Join Me at ProductCamp Austin 11

Join me Saturday, July 20th, 2013 for ProductCamp Austin 11. ProductCamp is an "unconference" where product management and marketing professionals teach, learn, and network.

Two years ago, John Milburn, Scott Sehlhorst, Paul Young, and I led a session on "The Future of Product Management". We noted that the "lean startup" movement was on the rise and would soon become a focus of product management discussion and debate. Sure enough, "lean startup" is all the rage these days, or at least talking about it is.

Yet to the extent product managers have embraced lean startup concepts, most of them have barely put them into practice. They've done little more than compose a business model canvas or used the "minimum viable product (MVP)" buzzword a few times. How can product managers move beyond these basics, put lean startup methods into practice, and derive real value from them?

I've proposed a session called "Let's Get Nekkid: Applying Lean Startup Methods":

You've heard about lean startup, and you may have even gone through the exercise of composing a business model canvas. Let's move beyond the theory and hype and examine the practical tips, tools, and guidelines you can use to apply lean startup methods to your company's product management and marketing efforts.

We'll briefly cover business model canvases, but we'll also look at the real-world application of customer development interviews, minimum viable product (MVP), funnel metrics, experiments to test and revise assumptions, instrumenting products to gain insight into what users are actually doing, and the pitfalls of applying lean startup methods.

The full list of proposed sessions is here.

WHAT: ProductCamp Austin 11
WHEN: July 20, 2013 from 8:30 AM to 4:30PM
WHERE: AT&T Conference Center @ 1900 University Ave., Austin, TX 78705
COST: Network, volunteer, pitch a session idea, or just make new folks feel welcome.

You must register (free) to attend.

You can get transit directions to the event by visiting the Capital Metro trip planner and filling in your starting location. If you choose to drive, parking is available for a fee in the AT&T Center underground parking lot.

Comments

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...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions . Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions. They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...

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...

Cauvin

Search This Blog