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Session Proposals for ProductPotluck Austin: January 2010
Session 1: "A New Value in Use Analysis Approach to Product Pricing and Marketing"
Session Description:
Determining the proper price for a new product in the marketplace is one of the most fundamental issues that a commercial manager has to deal with today. In this paper we present a new approach to map the value and price space for a product or service called the "Value Box". This new tool combines the conventional pricing approaches such as cost-plus alongside more sophisticated methods such as cost-in-use and value-in-use. The Value Box allows the Commercial Manager to properly define marketing and pricing strategy as well as communicate it to his/her team and management. The tool will be demonstrated with examples such as hybrid cars, premium razor blades and the Segway scooter. Marketing research methods to determine the value-in-use of a product will also be discussed
Attendees will learn:
1. An overview of the tools used to measure product value
2. The difference between setting pricing using cost in use vs. value in use
3. A new pricing tool, the Value Box, used to map the value/price space and develop pricing strategy
Format: The workshop will include request input from the Audience to complete or validate some of the tools and examples shown
Presenter:
Dr. Jose A. Briones is currently the Director of Operations for SpyroTek Performance Solutions which supplies specialty materials, software and consulting services to the manufacturing industry. Dr. Briones has 18 years of technical and commercial experience in the manufacturing Industry, holding marketing, innovation, sales, engineering and research positions with several Fortune 500 companies such as Celanese, Elf Atochem, Air Products and Reichhold. Dr. Briones has a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Clemson University and is a graduate from the Business Administration Program from Wharton Business School. Dr. Briones’ expertise includes: Product Development and Ideation support, Probabilistic Decision Analysis and Forecasting, Business Model Assessments and Product Portfolio Pricing and Value Analysis.
Session 2: "Salespeople say the darndest things – and it’s your fault!"
Description:
We are constantly amazed at the things salespeople say to prospects and clients and what they try to sell. While we like to blame the sales team for this, it is really our fault. As product managers & marketers, we must own the message and then train the sales team on how to take this message to the market.
In the session, we will have an interactive discussion where we help you to improve upon your message and then define best practices in enabling the sales team to communicate it.
Presenter:
Tom Evans is Principal at Lûcrum Marketing and brings over twenty years of successful hi-tech business experience helping start-ups as well as Fortune 500 companies create and launch winning products. Tom’s experience covers numerous vertical industries, technologies and international markets.
Session 3: "Triumph Over the Tyranny of the Customer"
Description:
Listening to your customers doesn't mean you should do what they say. Sure, you can keep them content by adding a feature or tweaking a behavior, but at what cost? Time, effort, complexity and the usability of your product are at stake. Not to mention your sanity. When a customer tells you about a problem do they tell you how to solve it instead of describing their situation? Ouch, that's bad and it does you both a mighty disservice. It's time to shed those habits and replace them with practices to guide your customers, focusing on what's right instead of implementing what's (not always) easy.
This will be a mixed format session, kicking off with a short, quite possibly irreverent presentation, which will gracefully segue into a roundtable, where we'll pool our horror stories and tips and tricks to avoid customer request traps so you can give your customers what they want, which isn't always what they ask for.
Presenter:
Alex Jones (@baldman), User Experience Manager at Pluck/Demand Media and Ringleader of Refresh Austin, is a passionate community catalyst, technologist and user advocate with extensive experience in Web development, design, strategy and management. As the User Experience Manager at Pluck, he identifies expert solutions to real world user experience challenges to improve and extend the company's social media solutions, which power billions of interactions each month.
In addition to coordinating Refresh Austin, a local group of Web professionals with national ties, Alex lends his expertise and support to Austin technology groups. When time allows, Alex writes about a range of topics on SilverSpider.com, and when time is short he spouts off on Twitter (@BaldMan). He has a driving curiosity, likes to barbecue, and has far more interests than time to explore them.
Session 4: "Trust & Substance versus Social Networking"
Description:
Back in October, many of you may have seen the #beatcancer tweetstorm that promoted a story and website in which it was stated that eBay, Miller Coors, and Guinness Book of World Records were monitoring tweets and blog citations to make contributions to several causes related to cancer research. Truth was that none of those companies were involved, the donation website was a scam and the tweet and blog campaign was initiated by the scammers. But it was, by appearance, a successful SN campaign in that many, including some Austin SN luminaries, retweeted it or added their own propulsion.
Is a social networking campaign immune from the consideration of trust? To what degree is a retweet an endorsement and of what ? Do you look at tweets, blogs and other social networking elements as substantive, or fluff ? What does this say about the ‘wisdom of crowds’ body of work being used in real product management efforts? How much weight – and investment – do you give an SN campaign for your company’s marketing if it can be matched by a completely fraudulently, but seemingly equivalent counter-campaign by either a competitor or a disgruntled customer or former employee ? I don’t believe there are any complete answers to these questions, so I won’t present any. But we will talk about how you see social networking – as a recipient or campaigner – and how you might consider or deal with these questions.
Format: Format will be “Town Hall”.
Presenter:
For the past 12 years, Don Jarrell has been President of Digital Thinking Inc, a consulting/service firm addressing Product Management Intellectual Property. He has recently founded Prista Corporation, a SaaS model company providing a healthcare performance metrics application, and is developing a social networking based marketing function that needs to be effective in a somewhat conservative enterprise marketplace where trust and authenticity are critical.
Session 5: "Great User Experience: How Do You Attain It (Despite All The Barriers)?"
Description:
Every product manager knows that a great user experience is one of the linchpins to creating and maintaining a successful offering. But most if not all of us have seen our initial vision of a great user experience get watered down or compromised. Sometimes it's due to schedule or engineering constraints; other times it's due to misalignments across teams in your organization. Other times it's due to decisions made by committee.
This session is intended to provide attendees with clear, actionable and implementable ideas for improving the user experience of their products or services.
Format:
This session will be an extremely interactive one, where attendees can and will discuss how they've surmounted the barriers and have made their product or services' experience a truly great one. It will be structured as a workshop, where everyone will be able to weigh in and ask/answer questions.
The session will start off with a short overview of user experience design, both idealized and how it "really" gets done in most instances. This portion of the session will last 10 minutes total.
From there, we will move into a "lightly moderated" discussion among attendees and the session leader. The moderator will elicit attendees' input and anecdotes, with the goal being to crystallize and record a set of "do's" and "dont's" that both attendees and the moderator have discussed and feel are of value for the attendees. Again, the goal is for the attendees to come away with clear, actionable and implementable ideas for improving the user experiences of their products or services.
Presenter:
Paul Sherman will lead this session. Paul Sherman is founder and principal consultant at Sherman Group User Experience. He has worked in the field of usability and user-centered design for the past 12 years. He was most recently Senior Director of User-Centered Design at Sage Software in Atlanta, Georgia, where he led efforts to redesign the UI and improve the overall customer experience of Peachtree Accounting and several other business management desktop and web-based products. While at Sage he also designed and implemented a customer-centric contextual innovation program that sought to identify new product and service opportunities by observing small businesses "in the wild". He also led efforts to modernize and make consistent Sage North America's product user interfaces.
In the 1990's he was a Member of Technical Staff at Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he led efforts to develop cross-product user interface standards for several telecommunications management applications. As a consultant he has conducted usability testing and interface design for banking, accounting and tax preparation applications, Web-based financial planning and portfolio management applications, and ecommerce Web sites.
Paul received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Texas at Austin. His research focused on how pilots' use of computers and automated systems on the flight deck affects their individual and team performance. Paul is Past President of the Usability Professionals' Association, was the founding President of the UPA Dallas/Fort Worth chapter, and serves on the UPA's Board of Directors and Executive Committee. He is also contributor and editor of the Gower book "Usability Success Stories: How Organizations Improve by Making Easier-to-Use Software and Web Sites," published in October 2006. He writes a regular column for the online user experience magazine "UXmatters" and has presented at conferences around North America as well as Asia, Europe, and South America. He can be reached at paul@shermanux.com.
