Name That Business Goal

I’ll give you a customer problem and you guess the customer’s business goal. Prizes to the winners as you learn the value of goal-based vs. problem-based requirements & value props.

Presenter Bio: John Mansour is a product management thought leader. As the founder and managing partner at Proficientz he constantly pushes the envelope to develop new best practices that simplify all aspects of product management, product marketing and sales enablement to help clients accelerate growth. 15 years as a practitioner and 17 as a trainer and consultant.

Product Managers and Tech Leads: A Winning Pair

Are you a product manager or a tech lead? Do you have a hard time determining how to relate to each other? Do you step on each other's toes? Argue? Let's lay down some definition around the value each role provides to the product and to the business they're growing.

Presenter Bio: Daniel Ra is the Director of Project Strategy at Big Nerd Ranch, an Atlanta-based digital product development and training company.

What the hell is a CTO?

Job titles are miss-leading and confusing. In technology, this tension is compounded. What's the difference between a Mid-level and Senior Engineer? How much can a code school student handle? Do we need a technical co-founder? How do we know what we're getting? Understanding a few core concepts can help reduce the frustration and uncertainty. Adding clarity to the tensions can also cut through the noise and keep your team moving forward.

Presenter Bio:Founder and CEO of Polar Notion, a human-centered team of designers and software engineers. He is also CTO of New Story, a startup focused on ending global homelessness through ground breaking solutions like 3D home printers and beyond. A thought-filled software engineer and entrepreneur who understands that deliberate, consistent progress over time is life's greatest growth strategy. Regardless of his job titles, Morgan sees leadership as a choice, not a rank. He strives to make that choice daily and challenges others to do the same.

How Assessing Product/Market Fit and Properly Defining and Prioritizing Requirements Work Together to Drive Success

A discussion on how starting correctly with the right market approach for your product concept - assessing target market, product feasibility, true differentiation, profit potential, and end-to-end customer needs - will maximize success no matter what development process you use.

Presenter Bio: Todd Ague is currently Senior Director - Product Management - Auto Lending Solutions at Equifax. His career spans over 20 years of digital product management and development with AOL, EarthLink, LexisNexis, Verizon and other top-tier B2B and B2C organizations.

How to market-test your product in one week!

Approaches like Lean Startup encourage Product Managers to rapidly iterate and pivot their way to a winning products. However, the details of exactly HOW to do this have been fuzzy... Fortunately, the folks at Google Ventures have come up with a way to rapidly prototype your product and put it in front of customers in just ONE WEEK. The purpose of this session is to provide an overview of their approach so you can (a) understand how they do it, and, (b) consider how you might incorporate their approach into your own product testing approach.

Presenter Bio: Steve Kraus has 20+ years experience 'bridging the gap' between business strategy and technology, helping to translate business needs into meaningful initiatives. Typical roles include business relationship management, as well as defining and driving change. This encompasses a broad number of business functions – IT, customer service, manufacturing, sales & marketing, logistics, and shared services. Steve has worked as a consultant or executive for a number of major companies, including Sears, FedEx, Cox Communications, Olan Mills, and Home Depot, and has made frequent presentations for the Atlanta chapters of PMI and IIBA, focusing on Product Management and Agile Transformation.

Product Manager: The most social role ever

Running meetings, meeting people varying from developers and designers to marketers and customers, makes the PM role a very social one. How  we manage these social interactions and turn them into stakeholder management is key.

Presenter Bio: Ruchir is a seasoned product manager with a technology background and an MBA from UVA Darden. In the past, he has worn various hats - of a consultant, project manager, and people manager for large engagements and corporate customers. He serves customers through empathy and curiosity, employing design thinking principles in his product offerings.

Acceptable Work, Bad Cop: Moving Toward Whole Team Acceptance Testing

Product team members often test for acceptance. How can the whole product team contribute to judging whether a story should be accepted?

Presenter Bio: As an Agilist, Clare Moss works as part of product development teams to support and accelerate development through fast feedback, helping teams to craft more executable user stories. She also owns her Product backlog with emphasis on progressive elaboration, specializing in Front-end Javascript development, back-end development in Python or Node, while serving the team as a test automator using Newman, Protractor, Javascript, Selenium, or Python, and as a Testing teacher, providing unit and integration test review and advisement, exploratory test coaching, a real test jumper - as well as an Agile coach and ScrumMaster

The Bear that Wasn't: Are you really solving the right problems?

In this beloved children’s story, a bear decides to hibernate for winter, but when he wakes up, he realizes that a factory has been built around his cave, trapping him inside. In his many attempts to escape, he insists to the factory employees, managers, etc. that he does not belong inside of a factory and that he is a bear. But every time he comes into contact with a person, they tell him that he is just a silly man - who needs a shave and wears a fur coat. He obviously knows that he is a bear, but because he is told otherwise, he begins to believe the people from the factory. 

Isn’t it much the same in product management, when we are given a problem to solve? How certain are we that we are hearing the ‘true’ problem statement…or even that we haven’t simply been told so often that this is ‘definitely the problem’ – that we start actually believing it…and thereby failing to solve real market problems?

Presenter Bio: Hali brings more than 16 years of experience in the financial services industry and software product management to her role in managing Sales tools for NCR Global Sales Operations. Passionate about the role of product management in the software development process, the evolution of payments, and overall making the world a better place, she is an Accredited ACH Professional as well as being a Certified Product Manager and has served on a number of industry work groups, councils and steering committees, in addition to helping organize ProductCamp Atlanta the last several years. Outside of all things product management, Hali's passions run the gamut from serving her community as a Skilled Supervisor for Atlanta Habitat for Humanity to dreams of being a gearhead, and – in her own words – a love of random furry creatures

SESSION PROPOSAL: Can't fix what you can't measure!

Every year, David Eckoff and Peter Hildebrandt teach us about the blue ocean and customer demand. But what happens after you launch? How do you know that your product is successful? If it isn't succeeding, what do you need to fix? In this workshop, we'll simulate designing a product dashboard. What metrics should you be looking at? Why? And what does a change in a metric really mean?

You won't be learning SQL in this workshop, but you'll definitely learn what questions to ask of your data team to get to the answers that matter.

Presenter Bio: Azhar is a software engineer turned product manager with passion for data. His greatest accomplishment is helping someone get a promotion as a result of his 2016 ProductCamp session. Here's to repeating that feat in 2017!

SESSION PROPOSAL: A Framework for Going From Aimless Product Reports to Purposeful Data Stories

As a product manager, a key role you must play is to bridge the gap between your data and presentation of that data in order to deliver actionable insights. Creating effective “data stories” is a common challenge. We’ll share common patterns to make your job easier by creating a data story together that you can take home with you.

SESSION PROPOSAL: Powerpoint Karaoke!!

For many of us presenting can be as scary as flying on a trapeze without a net...or bull riding....or shark cage diving. Sign up for powerpoint karaoke to help get over that fear and have a little fun in the process. Powerpoint Karaoke (also called powerpoint roulette or battledecks) is an improv game where a person presents a slideshow to an audience without knowing the contents of the slides.

Presenter Bio: Kellie Jones and Erin Shoemaker are friends and colleagues who bonded years ago over a shared passion for banishing boring presentations from the planet.  Coming from two sides of the tech house with 40 years of collective experience in Product Management and Services, they put this shared passion to practice in every presentation by flexing their improv muscles, ruthlessly editing the story, and finding just the right picture to say those thousand words so their audiences are engaged and focused on the message at hand.  

SESSION PROPOSAL: Product Manager: The Perpetual Networker

Have you noticed that highly successful product managers are great with customers, comfortably build internal and external relationships, and seem to be natural "people people"? They may actually be shy but they realize that networking - the art of beneficial relationships - is an essential, deliberate, practiced skill in product management, and they hone it continuously. We will hear and share specific techniques for owning conversations while talking the least; choosing the right customers to call next (maybe not who you think); interviewing instead of presenting; building the most valuable relationships across your organization in 30 days; choosing the right medium for each communication; and leveraging outside opportunities for career growth. This is a deep-dive into the people side of product management, not . Get ready to take notes to share with your team and start applying on Monday!

Presenter Bio: Dale Price is a senior offering manager for IBM. He has managed financial, marketing, CRM, and business intelligence software products and portfolios for over 20 years and directed product development organizations of up to 40 people. Dale has held a variety of management positions for companies ranging from IBM to a 4-person startup and is passionate about customers, product development, and easy-to-use software that solves complex business problems. He has a computer science degree from the University of Central Florida.

SESSION PROPOSAL: Building your influence - The secrets of driving top-line growth by creating compelling messaging and teaming with sales

This session targets those who are measured by revenue. We’ll explore secrets learned by a Product Marketing / Product Management leader gone undercover into the world of direct sales. You will learn to create messaging that energizes sales, and positioning that pulls targets into winnable buying cycles. 

Some of the interactive topics addressed will include:
- strategies that ensure the sales force follows your lead
- questions that sales teams need answered – and the opportunity costs of not doing so
- putting segmentation to use in lowering customer acquisition and retention costs
- top mistakes product marketers make – and why many marketing activities never translate into results

Presenter Bio: Russell currently leads Watson Customer Engagement sales and client for IBM. A passionate Product Management and Marketing leader, Russell has “gone undercover” in sales roles for the past 10 years, to better understand the realities of how sales and sellers operate. Russell has been voted top speaker at multiple industry conferences on multiple continents. He has a passion for technology’s socio-economic impact, and is known for expertly fusing sales, economics and innovation management into a deeply relevant, and entertaining message.

SESSION PROPOSAL: Million Dollar Impact Through Metrics, Analytics, and A/B Testing

Atlanta doesn't talk enough about data analytics and A/B testing. I was able to follow my product's performance on a product scorecard built on (free) analytics tools to identify key areas of improvement. Once identified, I conducted A/B testing on potential fixes to find the best performing change that resulted in real revenue impact. This session is a case study on what I did and how you can do the same for your product.

Note: I presented this session last year and it helped someone get a promotion at work! So, I'll be presenting an updated version of it in 2017.

Presenter Bio: Azhar is a software engineer turned product manager with a passion for data. His greatest accomplishment is knowing his 2016 ProductCamp session helped someone get promoted at work. Here's looking forward to a similar result in 2017!

SESSION PROPOSAL: Virtual Reality (VR) - Is It Ready For Prime Time Product Marketing?

Is virtual reality the next big wave in marketing your products to your customers? This town hall meeting will give you the state of the market place, what is being done with it currently and where it is headed. The brief introduction of VR is based on what is currently in the market place, where the technology is headed and more. Then we will open up the floor to questions, concerns, and experiences as well as your insights on the potential of this promising technology to add raving product fans. The goal is to determine if this technology is just a fad or does VR have a real future in your products marketing mix soon?

Presenter Bio: For over 35+ years Mark has been labeled as a maverick right from the start of his professional sales and marketing career because he refuses to accept the marketing status quo! He has a long career of stirring the pot, questioning why, tipping over sacred cows and also a passion for finding unique uses of today's modern technology to get his clients voice into the minds of potential customers. With over 24+ years in Internet marketing his simple, logical, diverse and down to earth approach to marketing will challenge your thinking way beyond the box.