On Product Management

Sessions I recommend at PCamp Silicon Valley

Hi everyone – Alan here. I’ve been fairly silent for quite a while, so I thank Saeed for his continued writing.

I hope to see as many of you as possible at this year’s Product Camp Silicon Valley! There are so many interesting sessions, I thought I would list a few that I recommend you attend (and vote on!):

• Why would anyone want to hire you? (Barb Nelson of Pragmatic Marketing): I heard Barb speak on this topic at Product CampSeattle, and I was very impressed. She recommends that you think of your professional self as a product that people are buying … and this will help you think about what your buyer wants and needs, rather than the feature/function on your resume. Barb is an engaging speaker, and normally people pay big bucks to hear her speak.
• Agile product managers: how agile changes waterfall PM processes and thinking (Agile PM guru Rich Mironov): Rich groks the intersection of agile and PM better than anyone that I know, and he is a stellar speaker. I heard him speak on this topic at PCamp New York City last summer, and it was awesome. Rich isn’t a theoretician … he’s a practitioner and he can help you make it happen.
• PM as a strategic asset and Why product launches go bad by Tom Grant of Forrester: Tom Grant is the only full-time analyst I know dedicated to product management, and a good friend of OnProductManagment.net.

I will also be speaking … you can find my proposals here:

• Credibility and Authority in Product Management: Stop complaining about your lack of authority, and do something about it. I offer strategies to assess and improve your personal impact.
• What do buyers really want?: If you want to improve product results, you need to look beyond product features and investigate the whole buying process. I will offer practical strategies to pinpoint the bottlenecks in your revenue stream and continuously improve it. Hint: It’s heavily based on buyer interviews and Win/Loss Analysis! I teach you how to do it yourself.

This will be my sixth product camp this year, and I keep going to them because I love the interactions, networking, and I always get new ideas.

Please stop me in the hall and say hello!

Alan

Related posts:

1. P-Camp Silicon Valley 2009
2. PCamp Austin: Please weigh in with questions and suggestions
3. OnPM speaking @ pcamp NYC
4. SV PCamp proposed session: It’s never about price