Agile Product Strategy, Marketing, ProductCamp and more.
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ProductCamp
Inaugural B2BCamp Atlanta
069 days
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural B2BCamp Atlanta, an unconference aimed at the growing B2B Marketing concentration in Atlanta. Lots of great thought leaders were present at the event hosted at Matrix Resources, and 12 educational sessions were offered.
Unfortunately the session that Kevin O’Malley and I offered was not selected, but that gave me the opportunity to sit in great sessions about being Buyer-Centric, the use of video, and a marketing automation panel. All in all, great learning opportunities all around!
Opening Session - photo by Adam Needles
As organizer of ProductCamp Atlanta, the format was refreshingly familiar, but the content was a nice foray into content I’m not exposed to quite as often. I want to commend the team on their execution to deliver a first class marketing event in Atlanta, and I certainly look forward to the next B2BCamp!
Interview: Rich Mironov
2159 days
Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Rich Mironov. Rich is an accomplished product executive and startup veteran who’s spent significant time evangelizing agile product management. Rich also founded the very first ProductCamp in Silicon Valley, and wrote The Art of Product Management based on content from his Product Bytes blog.
Rich and I spent about half an hour discussing three primary topics: ProductCamp, Agile Product Management, and the Product Management career path. Some of the specific discussions included:
- How ProductCamps can increase awareness among senior and executive level product management.
- How product managers can help engineering organizations to understand everything that product managers do outside of engineering to help ensure the success of a product.
- What are the options for a product manager to advance in the field.
Rich provides great insights in a relaxed, disarming style. Rich can be reached at his blog (http://www.mironov.com) or by email at rich@mironov.com.
Enjoy!
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Shared audio file for those who need to access it outside the blog, via Box.net
Buyer and User Personas – the Presentation
0161 days
The Startup Slingshot was gracious enough to offer me an opportunity to deliver my Buyer and User Personas session that I delivered at ProductCamp Atlanta with co-author Kevin O’Malley, and alone at ProductCamp Nashville, in the form of a video blog post.
If you have 25 minutes to burn, here’s the presentation:
Updated personas presentation
0187 days
I’ve updated the presentation I delivered on User and Buyer Personas in Design and Strategy on Slideshare. I delivered this at ProductCamp Nashville on November 12, 2011.
Personas in Design and Strategy
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ProductCamp is over…on to #ProdMgmtTalk!
0246 days
Another fantastic ProductCamp is in the books–that’s #5 for Atlanta–and the planning team is busy working on what’s coming up next. The two at top-of-mind are listed here; however, please follow us on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
- - Please complete the ProductCamp 5 Wrap-Up Survey
- - Please post your ProductCamp 5 Content on SlideShare
We’re giving ourselves about 10 days before we start thinking about the next event, possibly a happy hour in the Fall. Some of us are already making preliminary plans to visit our neighbors in Nashville for their first ProductCamp ever on November 12. Perhaps you might want to join us?
With a nod toward the session I led at ProductCamp this past Saturday, I will be the guest of honor on the next #ProdMgmtTalkTwitter chat which occurs at 7pm Eastern on Mondays. This talk is hosted by Cindy Solomon and will be co-hosted by Roger Cauvin, who I had the pleasure of meeting during my time in Austin. I find Roger’s blog to be one of the best-written on the topic of product management, with particular emphasis on agile approaches to the subject, and I look forward to his participation in the talk. Cindy and I have spoken about focusing the topic of our talk around backlog management during development of the initial release of a product, as that is an area I’ve uncovered (and..caused!) some controversy. Hope you can join us next Monday.
Personas in Design and Strategy
0250 days
At ProductCamp Atlanta 5, I co-presented a town hall session with Kevin O’Malley about the use of personas in Design and Strategy. Our assertion is that a persona effort is a wise use of a product manager’s time, because it can lead to both a better-designed product and a better-aligned marketing effort, which should lead to better results.
A significant amount of research goes into developing personas, and because of the “town hall” format, we only touched on that in this discussion at a high level. The key point is that the research must be first-hand, and the persona cannot be “made up” based on demographics and abstract data alone.
Once realistic personas are created (with real names and other details) we then must engage in a socialization effort, which is beyond the scope of this presentation. Suffice it to say that the personas must be brought to life, and the key players must get to know these personas as if they are real people. In response to a question, I cited that in the persona effort I led at Carestream, we had our personas email our team regularly to provide ongoing interaction and a steady flow of realism to paint the picture even better. If the team isn’t on a first-name basis with the personas, they aren’t doing any good.
The key benefits to investing in a persona effort are:
- Buyer personas: By crafting marketing collateral for a specific “person” or “persons” instead of the generic “the user,” we get more targeted language that our target audience can really connect with.
- User personas: The product itself can be better designed to meet the needs of a specific target market by designing the user experience for a specific “person” or “persons.”
One key point to make is that to achieve everything listed here, there are often two sets of buyers (particularly for B2B software) because the buyer is NOT the person using the product!
The slides we presented are on Slideshare:
Personas in Design and Strategy
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For more background, please reference this article by Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing.
Agile Product Management and the Product Owner Role – A Town Hall
0265 days
Many of you know me as a frequent participant in the product management community on Twitter, and as an organizer of ProductCamps. After participating on the organizing committee of four ProductCamp unconferences in Austin and two in Atlanta, I’ve just submitted my first session proposal for a ProductCamp — this one for ProductCamp Atlanta. I’m excited to contribute more, in a different way, to the product management and ProductCamp communities.
My topic is “Agile Product Management and the Product Owner Role – A Town Hall.” This talk is in response to the ongoing confusion that exists as engineering teams have moved to agile frameworks, while product management struggles to figure out how it can fit in. In my view, the benefits to the business of agile frameworks are equal to if not greater than those delivered to engineering, so it is in product management’s interest to optimize this evolution.
Some of my views can be found in earlier posts. I’ve touched on the confusion on several occasions in the past:
- http://johnpeltier.com/blog/2011/07/22/where-product-owner-as-backlog-manager-fits-best/
- http://johnpeltier.com/blog/2011/03/22/prodmgmttalk-product-manager-vs-product-owner/
- http://johnpeltier.com/blog/2011/02/25/thoughts-on-agile-product-management/
In my session, I’ll summarize common organizational models found in companies today, and lead a discussion bringing in the experiences of the group. From this exercise, I hope that we’ll all come away with new insights into the way product management can deliver incremental value when partnering with an agile engineering organization.
The Value of ProductCamp
3454 days
ProductCamps have been around several years now, and plenty of words have been written about the experience from all sorts of perspectives. ProductCamp Austin founder Paul Young wrote a frequently-referenced description of ProductCamp, so I won’t re-invent the wheel here.
What I do want to touch on is the value ProductCamp provides to those attending and participating (preferably everyone there is both!). We just held ProductCamp Atlanta 4 yesterday, and one tweet from presenter Jason Moss really summed everything up:
Just leaving Product Camp. This was one of the most amazing and educational days in my career. THANK YOU ALL! #pcampatl
This is why people volunteer to conduct ProductCamps, present content, and spend a gorgeous Saturday afternoon inside a conference center sharing and learning about product management and marketing topics. Product Managers usually only work with a small team of people that are like them — and work with a business-at-large that thinks quite differently (from Paul Young’s “X-facotr” presentation–see slide 12). A day devoted to topics related to our line of work, with our peers, is hard to come by.
The fact that ProductCamp occurs on weekends demands a degree of self-selection — product managers who aren’t slightly maniacal about their careers and doing their job to the absolute maximum of their capability aren’t going to spend a Saturday in a conference center. As a result, the caliber of people you find at a ProductCamp exceeds that of many other conferences — these aren’t people who are guilted into showing up because their company enrolled them. These are people who made a conscious decision to spend the day advancing their skills and knowledge, and meeting people like them.
In the opening session, Jason Brett asked how many in the audience were at their first ProductCamp — and on this particular day, about 50% of the audience stood up. So i was interested to see what these people thought of ProductCamp. So here are a few other comments that validate the time and effort:
From Eric Martincek: ”Thanks to everyone who made ProductCamp ATL #pcampatl a great success. This was my first & plan on attending the next one.”
From Desiree Peeples: ”Thanks so much for allowing me to be a part of such an amazing event… looking forward to next year!!!”
Also from Desiree: “#pcampatl ROCKED this year!!. If you weren’t there–you missed out!”
From Kellie Jones: “Great day. Awesome people. Good sessions. Sublime donuts and RiRa. #pcampatl”
How does ProductCamp get this kind of reaction? Aside from the self-selection mentioned earlier, people attending ProductCamp vote on session topics — so the democratic process encourages topics that the vast majority of people want to see. This time there were 32 proposals for only 16 slots — no room for sessions people were only marginally interested in.
So to sum up, if you haven’t paid much attention to ProductCamp Atlanta in the past, but you want to see what the fuss is about, check out pcampatl.com!
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