Follow the links below for more information, slides and notes of the sessions. Photos will also be posted on the ProductCamp Toronto Flickr Pool (tag=”pct2013″).
| Career Development & Hiring |
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| Your Roadmap: Developing a Career Plan | Hiring and The Art of Selecting Product Managers |
| Marketing Your Product |
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| I Have a MVP: Now What? |
Ignite Session – 5 Minute Talks: Various Presenters
7 Keys to Blogging – for Product / Marketing Managers: Maddy Dilski
Why is it important to Blog about your product / launch / marketing initiatives?
What will blogging do for my product / launch / business?
How much will this cost?
What are the key learnings to doing this well?
How much time is this going to take?
Can I do this as a hobby, or does this become my full time job (this option will NOT fly with the boss!)?
How do I assess how much work this is?
What about hiring a professional blogger to do this work – is that possible?
E-commerce Trends & Strategies: Rosalina Lin-Allen
While other channels have suffered during the recession, e-commerce continues to show impressive growth, averaging a 13%+ growth rate year-over-year (source: eMarketer, July 2012). With such opportunity your brand needs to remain competitive by offering shoppers an exceptional experience.
Learn valuable tips and strategies to optimize your e-commerce site for increased sales; best practices for improved channel performance, and key consumer, technology and market trends.
10 Tech Trends: How do Product / Marketing Managers use them? Charles Dimov
Tech Trends are cool, but how do I use them as a Product Manager / Marketing Manager?
Review & Interactive discussion about the practicality, and how of using the latest trends.
Audience participation will be key!
Noise Cancelling Social Strategies:Jordan Tomesch
Have you ever wished your company or your product could be the center of attention? I will explore several options on how to boost your impressions on social media. Want something revolutionary? Want something more than the traditional that can cancel the noise of social media? You got it. Let me introduce you to a revolutionary app called Grapevine, which is geared to get organizations and their content viral.
Social Media Channels: Shanta Nathwani
As Product Managers, we want to get the word out about our products, get feedback and engage our audience. How do we do that? Which social media channels should I be putting our product onto? How do I manage it all? What tools are available? This and more can be answered in this session.
YOUR Roadmap: Developing a career plan – Steve Gaylor, Pragmatic Marketing Plan your career, don’t let your career path be an accident. New to Product Management and Marketing? Want to break in? Learn the role, the trends and the approach of creating a career plan. Here is the fact: Product Management and marketing continues to evolve and represents a growing population of professionals who want to better understand their roles and career paths. This session will look at responsibilities, roles, trends and career opportunities for Product Managers.
Hiring and the Art of Selecting Product Managers: The PM Recruiting Roadmap – Alexander Stobe
Whether you’re hiring your first product manager or building a team, you’ll be making some vital decisions. Product Management is the glue that holds a business together. It’s the difference between good and great companies.
Selecting the right Product Manager is crucial, but spotting them isn’t always easy. Resumes help, but they can also mislead. It’s even trickier when you’re looking to develop the potential of a junior PM or fresh grad. The good news is that it can be done, and it can be done well.
In this interactive session you’ll learn to read people, not just resumes, so that you can select the best PM for your team. We’ll share some of the insights and best practices that have been honed over decades of experience recruiting Product Managers and other professionals in the local tech sector. Take away great interview questions, and other tactics that will be the foundation for how you build your winning PM team.
Pricing- You’re Probably Leaving Money on the Table: Alaine Meloche.
Pricing is not one-shape-fits-all. Cost+, legacy-, or competitor-based pricing may lead you to leave money on the table. You need to consider both the value that you add to buyers as well as your corporate objectives. This becomes even more complicated when you’ve got an entirely new, innovative product or service. The talk will highlight these topics and show you how to think about them when setting your prices. Bring your questions and learn about how leading product managers use pricing to support innovative strategies.
This would be an interactive session with the presenter leading discussions by providing an overview of key pricing approaches.
Alain Meloche, Managing Partner of Pricing Cloud in Canada, has lead workshops across the world including Canada, the U.S., Singapore, Shanghai, Paris, and Johannesburg.
Steve Johnson on “Products as services; services as products”
What are you selling—a service or a product? And what’s the difference? Many teams need to package their services as products—delivered consistently with standard pricing, sales sheets, and marketing materials. Many product teams are realizing that customers perceived their products as services—and need to look beyond the software and hardware to the importance of product analytics, best practices, and business rationale.
This session is chock full of examples that show the services wrapped around products and services delivered as products. If you’re thinking about applying product management to your products and services, you’ll enjoy this session!
About Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson is a recognized thought leader on product marketing and management processes. Under 10 Consulting is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product marketing and management team. Learn more at http://www.under10consulting.com
Market Driven Product: 10 Metrics every PM should know – Charles Dimov
How are you running & guiding your Product Line, or Category? Are you on top of all the metrics that tell you if your product is doing well, or languishing? When the VP or CEO ask you questions about the health of your business, are you quaking or flourishing? Find out 10 keys to what all Product Managers should have their eye on.
SPAvolution: Using Single Page Applications to Create Minimum Viable Products – Milan Chotai
Complemented by powerful Javascript utility libraries, the emergence of frameworks like Angular, Ember, Backbone, Knockout and others are shifting development focus from server to client. This discussion will highlight the benefits to entrepreneurs and product owners.
Quest for the Minimum Viable Product: Eric Rogness.
As an established business with a recognized brand and a budget to match, is it better to do 3 of the things off your wish list for this year, and do them big, big, BIG? Or to try 8 things, put something out there that adds value, see what sticks, and double down on the strategies that take off?
Startups should hardly need convincing to trim things down, given their limited resources and race to market. But even here, many promising ambitions become hopelessly mired in feature creep.
Let’s explore the value of starting small, learning and iterating; challenges to be overcome in the implementation; and entertain scenarios when a minimum viable product may be a bad idea in the first place.
About the Speaker
Eric consults as a technical product manager and is tinkering away at the next big thing in social payments.
The Product Manager’s Toolbox: Allan Neil
What are the essential tools in the Product Manager’s toolbox? If you are a seasoned Product Manager, come and share the contents of your trusted toolbox with the up-and-comers, if you are new to Product Management, come and get some ideas about the most valuable tools you should be learning and “carrying” with you to your next Product Management job.
UX Design Basics: Rami Tabbah
What are the 5 things I need to know about UX design? Where do I start with all of this. Nobody has asked me to get involved in UX design… do I need to get into this detail, too? What are the basics that Product Managers need to know about UX Design, and why is it important?
Create a Blue Ocean Strategy for your Product: Cristina Tudose
There are six basic approaches to reconstructing market boundaries.
These challenge the six fundamental assumptions underlying many companies’ strategies that keep companies trapped competing in red oceans. Instead of looking within the accepted boundaries of competition, the Six Paths Framework allows managers to look systematically across them to create blue oceans.
I will present these six basic assumptions and the pathway managers can take to break away from head-to-head competition towards blue ocean creation.
The six paths have general applicability across industry sectors. These principles address how an organization can create blue oceans by looking across the six conventional boundaries of competition, reduce their planning risk by following the four steps of visualizing strategy, create new demand by unlocking the three tiers of noncustomers and launch a commercially-viable blue ocean idea by aligning unprecedented utility of an offering with strategic pricing and target costing and by overcoming adoption hurdles
PowerPoint Karaoke: Peter Ganza
Presentations are key to Product Management, the way you present a product internally and externally can have a major impact on how people view not only you and your company but, your product, solution or service.
This concept originally came from Jennifer Doctor, and was attended by Peter Ganza at ProductCamp South Florida in June. It was such a hit, he decided to bring it to his native Toronto. Peter will briefly introduce the session with a few ground-rules, an energetic start before tackling his own take on random slides for 90 seconds, and close up with some comments at the end.
The session will be high-energy and very interactive. Attendees will volunteer to present slides which you have never seen before for 90 seconds. You can choose to speak to the slides (good luck!) or, tie them into Product Management in some fashion.
How to Manage a Technical Team: Vahid Jozi
Tales from the trenches. It’s about process, communication and culture.
I have a MVP. Now what? Lyndon Johnson
A guide to taking a minimum viable product to market. This session will include how to develop a PR and marketing strategy that delivers tangible results as quickly as possible with the minimum investment by ensuring that the right message is delivered to the right audience, at the right time via the right channel.