BLOG
4PM - User Stories in Agile Development
- Tradition Requirements vs. User Stories
- Users stories are requirements / features/ units of work
- Capture a succinct item of work
- Intentionally incomplete, it is a promise to have a conversation
3PM - Scrum Produt Ownership - What does it take to make SCRUM hum?
- Part Product Manager, part business analyst, part project manager, part leader
- Product Owner role is only part of Product Manager
- You should connect with your team, should focus on building the team
- Balancing the conflict between serving the team and serving the CEO and doing the traditional product management
- Goal Setting helps drive SCRUM team behavior
2PM - Enhancing Business to Business Relationships with Social Media
- Social Media is Interaction, Engagement, Conversation, Relationships, not about Tools!
- Talked about Dell Idea Storm
- Crowdsourcing was a good discussion
- Don't forget Social Media IS Social.
1PM - Software as a Service (SaaS) Session
- Pros and Cons of SaaS - who owns the data, etc. Beta testing is not an extension of QA, but should be considered a product feedback opportunity.
- Discussion of recent marketplace mistakes by Twitter
- Let customers guide you, use incremental changes to ease transitions.
- Should you have a demo environment or use the production environment for sales to use.
- The service IS the product.
- Really funny onversations about understanding techology and use cases.
Lunch Time - The food was amazing! Here's a quick snap of folks enjoying the food
11:00 - 10 important Things for Product Manager -
- Think - Take time away or you can easily become swallowed into the tactical.
- Leadership - 90% of your job.
- Pricing - Product Management should own the pricing of their product. Pricing is the only thing that brings in revenue
- Measure - Customer Satisfaction, Defects, Costs, etc. Track and share. It's easier to lead when you have the information to lead.
- Observe - Watch and learn. Observe your customers, determine why, and learn.
- Define your personas- Who are your buyers vs. users. Know their background, daily activities, etc.
- Call Reports - Validate assumptions, Discuss new opportunities
- Manage Roadmaps - Feature vs. Release based, Most important deliverable, review weekly. Make your roadmap, fill it in with key milestones and strategy.
- Win/Loss Analysis - Helps identify key features. Sales Process problems. Win\Loss analysis will be a career differentiator.
- Write Problem Statements - Don't just have it in your head.
10:15 - Customer Voice Session - Customers don't know what they don't know. Discussed several things including:
- Innovation discussion is very helpful. I'm looking forward to grabbing the slides.
- Focus on benefits vs. features
- Post market surveillance is sometimes more important than the pre-market work.
- Real innovation - not the overused misunderstood term called "innovation"
- Learned a out "PITA"s Customer who are a "Pain in the ass" customers. Ask why and dig deeper.
Here's a photo:
Here we go! My first session:
Almost 10AM - Folks in the lobby networking. I just sat down waiting for my first session.
9:22AM - This is not a conference. This is an "un-conference". First time I have heard of the two foot rule. If I'm not gaining something from a session, I can use my two feet to go an network or find another session.
Here's a pic of our organizers right before we start! Thanks!
Here's the first blog entry...going to give this a shot! It's 8:45 and folks are chatting up a storm behind me.
Here's a quick pic from my phone.