ProductCamp Austin Sessions

ProductCamp only works if you get involved - that means speaking or presenting, moderating a panel or roundtable discussion, conducting a workshop, or being on a panel. Add your session here with your name in ()'s so we know who you are! Proposed sessions will be voted on by the ProductCamp participants with the most popular sessions getting best scheduling. If you can't think of a session to lead, check out the section below called "Topics I would like to hear about" for ideas, or check out some of the really cool sessions offered by people just like you at ProductCamp Austin in June 2008 and January 2009.  

How to Add a Session

To add a session, you can send an e-mail to roger at cauvin dot org or edit this page as follows:

1. Check out the formats, tracks, and supply and demand for each track (shown below).
2. Click the 'Edit' tab near the top left corner of this page.
3. Scroll down to the list of sessions below and put the track name in brackets, the name of your proposed session, and your name in parentheses.

Session Formats

You can structure a session however you wish, but here are some potential session formats: 

• Presentation - You speak or give a Powerpoint presentation.
• Panel Discussion - You either moderate a discussion of topics by a group of panelists, or you sit on the panel.
• Roundtable Discussion - You moderate a discussion among all of the session attendees.
• Workshop - You lead session attendees as they work through a challenge. 

Tracks

Here are some categories of topics in which registrants have indicated interest:

• Agile (e.g. product owner and product management roles in scrum)
• Marketing (e.g. social media, marketing programs, advertising versus PR)
• Requirements (e.g. elicitation, concepts, documentation, tools)
• Product Strategy (e.g. partnerships, roadmapping, positioning)
• Career (e.g. how to interview, how to be interviewed, big company BS, working with internal stakeholders)
• Other (e-mail your suggestions to roger at cauvin dot org) 

The following chart shows how many people have expressed interest in each track (during registration) and how many sessions have been proposed (for each track). 

As a presenter, you may want to consider this as a demand signal indicating topics of interest to the attendees, and propose a session based on knowing the balance of "attendee interest" to "already proposed sessions."

We are transitioning the primary goal of this page to be 'see what's coming', so now only showing the percentage view of the demand signal:

PRESENTERS: The official ProductCamp Austin Summer 09 presentation template will be available soon.  You are not obligated but are highly encouraged to use it - it helps recognize our great sponsors! 

We need to fill ~30 session slots.  Some will be filled by roundtables and will need facilitators; the rest will be offered by you - the ProductCamp participants.   List your offered session here, if we end up with more than 30 offered sessions, than the sessions will be chosen by the participants in the morning.  Please indicate the track that best matches your session. 

Add new sessions here(so that Scott knows that a new one has been added and can update the demand signal):

1. [Track] [Title] (People)
   • [Novice|Intermediate|Expert] [Description]

2.  

3.  
4.  
5. Add more ...  
    

A sorted list of sessions by track (Scott will move sessions from the list above to the list below)

• Agile (3)
  • Impacts of Agile Development on Product Management and Requirements (Paul Brownell)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Keeping agile projects on track (Austin Govella)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • 7 tricks for better UX with less design in an agile world (Austin Govella)
    • [[Description goes here]]
• Marketing (13)
  • 10 Ways to Identify an Impending Product Launch Disaster (Dave Daniels)

    • There are 10 easily identifiable signs to watch for that can help forecast if a product launch may be in trouble.  Signs you can address and fix before the launch becomes a disaster. Your company may be spending millions on the next product. Spend 45 minutes with me to find ways to prevent a train wreck!

  • 7 Ps of Successful Product Marketers: Real World Perspectives (Dave Angelow & Bertrand Hazard)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • How Buyer Personas justify bigger online marketing budgets (Brian Massey)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Turning social media COMPLAINERS into CHAMPIONS (Joshua Baer)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Community Building (Matt Genovese)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Cowboy Sales Messaging and How Product Marketing can Corral It (Kurt Ballard) 
    • Studies have shown that up to 90% of marketing collateral is considered useless by sales. Frustrated sales people create their own freelance messages and sales tools.Commonly referred to as "Cowboy Messaging" it can derail your revenue stream if not collared quickly.  We'll discuss how Product Marketing  can help corral this rogue behavior and get everyone on the same page.[T]
  • Marketing across Borders: What do you do when your customers span 17 time zones? (Danny Mulligan, Alex McCarthy)
    • It's nice when you can meet your customer face to face on a regular basis, but what do you do when your are dealing with international customers?  How do you communicate with your customers, & local partners?  How do you find the people you want to do business with?  How do you deal with local competitors?  How does business culture differ in various countries, and how does that affect how you do business?[T]
  • Leveraging Current Events for Product Design and Marketing (Bill Solominsky)

    • Current events have a way of capturing the attention of millions of people, from local to worldwide scales. Products can be designed around certain news stories to take full advantage of this already captivated audience. In this session, we’ll discuss strategies, pitfalls, and marketing techniques for both new and existing products.[T]

  • Pay-Per-Click: How to use Google AdWords to test market interest, determine optimal messages/features, and -hopefully- sell your product.  (Craig Barrett)

    • Pay-per-Click marketing is one of the simplest yet most powerful tools available to marketers and product managers today. It can be used to slash research budgets, shorten feature research, and play a role determining advertising tactics.  Unfortunately, very few companies use it to its full potential. Learn how Pay-Per-Click (PPC) can be used not only to sell products, but assist with the design process, all for a fraction of the price of traditional methods. This tactical session will focus on providing an introduction into the Google adWords interface, sales and research strategies, and examples of their use.  Attendees will leave ready to launch their first campaign.

  • Link Building: Finding Your Most Valuable SEO Link Prospects, Faster and Easier. (Ben Wills, ontolo.com)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Going Global with Mobile - Why the US Doesn't get it? (Tom Sheahan - Red Oxygen)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Building a Community Site with Drupal (David Hahn)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Anatomy of a Modern Launch - How to Use Internet Marketing Techniques to Launch Your Physical Product (Vicki Flaugher, CEO of SmartWoman Publishing)
    • Learn how to leverage the power of online marketing to make your physical product launch more successful. By combining proven strategies, you can take your product - any product - and make a serious splash (and cash) in the marketplace. Workshop format - workbook and supporting materials (flow charts, templates, free resources and links etc) will be provided. Suited for the intermediate/experienced product manager/developer/marketer who has limited knowledge internet marketing skills/experience.

Topics will include the following:

* List building

* Joint ventures and affiliate partnering

* Email marketing

* Social media and community buzz

* Sales funnel development     [T]

• Requirements (2)

  • The Requirements Value Chain, Using Requirements to Improve the Overall Performance of the Company (John Mansour)
    • Successful PM’s need to be involved in every facet of the business but most spend a disproportionate amount of time doing everyone else’s job.  It’s a downward spiral for product managers and for the company as a whole because eventually, there’s no capacity to do product management.  Requirements are one of the bigger culprits.  Learn a new approach for gathering, documenting and communicating requirements that will improve the overall performance of sales, marketing, services and support so PM’s can spend more time on product management with fewer disruptions.[T]
  • Personas to Production: The Role of Design Briefs, Storyboards, and Wireframes in the Ideation/Design/Build Process (Paul Sherman)
    • An overview of key user experience methods and deliverables and how they help product managers:
      • Understand the customer base...and socialize this understanding with the team to attain shared vision about customer needs
      • Define and guide the qualitative but vitally important customer experience of your product or service
      • Lower risk and prevent churn during detailed design, validation, and development[T]
  • Objective Chains: How to Objectively Control Scope (Tony Chen)
    • [[Description goes here]]

• Product Strategy (12)

  • Using the voice of the customer to drive innovation (Steven Haines)
    • In the alphabet soup of corporate phrases, the words "voice of the customer" and "innovation" seem to blend into the background. Moreover, our managers continue to demand that our products take on unique, new, and different characteristics.  Product managers and their teams need to have a solid grounding in what this all means.  To pave the way forward, we'll all discuss how to put the pieces of the product innovation puzzle together. Then, we'll talk about how other companies have succeeded.. and how some have not.  This fun, interactive program will help you revitalize your efforts and catalyze your thoughts in how you engage your teams, and how you can better take the pulse of your market.[T]
  • Getting past the product roadmap to broaden your perspective (Steven Haines)
    • I recently wrote an article entitled "Product Myopia."  I wrote it because most product managers tend to only see the product roadmap as an evolution of features and functions. The essense is this: if you only look at future product capability, you might expose your product to unwanted competition, and you may also expose your company to unwarranted risk.  I've created this interactive discussion to help you broaden your perspective. I'll achieve this by helping you see a variety of factors that you might consider to set the future direction of your product or product line. [T]
  • How Product Mgmt. and Product Mktg. Can Drive Company, Market and Product Strategy (John Mansour)

    • Doing product management and product marketing the same old way (in product silos) produces the same old results – frustrated tactical product teams competing for resources that ultimately limit a company’s ability to grow.  Learn a unified approach that eliminates product silos and puts product management and product marketing in a position to drive the strategic direction of the company.  Priorities and execution become much easier.[T]

  • Roundtable Discussion on Pricing (Mahendra Mavani)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Attaining usability and a great user experience for big, enterprise-level product lines (Paul Sherman)
    • Enterprise software products are typically powerful and complex tools. But their complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes fail to fully realize the expected return on investment from these products. Some organizations find that their employees’ productivity actually decreases, because common or critical processes take longer using the new application. Others fail to realize an application’s benefits, because users vote with their fingers and don’t adopt the new system. Can you avoid this fate? Yes you can. This presentation and discussion will cover how you can "uncomplexify" enterprise software, unkink knotty workflow, and delight your customer's users. Enterprise software buyers, you'll also learn how to employ user experience evaluation techniques to evaluate a product's goodness of fit to your employees' workflows and needs...and to push on your vendors to deliver well-designed products.[T]
  • What’s next?  How to not be a deer in headlights when positioning your roadmap with stakeholders (Chris LaPoint, Denny LeCompte)
    • When presenting your roadmap to key decision makers in your company, the worst thing you can do as a PM is walk into the room empty handed with nothing more than a power point of features grouped into calendar quarters.  In this session, we'll describe what not to do (including some war stories - feel free to bring your own) and how to best prepare for an intelligent and informed discussion with key stakeholders regarding how you view priorities, scheduling, and the business impacts of your roadmap.  [T]

       

  • Integrated Marketing Strategy & the role of Product Management (Kurt Ballard) 

    • Marketing strategies that are not integrated with product efforts and sales teams produce inconsistent value propositions, extended buying processes and produce meager sales results.  No matter how much effort you put into your marketing planning and strategy, ultimately the execution will fail miserably if your communications are not tightly integrated with your strategy, products and your internal teams.  We will discuss the roles Product Management plays in the development and delivery of integrated marketing plans that gets your message to your target customer wherever they may be.[T]

  • Case Study: How to get people to click the buy button for your product when you have not developed your product yet. (Jonas Lamis - Tech Ranch Austin)
    • At Tech Ranch, we are coaching entrepreneurs to prove out their ideas as much as possible before investing their time and $$$ in building products.  By astutely using tools like Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, surveys, and keyword popularity sevices, startups have been able to shave weeks and thousands of dollars off their initial go to market strategies.  One venture literally spent $1.45 and got insight worth tens of thousands of dollars.  This session (hosted by last year's Best Speaker at Product Camp award winner, ahem) will discuss these tricks and tips.[T]
    • Roadmaps: The Bridge Between Strategy and Tactics (Byron Workman)
      • [[Description goes here]]
  • Roundtable: Integrating IP strategy and functions into Product Strategy / To Patent or not to Patent (Don Jarrell)

    • Lots of people jump into filing a patent application without (1) understanding the mechanics, options, outcome realities, or costs (2) understanding the lifecycle and valuecycle of patents, or (3) having a clear view of how the patent or overall IP strategy should serve their product strategy or business objectives. Many end up frustrated or angry and share broad-brush tales of woe that create even more misunderstanding among other Product Managers.  Simply engaging a patent attorney does not necessarily prevent or resolve this.  In this session we'll clear up some popular misunderstandings, and share/analyze informative experiences in patenting among participants.  I'll try to get a patent attorney to join in, but neither of us will be giving legal advice.[T]

  • Roundtable: Case Studies and Success Factors in Applying Social Media (Pat Scherer)
    • In social media, one size does not fit all. Over the last year and a half, Pat Scherer has been aligning social media applications and strategies to client objectives. She will bring the questions to stimulate a lively discussion of successes, challenges and best practices. And if you know Pat, you'll know this won't be a ho hum discussion.  Hope to see you there![T]
  • Roundtable: Good to Great = Soft Issues ? (Don Jarrell)

    • Your technologies and business models are both the very latest, the company is fully invested in the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, your development and release is as Agile as it can get, and your requirements are managed to three decimal places of precision.  But you’re not retaining customers as well as you want and your costs are still at issue.  Is it something that the hottest tools and methods can help, or is it something about the soft issues of the way in which smart people are working hard ?  We’ll discuss needs for balance among competing good attributes (market-driven products, design-driven products and business operations constraints; what works, what leads and what sustains in the product strategy; & others)[T]

• Career (6)

  • Domain Knowledge vs. Product Knowledge Roundtable Discussion (John Mansour)

    • It all started on the AustinPMMFForum with a product manager job posting.  Poor Mike. He just wanted a few good candidates for a PM job and started a passionate discussion (or perhaps a brushfire) about the balance of product expertise vs. market expertise.  Let's continue the the discussion live.  Bring your passion.[T]

       

  • Birds-of-a-Feather Panel: Product Marketing and Management Consultants (Colleen Heubaum, Vicki Flaugher, ?? )
    • Roundtable discussion about overcoming the challenges of being an independent product marketing/business consultant - how to get jobs, how to market yourself, how to manage your time so you make more money. Whether you're between jobs wanting to pick up some extra bucks or focused on running your own company on your own terms, you can benefit from discussing it with  entrepreneurs who have been in the trenches - bring your questions on how you can get started too! Perfect for the all levels of product professionals who are interested in working independently and have not yet done so (or are not as successful at it as they'd like to be).[T]
  • Employee to Entrepreneur: Learn how to make the leap from being employed to launching your own venture. (Kevin Koym - Tech  Ranch Austin)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Product Management in Software Startups – A personal view on how it differs from larger organizations (Oliver Schmelzle) 
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Is the Standard Departmental Structure Hazardous to Product Success? (Brandon Hudgeons)
    • [[Description goes here]]
  • Web 2.0 Tools for Managers (Alora Chistiakoff)
    • Web 2.0 has created an enormous portfolio of tools and services to help us work, play and manage different details of our lives.  But what about some creative Web 2.0 tools to help us manage employees?  For bosses, coaches and mentors, finding ways to leverage technical tools to help develop direct reports, departments or project teams can be daunting.  We'll go beyond the obvious (Google Calendar/Docs), and identify other readily accessible web-based tools in some creative ways to help you with the difficult, yet critical, job of managing your staff.[T]
  • Workshop: Effective Time Management for Product Managers (Colleen Heubaum) 
    • [[Description goes here]]

• Other (1)

  • Panel Discussion: Do you hate Sharepoint? Alternative tools for sharing information with peers and stakeholders (Chris LaPoint, Denny LeCompte, Nick Crown, Nick Bhavsar)
    • [[Description goes here]]

Topics I would like to hear about

Some of these topics we got to, others we didn't. Consider these topics for a future PCA. 

• Tips for finding and interviewing customers and potentials

• Using low/no cost methods to connect with the Market

• Effective time management for PM's

• Dealing with GUIs in requirements

• Developing a 12 month strategy plan to drive awareness in the marketplace

• How to best align a product management team internally to serve the different target markets. Enterprise, Consumer, SAAS, etc.

• Product EOL planning, concerns

• Product personas; useful methods of assessment, software v. web personas, impact on value proposition, market reach, product usability etc.

• How segment and size markets

• Product Management: Consumer vs. B2B

• Product Management & Business Development

• Product Management and Open Source: Mutually exclusive?

• Just say No: When is it time to end of life a product? How to restrict bad ideas from ever becoming products?

• Ethnography & Product Development

• Effective Collaboration - How product managers are using wikis to share information with customers, developmers and/or stakeholders.

• Build, buy or partner - Beyond the basic business case.

• Does offshoring and outsourcing still make sense?

• Launch strategy - customizing your product launch activities for your market

• What's next? Career management for the product manager

• Managing up: Working with executives vs. working with peers.

• Hit the ground running: What to do in the first 30 days (in a new role, at a new company, with a new product)

• add a topic... 

Lessons Learned from Previous ProductCamps...

There is nothing like leading a session at ProductCamp - it will be the most fun you can pack into a 45-50 minute conference session.  Because ProductCamp is completely user driven, there are no "talking heads" or "keynotes."  There is just you and your peers.  That lends a realism to the sessions that you can't get anywhere else.  Presenting at ProductCamp is fun, and an experience you will remember forever.  Use this opportunity to polish your presentation and facilitation skills in a non-threatening environment, talking about problems that matter with people who "get it."

We learned at the first ProductCamp that certain types of sessions work better than others.  These are guidelines, but feel free to break the mold and bring something new to the table.

Participants Liked:

• Interactivity

• Discussion

• Use Cases/Examples

• Whiteboards

• Roundtables

Disliked:

• Excessive Slideware (>10 slides is probably pushing it for most sessions!)

• Pushing questions to the end

• Anything Sales-y