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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!

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!

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?

Folks,

Liz & I are realising our calendars are swamped this month leaving very little time to organise the May event. Anyone out there interested in lending a hand?

We’re looking for someone (someones) who can help get the word out and/or assist with a topic or speaker. This also includes if you have a burning issue you’d like to talk to/debate with others.

Drop us a line if you’d like to chat or have any ideas. You can leave a comment below (which is moderated so don’t worry if you don’t see it appear) or tweet us @product_anon

Thanks! jen

Hi all,

While we’re focused on bringing Melbourne based product managers together, there’s a Product Camp happening up the road from us… or maybe it’s more like … a short flight away.

The last Saturday this month, May 26th, Brainmates are hosting Product Camp Sydney for the 3rd year in a row. If you’re up for a weekend away & hanging out with other product managers, c’mon along. There’s usually a few of us from Melbourne who go.

FYI, typically there are drinks after the event & us out of towners continue on for dinner after that.

For more info, check out Product Camp Sydney. if you’re interested, you can suggest a topic or offer to lead a conversation or present. RSVP here.

FYI, Brainmates will be hosting a product camp in melbourne later this year (october).

At our last product anonymous session, we discussed backlogs.

… That is, after we navigated around the comedy show & had a bit of a get to know you session as there were a few new faces!!

To follow up… here’s a few good articles on the backlog:

How Uservoice uses Trello to manage their backlog

A great article on the agile’product owner’ role from on product management which puts the focus of the product role on prioritising stories – Good Bye “Product Owner”, Hello “Backlog Manager”

Pragmatic webinar with Luke Hohmann Prioritizing Your Backlog for Profit & an article by Luke about how prioritising the agile backlog for roi doesn’t work.