help people get jobs. In this case study session, I invite the audience to discuss how they would approach this challenge before sharing the quick learning method that led to successful product development at Indeed University.
Presenter: Michael Magan @magan
15 – The Many Types of Product Managers
When you ask your friend in marketing or in development what their role is, chances are they come back with a specific title that automatically translates to what they do in their role. Maybe it is Search Engine Marketing or Front End Development, but if the same question was asked to a product manager, the answer will be just that “Product Manager”. In reality, there are many types of product managers based on their skill set, the market they serve to, the lifecycle of the product they manage and much more. If you want to learn more about this and where exactly you’d fit in, then this session is for you.
Presenter: Vaish Ravikumar
17 – How to Engineer the Ideal Sales Conversation Using a Customer Value Journey
You’re familiar with customer journeys. But I’ll show how adding a single word and a magical moment will skyrocket sales. The single word is “value.” Experience the transformation that follows when you shift to a Customer VALUE Journey. But to make this work you need to architect a moment of magic. There are 5 critical elements to create this magical moment. One is an exchange of a small amount of money. Come discover the other four and how they fit into the customer value journey. This session will be 50% presentation and 50% workshop.
Presenter: Craig Andrews @allies4me
18 – Modern Tools for the Job Hunt
Product managers hunt for jobs! This interactive talk reveals modern tools that will help product-position-yourself for your next opportunity. Come to this interactive talk where you will pick up some tools/tips, make new connections, and uncover feelings of confidence for your job hunt.
Presenter: Pamela Otten
19 – Leading through influence, up your Product Management game with Public Relations skills
Have you ever had to convince an executive about the value of your product idea? What about deliver bad news to an internal stakeholder about the delay of a product or feature that’s important to them? Students and professionals in Public Relations spend their entire education and careers learning how to effectively communicate to get their company’s most important stakeholders on their side. In this presentation we’ll explore the five key Public Relations skills that you can leverage to achieve product management success.
Presenter: Nicole Salzman Page
20 – Bootstrap Marketing Strategy on a Shoe-String Budget
Entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs will draft their marketing plan through our workshop and break-out into small groups where they can provide each other with additional ideas on ways to grow their customer base through the customer journey. We’ll cover questions such as: identifying customer base (and no the answer is not everyone), determining media consumption for the base, branding, the customer journey and analytics with a small budget.
Presenter: Victoria Brooks @cleopatoria
21 – Inventory Planning – The one big difference between Hardware and Software Product Management
The one word that defines complexity of hardware product management is INVENTORY . Proper inventory and supply chain planning can affect not just profitability of your product, but it can have a significant impact on your Product launch strategy and timeline. This session would provide you the right things to consider related to inventory so that you are able to launch your products on time, deliver them on time and then also obsolete that when you want to.
Presenter: Ashish Moondra
22 – How to Create a Compelling Messaging Architecture
Most product messaging sucks. Too often, messaging is about the product or the company and not about the customers and their needs, and because of that, your prospects say, SO WHAT! In this session, we’ll review examples of bad messaging and the causes of this. We’ll then teach you how to build powerful messaging that resonates with all of your target personas by using a messaging map. Finally, we’ll describe the key component of a compelling messaging architecture that will empower your marketing and sales organizations. Please bring some of your own examples as we’ll make this an interactive discussion working on your own challenges, helping your as a Product Manager or Product Marketing develop compelling messaging that resonates with your target markets.
Presenter: Tom Evans @compellingpm
23 – User Stories That Improve User Experience
You will learn how to write a user story that contributes to an outstanding user experience.
Presenter: Karen Kelvie @KKstreaming
24 – Building & Scaling a Products Practice – The OnTarget Framework
If someone asked your to define your practice as a Products Person, how would you answer? I’ve spent the last few years refining this answer for myself and want to share a framework that I have created to help folks build the right practice for yourself/team/organization.
Presenter: Casey Flinn
25 – How Epic Failure led to Product Management Success
This session will be a case study of the epic and sometimes funny failure of Live Athlete, a startup started by two NFL agents who knew nothing about how to create a digital product, and how that failure led to Product Management success. Relive the journey as we critically look at how an ambitious pivot, not fully vetted decisions, lofty plans, and extreme hubris led to the downfall of a passion project and how one founder remade himself into a future Product Manager. This session is for all attendees who want to laugh, learn, and understand how to recognize and avoid the same pitfalls in their careers.
Presenter: Darren Smith
26 – Product Hiring Managers Panel – How to land the job you want!
To land the perfect product job, you need to stand out above the rest. Come hear real-world advice from six senior product hiring managers that will help you get hired while enjoying the process. The panel will take your questions and provide invaluable practical assistance whether you are looking today or considering a future job change.
Presenter: Robert Anderson & Nicki James
27 – How good ideas can fail: Cultural Obstacles to Getting Internal Buy-In
Some fantastic ideas are pitched…but die on the vine because they lack the support to succeed. And others are launched…but they fail to overcome internal obstacles to developing a culture of acceptance. This talk will discuss obstacles to internal buy-in, including facing political hurdles, the power of internal interviews, developing influential champions, and overcoming the cultural barriers to adoption.
Presenter: Annie Hardy
28 – 5 Questions To Ask Before You Accept Your Next Product Management Job Offer
Imagine sitting at your desk six months after starting a new job. Your head is in your hands and you ask yourself, “This job sucks. How did I get here? All I do is move stories around a bloated backlog.” You failed to ask your hiring manager 5 critical questions before taking the job. Before you accept your next job, know what you need to learn about the company, your team and your role at the new organization so that you land a job where you know you will have an impact!
Presenter: Reza Shirazi
29 – Top 25 Go To Market Tips and Tricks ..
Elizabeth Quintanilla, Marketing Gunslinger, will share her top 25 Go-To-Market Tips and Tricks for getting your product from an idea to cash in your hand! This will be an interactive presentation.
Presenter: Elizabeth Quintanilla equintanilla
30 – Lessons in Roadmapping from the Back Seat of a Chevy Stationwagon
Back in the days before all our mobile phones had GPS built in, families would travel across the country using something called a roadmap. For my family, we crisscrossed the country several times in a Chevy Malibu station wagon. In our case, the Rand McNally roadmap alone was not sufficient for a timely and successful long distance journey. Much like my infamous cross-country trips in the Malibu, today’s companies try to follow their own roadmaps only to discover they are not successful in plotting out their journey. Spoiler alert — it’s not your roadmap. Hear how the lessons from the trips in the Malibu will help you to create better roadmaps, and how navigate around road hazards to stay on course.
Presenter: Mike Trujillo
31 – Energy Leadership – 5 Steps to Emotionally Empower Teams into a Solution-Driven Mindset
There are inevitable circumstances that can drive talented team members to become unproductive, frustrated, unenthusiastic, resistant, conflicting. They can stem from within the workplace, as well as personal lives. This counterproductive mindset and behavior can stifle the effectiveness of an entire team and their product. Successful leaders and product managers inspire and empower their team to perform at their maximum potential. Tap into your teams highest potential by skillfully transforming their perceptions and emotions into a solution-oriented, synergistic and inspired mindset. In this workshop, you’ll learn how the power of thought and emotion equate to your decisions and actions. You’ll understand how to use energy leadership strategies and coaching tools to help your team achieve goals and tasks to bring about extraordinary results.
Presenter: Nelson Almanzar @nelsonnyc
32 – How Much is your Digital Data Worth?
Your smartphone is collecting your digital data right now. These data are being bought and sold today by multiple companies for profit and commercial purposes, in most cases with a minimum of consent and no compensation to the device users. CA Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed a ‘Digital Dividend’ in with California’s consumers would be able to share in the wealth that is created from their data. This would be done via a new data dividend because they recognize that data has value and it belongs to the user. Facebook recently had a trial program where users were paid $20/month for total access to their phone activity. In this session, we discuss the current trends regarding data collection and brokering. We try to determine the actual value of your digital data and what is your right to your data. This session is intended to be in an open discussion format.
Presenter: Jose A. Briones, Ph.D. @Brioneja
33 – A Full Example of a Product’s Life Cycle from Beginning to End
Since most sessions discuss broad lessons learned, this case study will focus on one specific product example with a particularly well-documented history. We will follow the product from ideation and concepting, to brainstorming ideas, to testing and validation, to design and development, to marketing and support. This is an actual process that was forged in 2018 by Return Path’s Consumer App Development team. The process was well documented in order to achieve better alignment among team members, to gain buy-in from stakeholders, and to train other teams on the process so it could be replicated. We will explore active, working docs and tools that were used during the process, and are still being used today, along with screenshots and photos from throughout the product’s development and life cycle.
Presenter: Alex Boase https://twitter.com/boase