aktually » New York

ProductCampNYC 2011!

Andrew — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 15:00:06 +0000

I’ve gone to ProductCampNYC for the past few years, and it’s always a great experience! This year was the first year that I submitted some ideas for speaking, and I was fortunate that folks were interested in HTML5 (or at least, as much as I am!). But my bigger takeaway this year was from the keynote speaker, Brian Fitzgerald of Knewton, and his very keen comments on a “Product Culture.” In short, I think of the culture as the thing that gets everyone pointed in the right direction, while his point about focus gets everyone moving quickly in that direction. I’ve seen situations where Product folks resist investing the time to contribute to the culture, and that’s a real shame. If anything, I believe that Product folks are responsible for motivating customers to engage with the product, as well as motivating the team to build, iterate, and innovate.

I especially liked two points of his that related to build/iterate/innovate, which were:

creating space vs. churning features, and
iterative process – customer feedback

The first, “creating space vs. churning features,” is so relevant to today’s software products that need to scale. Build a simple product first, then layer on convenience and complexity as needed. In contrast, so many organizations end up trying to build in everything, and end up with products like Microsoft Word where so much was invested in every detail, with only a fraction of its capabilities being used.

The second, “iterative process – customer feedback” is so important to maintaining great products. Ultimately, any product that gets launched will inevitably get feedback. Two lessons that I’ve learned the hard way: first, set yourself up to measure everything about your users. And second, always leave room to reinvent the product. It’ll never be perfect the first time around, and frankly, using a combination of KPIs/quantitative data as well as observations in the field will be a huge source of innovation. There’s no such thing as “build it right the first time;” it’s really more like “build it good enough the first time, and be prepared to change.”

ProductCampNYC 2010

Andrew — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 15:04:21 +0000

So following my earlier recommendation, I jumped out of bed on a crisp Saturday morning and headed over to the Microsoft offices in midtown Manhattan for the 2010 version of ProductCampNYC! There were great conversations, a ton of expertise, and an awesome raffle to close it out.

To give you a sample of the topics, I heard about:

entrepreneurship and its role in fostering great product managers
how difficult it is to really figure out what consumers really want
the key skills and attributes that make your career as a product manager stand out, and
how consumers and their behaviors need to be contextualized to realize the full value of the insights about your product (physical good, service, solution)

It got me really thinking about my own career and aspirations to do product management work. If you get the chance to go to a ProductCamp, don’t hesitate to sign up and contribute!

BarCamp / ProductCampNYC

Andrew — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:08:08 +0000

ProductCampNYC was a fantastic event where I met likeminded individuals and enjoyed a day that’s dedicated to the amorphous blob of a role/function that is the Product Manager. I highly recommend going if it’s offered in the future!

I’m particularly interested in the product manager function both from an improve-my-everyday-work perspective as well as this-could-be-the-next-step-in-my-career point of view. And what found today is this:

Product Managers are the customer/are not the customer.
Product Managers occupy a very interesting intersection between senior management, marketing, and development (mind you, this is biased towards my background in software development, YMMV when it comes to physical goods).
Product Managers communicate a lot/do not communicate enough.

What do I do with this as a project manager in a Engineering organization (not a rhetorical question)? More on this topic later!