I have to say that my decision to attend ProductCamp New York turned out to be quite fruitful.
First and foremost, it was a great event. After helping organize 3 ProductCamps here in Toronto, I finally made it out to an event in another city.
The location, the Microsoft office in midtown Manhattan, was easy to reach, preparations for the New York marathon notwithstanding.
The kickoff and keynote
A good crowd had assembled by 9 am for the orientation and then it was off to vote for sessions.
Following the voting was a keynote speech by Jeff Stewart. Jeff made a number of good points about maintaining vision, iterating quickly to learn about customers and markets, and understanding how you will generate revenue before scaling your business. It was good business basics. I tweeted actively during the keynote. But here are a few of my favourite lines from Jeff.
- Part of the product is a repeatable scalable sales process
- Find out what people will pay for, not just what they need
- If you build it they won’t necessarily come. Start selling early. Learn from rejection.
Note that all of these are focused on the business side of things. There is no mention of technology, features, architecture, etc.
Given how a lot of Product Management is done today, there needs to be a real shift to focus on the business side of things.
Voting results and sessions
After the keynote, the voting results were announced. I had posted two potential talks — Product Management Axioms and Lean Communications. Thankfully both got enough votes and I gave two talks during the day.
That didn’t leave a lot of time to attend other sessions, but Steven Haines — one of the organizers — gave a good interactive workshop on strategy, with a focus on the business aspects of Product Management. Like Jeff’s keynote, he reminded people of the business focus that Product Management needs to maintain but worked though some good practical examples.
This is a very important topic that doesn’t get enough coverage. We get too focused on the bits and bytes and details of features and functionality, when the real focus of Product Management has to be the overall business success of the product.
Then came lunch. Kudos to whomever arranged the food. For a free event, the food was outstanding with a great lunch spread, and plenty of snacks and desserts.
Afternoon sessions and prize giveaway
The afternoon went by quickly. The crowd had thinned a bit from the morning. I sat in a couple of talks, including Rich Nutinsky’s talk entitled What Product Managers can learn from Darth Vader. Good title, though not enough Darth Vader in the talk. 🙁
I gave my second talk of the day and moved between a couple of sessions during the last timeslot. Then we all assembled in the common area for a wrap up of the day and the draw for the prizes.
Now I did tweet that I wanted the iPad that was one of the prizes. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in hoping NOT to win a t-shirt or even one of the books. Nothing against t-shirts and books, but the iPad is the current cool high tech giveaway prize. There was some irony in giving away an iPad in an event held at the Microsoft office. I’m surprised MS didn’t offer one of their XBox’s with the new (also very cool) controllerless Kinect interface.
After all the tshirts and books were given away — there must have been at least 30 names drawn — I was feeling a bit hopeful that my name had not yet been picked. But then one of the organizers decided to put all the name that had won prizes back into the box for the iPad draw. A loud chorus of Boos – myself included – erupted from those of us who didn’t want to ruin our odds of winning.
They pulled out the winning business card, and read out my name. Yes, I won the iPad. Awesome. Can’t say much else.
The day ended with a small number of attendees assembling at a local bar — City55. Had good discussions with Trevor Fox (one of the organizers) and Kapil Gupta (one of the attendees)
So that’s it. A good day in many respects.
BTW, I’ve started using the iPad, and will soon post my feedback on it. I know there are many, many “my view of the iPad” posts on the Web. Even some by Product Managers. I’ll see if I can add to what has been said, and not simply repeat existing thoughts and comments.
Saeed