In our first guest post,  Nicolas Strybosch talks about his experience at Product Camp Sydney earlier this month. With Product Camp Melbourne set for July 20th, it’s a bit of a preview of how camp works & what you’ll be missing out on if we don’t see you on the 20th.  

I hit Sydney ProductCamp with the sleep-deprived intensity and hunger that only a 7am weekend flight induces. Thankfully croissants and coffee were supplied, and I had the chance to cruise around the Atlassian offices and strike up a few conversations before the morning keynote.

The first keynote compared startups to the enterprise from a player who’s been in both worlds. Paul Gray (@paulalexgray) kicked off with a tongue-in-cheek ripping apart of a formal product management framework and rephrasing it into the startup world, before going into a list of lessons that startups can learn from enterprise and vice-versa. The entire list is actually a great guide to product management in general – worth framing for the mantle piece.

Next up: the unconference part.

30-second pitches from people interested in presenting or facilitating discussions. While this was impromptu, everyone was in fine form and voting was tough. The organisers split the talks into 3 streams (to facilitate a manageable group size rather than theme), and I took a punt on Aaron from Lexer and his talk on “Employing Social Data for Passive Insights“. The punt paid off, as Aaron was engaging and his examples – ranging from PayTV to Yoghurt – were used to good effect in explaining how social data is just waiting to be trawled for insights. You just need the tools to mine it and know how to analyse it (catch!). Great for consumer facing products, though I’m going to try using social to build out personas for a B2B product.

After lunch Matthew Hodgson had the whole room to explain the “New New Product Development Game“. If you’re familiar with lean and agile already, it was a good history lesson that starts pre-internet in the manufacturing industry. If you’re not so familiar and are sick of the hype-without-substance, then this was the evidence based case for adopting it.

The last few talks I attended focussed on the Build-Measure-Learn directive: David Neale explaining Cohort Analysis and Shaun Clowes on Growth Hacking.

David’s simple charts and images illustrated his points well, highlighting a few metrics which should be measured on every product. If you’re interested in more, check out the excellent Lean Analytics book and start measuring. Shaun (who won the best speaker prize) is an energised presenter who clearly loves his day job. As a growth hacker, he’s charged with optimising…well, everything. Experimentation is the name of the game, and if you’re getting success from 5% of all your experiments, then you’re doing well.

Between sessions I met a great variety of friendly people, all passionate about product management and marketing. Unfortunately I missed some great sessions, though the one at the bar afterwards did round out a great day.

More slides from Product Camp Sydney can be found on their slideshare.

Find out more about Product Camp Melbourne, RSVP or suggest a topic.

Our presenter this month, Vaughn Harber, from PageUp People started out in Product management a little bit over a year ago, although at the time, his official title wasn’t product manager but Product Analyst.  In that time his learning curve was steep and fast and with another colleague about to step into the role of Product manager, he felt he was finally in a good place to share the things he wished he had known at the start of the journey.  The format of the session allowed some of our more seasoned PM’s to concur or offer additional advice at certain key points of learning, but Vaughn shaped it all around three key themes that would have helped him greatly if he had known these ahead of time.  As his Product Management presentation highlighted, when he started he was completely a blank slate!

Vaughn’s first comment was one of the most enlightening – “Nothing on the position description matches what I do in my day to day job!”.  His three key areas that he could tie all he did do day to day was: Vision, Design and Execution.  The vision area was one of the hardest to understand without guidance or mentoring, so if you are taking a new product manager under your wing, this is definitely one area to take some time on.  Some of the insights Vaughn shared with us that without this it was very hard to ensure his product was delivering.  Comments from the group endorsed this view, and called out that it was a helpful part of the product management role to make this clear, continue to share it so that the Design stage is so much more effective.

Design was a large topic as well, but in terms of the esoteric easier for most to grasp how to get on track with this one.  There are still things you wish you had known before you start out, but unlike the Vision discussion, less time needed to understand what it is before you set about “solving” it.  In this area there was some good input from those more experienced, that this the toughest one for a product manager to embrace.  In other words, to let go of some of the ego or the control freak side, and include and encourage involvement from others to get the best designs and outcome for your product.

So all of these first two stages can be done brilliantly only to see it fall apart at the Execution phase.  A fabulous comment made here was around checking in with the correct audience – in other words, if you have only ever asked similar minded people whether they like this product and then wish to launch to a much wider group – you might find the execution phase a tough one!  Never mistake yourself for the end user:-)

The last of the call-outs were the Do’s and the Don’ts!  Vaughn’s lists were well received and endorsed by the group, unfortunately as we started to add to these, a fire alarm went off and we reconvened to another location.  The scribe at this point lost track of comments here, but the group was in fine form and continued with great enthusiasm at the next venue where we went round the table and got a top piece of advice from everyone.

Another great session of knowledge sharing and experiences, kicked off brilliantly by Vaughn, and hearty contributions from our Prod Anon-ers.

See you on the 20th of June, when Steve Bauer takes us on the topic of Decision making, and don’t forget Product Camp is on the 20th of July, which will mean no dedicated Product Anonymous session.

Adoption of a Product Manager – Reflection & Learnings of the 1st year

This session will focus on what this newly minted product manager learnt in his first year of on-the-job product management training & a back-to-basics approach to learning & simplifing the product management process.

If you’re new to product management or interested in what the role is really like, you’ll get some great insights.

If you’ve been around the block for a while or manage/mentor product managers, this talk will give you fresh eyes on how to make the newbie product manager experience better to help them (& you) succeed faster.

Speaker: Vaughn Harber is a product manager for several modules of PageUp People’s integrated talent management software. Until the interview for his current role, he had never heard of this thing called ‘product management’ but it sounded interesting. Now he can’t imagine doing anything else.

Location: Mail Exchange Hotel on the corner of Collins & Spencer. Once down the escalator, walk to the left of the bar which leads to the restaurant. We’ll be in the function room at the far left of the restaurant.

Time: 6 – 6:30p – arrival & drinks.  Talk starts at 6:30pm

RSVP here

How does a product manager lead innovation?

The FMCG sector has much experience in this area, so what can we learn from them? In sectors where pivoting, planned obsolescence, and iterative cycles are the norm, what works in these areas to allow for innovation and what does not? And finally, what can the individual product manager, as leader and influencer do to encourage innovative practices in their organisation and amongst their team?

Based on her talk ‘New ways to drive innovation & new business development in the FMCG/retail space’ presented at Hargraves’ Connect Melbourne conference, Theresa Saldanha will be presenting some of her thoughts and ideas for discussion at the next Product Anonymous on May 2nd.

What is the role of the sector, the institution and the people in driving innovation? What role does the product manager play here in encouraging innovation in the people they work with and themselves? Some obvious sectors have been very good at this in the past, so what processes and tools do they use to embed this behaviour and way of thinking? Other sectors, such as the digital marketplace have embraced practices that foster innovation, so what are those practices and what doesn’t work so well? If your environment hasn’t been set up to support creative thinking and innovative execution what steps can you take to change that? does it have to be disruptive or can it just start with listening more?

The session plans to look at some of the tools, processes & learnings from other sectors as well as practical tools that one can use, games that help to change things from being the same all the time. This session is a great opportunity to share learnings & thoughts across sectors, so bring your thinking hats along.

Theresa Saldanha is passionate about driving growth into the consumer goods space through innovation, which has led her to explore techniques & methodologies used in other sectors. Theresa is an FMCG Marketing specialist & Director at WhyNot! Innovate, which specialises in leveraging industry collaboration to drive growth, profitability & innovation.
—-
NEW LOCATION: Bottom End at 579 Little Collins (between Spencer & King). They have wifi & food. http://thebottomend.com.au

Talk starts about 6:30p.  Chatting & drinking from 6p onwards. See you there!

Eventbrite sign-up: http://prod-anon-may22013.eventbrite.com/

I read this article by Google group product manager Kenneth Norton of what he asks product managers when he is hiring. I found it fascinating and am basing this months topic on the principles inside it.

Would you be looking for the same characteristics in a product manager that Kenneth is looking for?  Kenneth’s background is an engineering one, so does his approach lean to much to this bias?  And if this set of questions defines what a product manager is, do we feel this captures us well?

Lots more questions to pose than I have included here – It will be interesting to hear from those who have recently gone through the process themselves and those who ask the questions.

Where will we be?  Bull and Bear from 6pm.

We’ve updated the public google calendar for April & May meetups due to the Anzac weekend in April.

The new dates are Thursday May 2nd & May 30th.

Our next session is March 21st.

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.

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!