ProductCamp Austin: A great success!
The second ever ProductCamp started in Austin at 8am this morning. I had never been to any BarCamp-style “un-conference” before, but I must say I really enjoyed it. It was 
active, informative and agile, in the sense that we the participants, voted on the sessions at the beginning of the day, we were expected to actively discuss, interupt and add our own value to the proceedings. Open sessions were guided and moderated, some a bit more successfully than others, but all that I attended had value to me as a marketer and professional. They had a Twitter account open and many of us Twittered about it, and posted photos to Flickr in this group. My Twitter here at CharlieNB.
I enjoyed a session on general Agile/Scrum and roles, another on Agile best practices and horror stories with Ross Hobbie. I was interested in others managing content and/or marketing via Scrum processes, but no others were. After the session though, I spoke with several people that had great product marketing teams and development teams, but no user-centered design or UX resources. They were interested in how UX could help with their prototyping and products, several good discussions!
The Global Product Mgmt session was a little too open and unfocused, but to be fair, it’s a REALLY broad and complex topic, it could have been broken into 3-4 different sessions.
I jumped into UX 101 with Ben Phenix late, but it was well recieved by all, clear, simple concepts that were easy to apply. I’ve been through and given a lot of UX presos, and this one was good.
Pat Scherer gave more of a presentation rather than a discussion, but her detailed points on Priorities and Roadmaps was very complete and clearly well proven in the real world.
Next up was a Product Management Tools roundtable… very well moderated by (I think) Cindy Phillips. We covered a lot, from requirements gathering, to basic excel templates, into productivity tools. Here are the ones I captured: Blackblot, xcelsius, devonthink, xmind, “montecarlo analysis” excel plug-ins, Mindmap, MindMeister, Google Trends, search volume, surveys with Survey Monkey and QuestionPro, customer wiki’s and communities, Salesforce QA (? not sure of the name), Markettools, Passenger, PHPBB communities, BasecampHQ, fogbugs (tracks accuracy of estimates), Jira, JOTT, Rally, Webex, Breeze, Camtasia, Snagit, Yugma, Netmeeting, Lifehacker. Whew!!!
My last session was with Charlie Ray on navigating political minefields. Charlie was very entertaining, and also shared many good insights… management styles aside, there was a lot of good info to bring to daily life. My favorite quote is “Nip the G.M.O.O.T” meaning stop CEO’s from saying “Get Me One Of Those” when seeing features and adding them willy-nilly to products. Charlie also won the award for best session at the end of the day. Good job Charlie!!!
Throughout several of the sessions, the differences between startups with scarce time, personnel and financial resources versus larger, mature companies with sometimes too many resources and plenty of budget were apparent. Some of us discussed the idea of a StartupCamp, either a seperate BarCamp, or as a track at the next Product or BarCamp. We’ll be gathering thoughts and discuss further, so contact me if you are interested.
I really want to thank the organizers of the event, Paul Young and John Milburn, they did a great job.
Sponsors took care of the space, coffee/snacks, lunch, tshirts and mugs, thanks!
I certainly recommend the BarCamp concept and certainly will participate in the next Product or any other Camp. (Full world wide list here.)
Hope to see you at the next BarCamp event!
ProductCamp, BarCamp, UX, product management, product marketing, Austin, agile, global products, StartupCamp
Technorati Tags: ProductCamp, BarCamp, UX, product management, product marketing, Austin, agile, global products, StartupCamp
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