Author Archives: jen leibhart

Add Product Anonymous events to your calendar automagically

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We’ve setup a public google calendar for our events so you can subscribe & have the events automagically appear in your calendar.

Scroll below to where you see the calendar & click on the Google Calendar icon at the bottom of the embedded calendar. That should open your Gcal so you can add it.

Or

Within Google calendar, go to Other Calendars on the left side of your screen. Click the downwards arrow next to it & select Add by URL. Cut & paste the ical link below. Ignore the ‘Make calendar publically accessible’ tickbox because we’ve already done that! 🙂 Click Add Calendar & you should be good to go.

Need ical?  Then cut & paste this link:  https://www.google.com/calendar/ical/vjvgnqbcmncl421uuqmub16rr4%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Google has a help page on how to add calendars

Product Innovation Seminar on Friday 18th

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Just hearing about this so it’s a bit of a late notice but:

Key Results of the 2012 Dutch [Product Innovation] Competitive Performance Assessment Study.

Friday Jan 18th 1-2pm

Who: Professor H.J. Hultink (Erik Jan). Professor of New Product Marketing. Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.

Where: School of Economics, Finance and Marketing. RMIT University. Level 11, Room 10, Building 80, 445 Swanston Street (80.11.10).

This seminar examines the performance of Dutch companies, their innovation practices, and their associated innovation performance. The lessons emanating from these findings are presented and implications for Australian innovators discussed.

Brief Bio:

Erik Jan Hultink is a Professor of New Product Marketing at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research focuses on launch and branding strategies for new products. He has published on these topics in such journals as the Journal of the Academy in Marketing Science, and the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He was ranked number six in the list of the World’s Top Innovation Management Scholars, and selected as the most productive European researcher publishing in the Journal of Product Innovation Management. He is co-founder and board member of the Dutch chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA). He regularly consults companies on the topic of new product launch, and frequently appears on the Dutch television and radio commenting on the success and failure chances of new products.

Thurs Jan 24- 1st Product Anon of 2013

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Hope everyone had an awesome break!!

If you were at our end of the year drinks, you might have heard about the January topic being planned.  I think we may have persuaded Chris to kick off the year after a few drinks were had 🙂

Please join us Thursday the 24th for a drink, a chat and Chris Dahl on the importance of taking a break:

Why Product Managers need regular escapes from the daily grind

Whilst the Product Manager role wears multiple hats, it’s critical that it has a primary focus on the future direction of the product (i.e. new opportunities, innovative feature competition doesn’t have).

This can prove to be a challenge for Product Managers when you have the daily grind of e-mail, customer requests & calls, and prioritisation. It’s important for us to recognise these distractions, and ensure we don’t let them inhibit innovative and high-value product development.

Location confirmed as Bull & Bear on Flinders Lane

RSVP now!

End of Year meetup – Nov 22

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Make sure you come out to the last Product Anonymous of the year on Thursday 22nd of November to meet some fellow product folk, people interested in product mgmt & creating products.

We’ll be at the Carlton Hotel up on the roof – provided it’s good weather – or inside if the weather isn’t great.

We’re looking for people interested in talking or leading discussions at next year’s monthly meetings. Contact usat @product_anon or info@ our domain.

Product Camp Melbourne Wrap Up

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Did you miss camp?  Or want to relive it all?  Either way, Nat has posted a great summary of the day over on the Product Camp Melbourne site.

Don’t forget to contribute to the Day in the Life of a Product Manager infographic by answering 6 quick questions. We didn’t have the chance to get to some of the ‘numbers’ questions during that session so please contribute now.   We’ll publish the infographic here & on the camp site.

Thanks again to the camp sponsors PageUp People & Brainmates & migoals.  It was an awesome day & we’re looking forward to the next one!

Why you should be attending Product Camp Melbourne

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Product Camp Melbourne is coming up on Saturday the 20th.   If you’re interested in product management, product marketing or how to build a great product (no matter what your title is), you should attend.

Why?

As someone who’s attended 6 product camps over the years,  I’d recommend attending because:

  • you get to meet people who have a clue what you do! wow!
  • you get to have interesting conversations with these people who get what you do AND often have the same issues you do!
  • you’re going to learn something new
  • it’s free
  • it’s life affirming!
  • you may find a new job
  • you might be able to recruit your new staff or co-worker
  • you can share your own experiences via conversations between sessions, during session discussions or even host a topic (see the Product Camp website for info)

If you want more proof, check out this great video recap of the Mind The Product Conference.  This is a London based gathering for Product Managers & echoes my thoughts whenever I see a lot of PMs gathering!

Hope to see you on Sat 20th!

 

August meeting wrap up – Prune the Product Tree

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At our August meetup, we played Prune the Product Tree which is one of the Innovation Games (you can pick up the book at Amazon… link below).

I’m a big fan of the games.  They’re a much more interesting way of getting to the information you need than a ‘brainstorming meeting’ or some of the other faciliated sessions I’ve attended during my life.  It can help build common understanding amongst the folks on the team, it lets you visually see the product as a whole (not just 1 feature in isolation) & it’s fun!   Speedboat is one I’ve used on several occasions to help think about issues & visualise feedback.  I’ve recently used Buy a Feature during customer groups to assist in understanding needs & to assist in feature prioritisation – and got some great feedback from the attendees.

Prune the Product tree can be used for

  • priorisitation
  • to help build your roadmap
  • in developing new ideas
  • to understand what the eco system around the product needs (documentation, sales team training, etc)
  • understanding which features can be removed

It’s really easy to faciliate too – just grab some paper & pens.   You can get fancy & print out a tree & create leaves or go really low-fi.

We did a bit of both…  some creatively sketched trees with green paper for leaves.

We decided to focus on Melbourne’s public transport.  Later someone suggested using green, brown, red, yellow leaves as a way to show the maturity of the item.

We could have spent days working on this – in fact, we did talk about it needing to be a forest, not just 1 tree!   With the time constraints we focused on

  • modes of transport – where’s the jet packs? the water taxis?
  • ticketing
  • infrastructure
  • organising a trip

And of course the tree metaphors are fun!  We really wanted to hack off the Myki branch!  We wondered what would you need to do to make sure your tree continues to grow?  How do you make sure it makes it to 100 years old?

Looking for more resources?  Growing your product tree is a great blog post talking about their experience.

Hope to see you at our September session about managing customers!

Aug 30: Understanding your market’s needs

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We’re going to play a game at the next Product Anonymous meeting (Thursday Aug 30th).   No, no… no angry birds! No Fruit Ninja! Not even WOW.   😉

We’re going to get hands on & play a game that you can use with clients/users to help understand and prioritise your market’s needs.   Whether you’ve played one of the Innovation Games before or not,  it doesn’t matter.   The beauty of the game is particpants just need to show up!

So join us on Thursday Aug 30th & have a new tool in your toolkit for Friday that makes prioritising fun (Yes, I know that doesn’t sound fun but it can be!)

NEW LOCATION:  We’ll be meeting at the Mail Exchange Hotel at the corner of Bourke & Spencer St.  We needed a bit of space for this month’s topic so we have one of the rooms off the restaurant.   At the bottom of the escalator, go left towards the restaurant & then left again towards the screened off areas.

We’ll be there from 6pm onwards with the talk starting at 6:30.  RSVP here (it’s free.  we just want to make sure we have enough space for the game).

Hashtag #prod_anon

Update: next meetup, Linkedin, Facebook & such

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We’ve been a little quiet lately… between work, travel & stuff in general, there hasn’t been much time for planning product anon events.

We finally had a chance today to sit down … & look out Melbourne product managers!

The next meeting will be Thursday July 26th. Topic & bar to be confirmed (though probably our usual the – Bear & Bull on Flinders Ln). We’ve also pulled together a bit of a schedule for the rest of the year so more to come on this.

We also discussed communication. So far we’ve been using this site & Twitter to keep everyone updated. Now we’ve setup a Linkedin group for folks who prefer to get their information there & a Facebook group probably isn’t far off. We’ve talked about setting up a Yammer group but there doesn’t seem to be a way for orgs like this to have a yammer group except as an external network of an existing company.

What other ways would you like to keep in touch?