I attended Product Camp Atlanta for the second time today. As the website says its a ” collaborative, user organized professional conference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics.” As with my first product camp, I enjoyed my time today and it was worth giving up a Saturday to find time to network, collaborate, share, and learn.
Enclosed are the notes I took from the four sessions I attended.
Session #1 – Driving Sales with Compelling Messaging
Russell Scherwin (@rscherwin)
- Use relevant examples with items that people can relate to and understand.
- Make sure the example is relevant to the environment/industry.
- Use a reference customer where appropriate to make impact.
- If you don’t have a reference customer, get one (may involve giving a product away, but make sure to get commitment of involvement. from them.)
- The goal of a product message is to create a position and value. (relevant, differentiated, defensible)
- example: Inception (movie) is about planting an idea that can grow on its own
- Marketing starts with the product. Sales starts with the audience.
- Sales needs to know why specific topic will help them drive relevance and differentiation.
- Help sales gain credibility.
- Up-front credibility reduces cycle time and competitive threats.
Session #2 – Transitioning a service into a product (small group discussion)
The speaker for this topic was not able to make it, so a small number of attendees stayed to have a round-table like discussion on the topic.
- Thought: How do I make a service that I have provided to be scalable?
- How many people are needed to execute in a predictable / consistent manner?
- One thought might be to use a partner program
- At what level do you move from solving a problem for one customer to something that solves problems for multiple people?
- The process to create the service is a template
- Selling blocks of hours is not a product as a service because its not repeatable. Meaning that if you are selling blocks of service it’s more like consulting.
- What about value based billing for services? Service fee is based on value of results?
- billing hourly – in this model the payee pays more less competency
- billing based on value means payee doesn’t pay for any learning curve and gives risk mitigation against low performing results.
Session #3 – Deciding WHAT to build
- Dennis Stevens (@dennisstevens)
- Fedex logo – do you know of the secret symbol (arrow between E and X)?
- With the The “how” trap – People are focused on the how but this is irrelevant to the what.
- If we focus on the how, the effort expands faster than value
- Over analyze and over design
- focus on the next highest increment of value
- goat path – a story that defines the absolute minimum required to walk a happy path of an activity from one end to another
- Each successive level defines more (gravel road, paved road, super highway)
- start with the simplest thing that might possibly work
- reduce risk early with as little investment as possible
- be focused on small specific objectives
- Delivery is over-engineered
- The runway is more important than the road-map
- Make work ready so the next most important thing can be worked on
- Establish context and delivery early and frequently (establish value early)
- Over analyze and over design
- Customer value vs business value
- What the customer perceives as important and is willing ot pay for (customer value)
- Decrease costs, increase revenue, increase service (business value)
- Revisit the road-map frequently
Session #4 – Great Groups: Building sustainable high performance product teams
Richard Cullom
- People need a reason to believe
- The company they work for
- The person they work for
- The people they work with
- The epic – people need to be part of something bigger than themselves
- Servant leadership –
- Build community
- Foster teamwork
- Get the team to care about each other
- Be the moral backbone (they take on your philosophy)
- Risk Mitigation for the team
- Remove bad apples (PDQ)
- Mentor and promote the people who want to move
- Be the steward of calm and happy
- Know what people want to do
- Career goals
- Personal goals
Nice. Thanks for doing this!