Skip to main content

ProductCamp Austin Winter 2009




You may know that Austin led the global product management community in holding the first ProductCamp. About ninety product management and other professionals spent a Saturday in June in the air conditioned comfort of the St. Edwards Professional Education Center. ProductCamp is like BarCamp, an informal conference in which professionals meet to share ideas about technologies, tools, and practices.

I'm pleased to announce that Austin's second ProductCamp is taking place in January. We are expecting over 175 of Austin's most talented product management, marketing, and product development professionals to attend. This time the event will be at the UT College of Communications building.

WHAT: ProductCamp Austin
WHEN: January 24, 2009
WHERE: University of Texas, College of Communications CMB Building (Studios 4B-4E)
201 W. Dean Keeton St.
Austin, Texas 78712

For more information on the event, or to sign up to lead a session, visit the wiki. Register for free here.

Pragmatic Marketing, Austin Ventures, UT, NetQoS, and Troux Technologies have already signed on as sponsors. If your company is interested in being a sponsor, please contact Bertrand Hazard.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardware