Home / Proposed Sessions

Proposed Sessions

Below are a list of sessions that have been proposed for the 2011 Rocky Mountain ProductCamp.  Sessions will be voted on by the participants with the most popular sessions getting on the event schedule.  Check back often as online voting will open up beginning on October 18th.

Want to join in?  Click here to propose a session.

Superman & Clark Kent: Mobile’s Dual Role in Saving the World One Text Message at a Time

Presenter: Cassie Bair
Category:  Product Strategy
Format: Roundtable Breakout

Text mobile donations and engagement for nonprofits hit the main stream market immediately following the devastating Haiti earthquake. The halo effect of text donation has gained additional prominence after every major natural disaster, generating a Superman reputation for saving the world. But nonprofits and government entities can – and should – use text in many other ways. The everyday Clark Kent persona of mobile engagement is critical in the long-term success of any mobile campaign. This session will provide attendees with a brief overview of how nonprofits/government entities use text engagement in the US and internationally and the “Kryptonite” of any text engagement campaign. The audience will then break into roundtable discussions on the ways in which text engagement could be leveraged for social good. This session is ideal for nonprofits interested in text engagement, government organizations exploring mobile programs or brands interested in mobile CSR relationships.

Lean Product Managment – A Learning & Agile Product Approach

Presenter: Timothy Bates
Category:  Product Strategy
Format: Town Hall

Lean Strategies are experiencing a resurgence today. Focused mostly on Start-ups as a result of the popularity of Eric Ries new book, the question for this session is: What does this mean for Product Management outside the Start-up? This session, after a brief overview of Lean principles will be an interactive discussion where participants are encouraged to bring their experiences and challenges.

Innovating the Innovation Matrix: Radical Innovation re-defined.

Presenter: Marianne Carr
Category:  Other
Format: Presentation

This is my capstone research project for my Masters from the University Denver University College Leadership and Organization program with a specialty in Strategic Innovation and Change. It is based on two strategies important to business today– innovation and social responsibility. A new innovation matrix strives to change the perception of innovation from being about risk, to being about the benefits an innovation can bring to society. By infusing social responsibility into innovation, an organization can reap financial benefits. A search of current literature sheds light on the ramifications of merging social responsibility with innovation and measuring financial outcomes. The search also supplies context for evaluating this new model of innovation. This secondary research suggests that social responsibility can have a positive influence on innovation, although there is no consensus on how to measure financial impact, and a new innovation matrix model may have merit.

Product Owner and Product Manager Scars Directly from the Horses’ Mouth

Presenter: Catherine Connor, Jennifer Fawcett, etc.
Category:  Product Lifecycle Management
Format: Panel Discussion

Ask your questions to a seasoned team of product professionals who will offer their honest and sometimes different perspectives of both roles. A panel of product managers and product owners who have lived the struggle of effectively performing all the necessary product management functions when development goes Agile. Bring your hard questions about the product owner role, the product manager role, and product marketing roles, accountability for each, challenges, egos, and how they deal with them. Panelists will share tips to avoid the pitfalls agile brings to product management, and their experience overcoming the challenges.

Product Managers and Product Owners: Cutting Their Teeth

Presenter: Catherine Connor and Jennifer Fawcett
Category:  Product Lifecycle Management
Format: Ask the Expert

The agile community has become remotely and sometimes obsessively familiar with the need for a strong Product Manager/Product Owner partnership. Many new Product Owner materials and guides published over the past 24 months help validate and educate business in the need for both roles within a successful product management environment. But the truth is, adopting one, the other, or both has its share of personality challenges in its adoption process into the agile culture. Learn from two product management experts: one with a passion for Product Management, and the other with a passion for Product Ownership about their experience, successes, and failures in defining and executing both roles in an attempt to do the one thing product management always aspires to do: to stay ahead of the market.

Experiences in leveraging idea sites to better understand your users

Presenter: Catherine Connor
Category:  Product Lifecycle Management
Format: Town Hall

In the era of LinkedIn and Facebook, product managers seem to miss out on the value crowd-sourcing can provide in better understanding customer needs. Idea sites where users submit product ideas and converse with each other and with product managers provide a way to stay in touch with user needs, provide them feedback on the evolution of their ideas into product features, and idea votes give quantitative data to business cases. This town hall focuses on sharing experiences among product managers currently using idea sites to engage with their users, as well as providing information to product managers interesting in learning more about leveraging idea sites to better engage with their users.

It will cost how much to develop this product!?

Presenter: Isaac Davenport
Category:  Product Development
Format: Town Hall

As every disciple of Dilbert knows, early in the product development process there is typically a dysfunctional interaction between marketing and engineering. Frequently this interaction ends in the engineers creating a development cost estimate that either seems very high or an estimate that meets the expectation of those developing the business case, but turns out to be very optimistic. We will discuss factors that drive development cost and success including: flaws in the estimating process, application of risk management to development, knowing the start and knowing the end, the difference between R and D, having the right technical team, and optimization gremlins hiding behind requirements containing the word “best”.

Exploring the Power of Social Media

Presenter: Jamie Duklas
Category:  Marketing Execution
Format: Town Hall

Everybody is talking about it. It seems like everyone is doing it. But you are still unsure if you and your company are ready to give it a try. Social Media is a great way to connect with your customers, even if you are in a B2B market. This session will remove some of the misconceptions and mystique surrounding social media. It will cover how to get started, provide real examples and some best practices to use whether you are just getting started or looking to improve your success.

The Chasm in Your Portfolio

Presenter: Keith Duncan
Category:  Product Strategy
Format: Town Hall

This Town Hall will address the disconnect between the classic bottom-up product/project portfolio and the top-down financial planning activities done at the executive level. The inability to bridge between these two views is a key reason why NPD process initiatives lose executive support. The goal of the session is to discuss the tools, techniques and approaches that can provide all stakeholders with the views and information they need for effective decision support.

Need a Better Way to Measure New Product Investments?

Presenter: John Farnbach
Category:  Product Strategy
Format: Presentation

If you need to compare new product investments directly against growth goals, drop in on this sneak preview of a still unpublished metric that’s ideal for new product investments. Unlike commonly used financial metrics, Discounted Growth Valuation (DGV) is a yardstick that’s traceable to growth goals and funding levels, with uniform comparisons across diverse product lines. Simple sales ratios don’t give you quantitative hurdle rates related to growth goals. Net Present Value and its cousins measure economic returns, but not growth contribution. DGV wraps all the aspects of new product investment together into a uniform metric for all product lines and all management levels.

What’s Holding Back your New Product Ship?

Presenter: John Farnbach
Category:  Product Strategy
Format: Town Hall

Your new product programs need to sail fast and smooth through today’s rough seas. But you may have some anchors that are holding the ship back. You’re probably not alone. Participate with your peers in a town hall discussion to identify common barriers to product development success and how to remove them.

Startup Product Management

Presenter: Michael Jones
Category: Product Management Careers
Format: Ask the Expert

How many of you have worked in a startup where product management is nothing but a buzz word, or better yet, non-existent? Startups are driven by vision, ego, emotion, survival and other distorting elements. Many times one function can dominate the whole company, such as sales or engineering. This session will be a forum to share past experiences, learn from each other, and ask the question: Can product management really happen in startups or do we need something different?

When a new product challenges the company’s status quo

Presenter: Jorge Latre
Category: Product Strategy
Format: Panel Discussion

Are you working on a new product with great potential but which doesn’t quite fit your company’s current business model? It happens often – and can be painful. Do you remember United’s Ted? Apple’s Newton? Are Tablet PCs competing with iPads? Yet others succeed. For instance, Nestle, traditionally a consumer packaged goods company that relies on mass distribution channels, brought Nespresso to market: coffee machines; patented capsules; a coffee club; limited editions; internet channel. Way different from ground coffee in a can. The key is to design not just the new product, but also the business model that goes around it; and then to include in the commercialization plan all the company changes that will enable the product to succeed. In this session we will share a few in-depth examples, then turn to your experiences – past and present, successful and less successful – and draw insight on how to succeed.

OFFSHORING – Is this a right decision for your product?

Presenter: Dick Lee
Category: Product Development
Format: Panel Discussion

What should a Product Manager consider before deciding to offshore/outsource a product or service? How have companies fared and what are the lessons learned? A local Denver company, NoKero Inc., will be used to set the context surrounding the discussion of outsourcing. With this in mind, as well as the audience’s own experiences, an esteemed panel will delve into this issues and explore this hot topic further. This session will surely generate some vigorous discussion and shouldn’t be missed.

Take Stock of Your Product

Presenter: Larry McKeogh
Category: Product Management Careers
Format: Town Hall

You spend all this time working on a product or service but how much time have you spent on your own product? How do you convey your worth, are you well positioned in the market, are you aware of how the market is changing, do you know what your “customer” wants (aka boss). Whether you are in the hunt for a new opportunity or just looking to secure your future at your current gig take a little time to step back and ask yourself some critical questions. This session will help you with that and maybe you can help others as well.

The Future of Product Management

Presenter: John Milburn
Category: Product Management Careers
Format: Town Hall

Product management has grown and matured over the last 20 years, but what does the next decade hold for product management? Will product management grow or will Apple’s “benevolent dictator” model win? What skills will hiring managers look for in the coming years? Will lean principles create as much disruption as agile? How will the next generation of “millennial” product managers change our industry? Most importantly, what do YOU need to do to prepare yourself for the next 10 years? Join Pragmatic Marketing Instructor and ProductCamp Austin Co-Founder John Milburn for a look into the future – and how to make sure you are leading the way instead of following.

Finding design mistakes that kill success

Presenter: Larry Marine
Category: Product Design
Format: Town Hall

Attendees will participate in a moderated UX design analysis of a product or website, learning and practicing a proven technique that quickly identifies common design mistakes that kill success. This is a straight-forward technique you can use on your own products right away, doesn’t take long, and opens everyone’s eyes to common design mistakes… and how to correct them. This format is very interactive and invites questions and discussion from the attendees. Larry serves merely to moderate and guide the discussion along a proven track. Larry created a well attended monthly group (UX Design SIG in San Diego) that has followed this format for 15 years and the waiting list for companies to have their product evaluated at these meetings is a year long.

Sales Driven Voice of the Customer – The Horror!

Presenter: Michael May
Category: Requirements Definition
Format: Town Hall

When does one customer represent the target market or help create the best product? Ever had management, or a product manager, decide to change a product because they talked to one customer? Crazy! A product needs to provide value to your whole target market. Join me for a discussion on the benefits of being market driven compared to sales driven. We’ll get into activities you can do (VOC, VOM, surveys, market research, etc.) and available tools to get that market input so you can create products that solve market problems.

Agile Portfolio Steering

Presenter: Ronica Roth
Category: Product Development
Format: Workshop

In this *interactive* session, people will participate in a short *simulation* which begins to show how to apply Lean & Agile practices to steering a portfolio of product initiatives. Got dev teams using Scrum and/or Kanban? Let’s explore together how to leverage their flexibility, quality, and speed to produce great features that are aligned to business goals. We’re not talkin’ stories and iterations here, we’re talking about managing MMFs and initiatives over the long haul, and using rich data and visualizations to move with the market.

“So you want loyal customers. Tell me about your customer experience planning process.”

Presenter: Gordon Sims and Pamela DeBellis
Category: Other
Format: Town Hall

Delivering value and solutions to problems is an expectation in B2B relationships. A Value Proposition is a clear statement of results a customer gets from using a company’s products or services. But are solid value propositions enough to earn customers’ loyalty? What is required to make customers conclude your company is great to do business with and recommend your company to a friend or colleague? This session will 1) present the premise that B2B relationships involve multiple interactions that wrap the value proposition and contribute to the total customer experience and 2) seek participants’ views on • How they plan total customer experience and does it have an impact? • What factors have the greatest influence on a positive customer experience and loyalty? How do you know? • Who in your company owns or cares about planning the customer experience? Product management? Sales? Someone else? Nobody?

Measure Everything – Knowing your funnels, metrics and how to manipulate them for your advantage

Presenter: Bill Quinn
Category: Marketing Execution
Format: Town Hall

Is your marketing organization viewed as a revenue generator? Today’s business climate requires smarter more targeted marketing. This starts with identifying you customers and where in the funnel they are. This session will quickly cover funnel basics and then dive into extracting the important information you and your team need to make the smart choices to generate revenue.

______________________________________________________________________

If there is a session you saw from last year and want to redo it or another session from another ProductCamp you could present, submit it!  More than likely there are others that didn’t see it or are interested in it too.

Here are some sample sessions: