This session will explain the seven phase product management lifecycle, a standard created by the Association of International Product Management & Marketing (AIPMM) and supported by a variety of vendors such as the 280 Group. Every product goes through this lifecycle (whether the company realizes and/or acknowledges it or not), and for every phase there are key questions and decisions that must be taken into account. By understanding the phases of this lifecycle you can ship products that better meet your customer’s needs, deliver increased revenues and profits and avoid common mistakes that can be disastrous.

Phases covered will include:

1. Conceive
2. Plan
3. Develop
4. Qualify
5. Launch
6. Market
7. Retire

Additionally, the session will cover the nine key documents that contain the critical decisions that must be made in order for a product to succeed. If a company leaves out any of these and doesn’t consider the critical issues they risk product failure.

Documents covered will include:
1. Business Case
2. Market Needs (also called market requirements)
3. Product Description (also called product requirements)
4. Market Strategy
5. Roadmap
6. Beta Plan
7. Launch Plan
8. Marketing Plan
9. End of Life Plan

Join us to learn how the lifecycle and corresponding documents can help you and your company ship better products more effectively.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Brian Lawley
CEO & Founder, 280 Group

Brian Lawley is the CEO and Founder of the 280 Group. He is the author three best-selling books, The Phenomenal Product Manager, Expert Product Management and 42 Rules of Product Management and is the former President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA). He was awarded the Association of International Product Marketing Management award for Thought Leadership in Product Management, and has been featured on World Business Review and the Silicon Valley Business Report. He is the editor of the Optimal Product Management blog and newsletter and also writes guest articles for publications such as the Software Development Forum newsletter, Softletter and the SVPMA newsletter.

Prior to founding and running the 280 Group Brian spent many years working on innovative products at world-leading companies, including Digidesign (acquired by Avid), Apple (Product Manager for the MacOS human interface), Claris, Symantec and Whistle Communications. Brian is a Certified Product Manager (CPM) and Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM) and has a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science from the University of California at San Diego with a minor in Music Technology and an MBA with honors from San Jose State University.

What tough questions have you always had about product management or product marketing? What immediate challenges are you facing now that you might want insight about? What do you want to learn about addressing your issues or advancing your product management career?

Join us for a fun and informative game-show style session where you as the audience are invited to stump the experts: a panel with over 150 years of combined product management and product marketing experience as well as authors of the best-selling books The Phenomenal Product Manager, Expert Product Management, 42 Rules of Product Management and 42 Rules of Product Marketing.

Bring you hardest questions – the ones you have always wondered about regarding product management and product marketing – and this expert panel will offer debate, enlightenment and humor. If you succeed in stumping the panel you’ll win a copy of your choice of the 280 Group Press books. Plus, everyone who attends will receive a prize just for participating.

The moderator for this session will be Brian Lawley, the CEO and Founder of the 280 Group. He is the author four best-selling books, The Phenomenal Product Manager, Expert Product Management, 42 Rules of Product Management and the just-released 42 Rules of Product Marketing and is the former President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA). He was awarded the Association of International Product Marketing Management award for Thought Leadership in Product Management, and has been featured on World Business Review and the Silicon Valley Business Report. He is the editor of the Optimal Product Management blog and newsletter and also writes guest articles for publications such as the Software Development Forum newsletter, Softletter and the SVPMA newsletter.

Prior to founding and running the 280 Group Brian spent many years working on innovative products at world-leading companies, including Digidesign (acquired by Avid), Apple (Product Manager for the MacOS human interface), Claris, Symantec and Whistle Communications. Brian is a Certified Product Manager (CPM) and Certified Product Marketing Manager (CPMM) and has a Bachelor’s degree in Management Science from the University of California at San Diego with a minor in Music Technology and an MBA with honors from San Jose State University.

In the new era of big data, cloud, and personalization, no organization can afford to not use user data to build and launch products . Data-driven product management improves efficiency and effectiveness of product development by evaluating right product opportunities, assessing impacts to user base, delighting the customers by providing them what they want, and increasing organization revenue by increasing usage. This session will define how some of the leading silicon valley company are redefining product management by effective use of data and ten metrics that every product management should know as they venture into exciting world of data driven product management.

AS A PRODUCT MANAGER, you are probably inundated with feature and functionality requests based on opinions or circumstances from within your organization. These can include:
• A current crisis: “The VP of Sales needs you to include the following three features so that we can win that big new account!”
• An engineering triumph: “This feature is so cool! We have to include it!”
• A powerful opinion: “The CEO thinks that users will want to access this product on an iPad.”
• A time crunch: “The project is late so you’ll need to cut out the least
important features.”
• A checklist mentality: “Our competitor’s product includes this feature so we have to put it in ours, too!”
This session will discuss approaches to neutralize strong opinions like these and back up your decisions with objective, scientific research. User Centered Design (UCD) allows you to do exactly that — it gives you the hard evidence you need to prioritize feature requests, differentiate your offerings and sell more product.

When you launch a new product, it's always a challenge to train the people who are going to sell and support it. In this interactive session you will learn how to use proven templates to easily and quickly design new product training with little or no budget. Following review of a brief case history, you will be provided with models and tools, and practice using the templates to design training for your product. You will learn to isolate key terms and behaviors needed to effectively describe, sell or use your product. Most important, your team will gain product fluency and you will be able to reduce ramp time to take your product to market.
Facilitator: Eric Doner is a Principal of AchieveCorp and designed training for leading companies in the automotive, chemical, construction, energy, financial, healthcare, logistics, software and manufacturing industries.

Most product managers understand the theory of User Experience Design. Get insights from real-world users, sketch a design, then test it. Iterate until you get it right. Along the way you create personas, paper prototypes, usability metrics and other goodies.

It all sounds great in theory, but truly effective research and design is wrought with challenges in the real world. With only limited time, budget, and patience from your team, how can you effectively put the principles into practice?

Mary Piontkowski, Macadamian's UX Design Lead, has been working with product managers and development teams for over 15 years. Based on Macadamian's popular white paper, Mary leads a 1-hour session that provides real-world research and design tips that address questions such as:
· How do you create Personas for a complex product that might have dozens of different user types?
· How can you limit the number of design iterations to fit into a tight timeframe?
· Which UX techniques can you apply to your existing product to see results within weeks, not months?

Do you know what your users think of your products? Are you missing out on their creative ideas? Do your users feel heard?

In the era of LinkedIn and Facebook, product managers seem to miss out on the value of crowd-sourcing in hearing what their users have to say - good or bad.

Idea sites (like the one you are voting this session on!) are a simple yet powerful application of the Agile manifesto (“conversations over contract negotiation!”) when you cannot reach every one of your users (who can?)

We'll share our experience at using such an idea site to converse with a large and distributed user base. We'll point out what works well, what we learn along the way and the value it provides to our entire product management team.

Be a cool parent! Show your kids what you do and teach them how to build a great product - together.

This is the story of bankaroo...

www.bankaroo.com is a family project to help children learn how to manage their savings. Danielle came up with the idea and helped with the design, dad helped with the technology, and mom helped with the rest.

In this session we will discuss how to explain your kid what you are doing, how to validate ideas, how to collect feedback, how to stay focus and how to have fun while doing so.

We will share real examples from real projects + the tools and methods to take your, or your kid's idea to the next level.

Most product teams get everything they can from individual products. But in many cases, it’s not enough to satisfy the organization’s aggressive growth goals and it leaves a huge gap between corporate goals and product initiatives. When that gap exists, “shiny new object” syndrome kicks in and product teams are forced to react to every new idea or opportunity that promises to remedy the organization’s growth challenges. It’s a path of distraction and over time it creates a perception product teams aren't strategic. The truth is most product teams aren't structured to be strategic. Something has to change! It’s time for a new class of product manager, a new structure for product teams and a new gauge for measuring success.

Sales pipeline reports have a lot of information, but oftentimes do not track some key attributes that can help you understand your product's true position in the market. In this session, we will use real examples to highlight common gaps in pipeline information and how to overcome those to answer questions like -

1. are missed targets indicating a lead-gen/marketing problem or because of a lack of product-market fit
2. the price elasticity of the product. In other words, are we discounting more than necessary?
3. what does the maintenance renewal rate tell us - are we losing out because the product is too complex to install/use/maintain?
4. what is your pipeline coverage and is it sufficient to hit the target numbers?
5. is the sales cycle longer than that of our competitor's?

Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be an employee to do some of the most interesting product work in the valley.

So, if you LOVE product management and product marketing work, but...

* you want to see your family more
* you want to learn more in one year than you have in the past five
* you want to have a bigger impact on the industry, and work with several interesting companies in a year
* you're inherently entrepreneurial and want to control your own destiny
* BUT you want to do all this without sacrificing your pay

... then come learn how to become an independent product management consultant. Someone who's done it, a been-there-done-that PM consultant, will guide you step-by-step through what you need to do to strike out on your own within 2 months.

We'l cover exactly what you need to do to set up shop, land your first client, do an incredible job for your clients, and manage your business going forward.

You can do this! I made the leap 4 years ago. Since then, I've worked on dozens of interesting projects for several amazing companies, I have an incredibly flexible schedule that fits around the needs of two small kids, and I more than doubled my income. I'll share what I've learned along the way, including my mistakes.

“Nothing happens until someone sells something” -”Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM

This session targets those who support and enable the revenue generation process. We’ll explore secrets learned by a Product Marketing / Product Management leader gone undercover into the world of direct field sales. You will learn to create messaging that will energize your sales force, and positioning that pulls targets into winnable buying cycles. The content is especially useful for leaders in organizations with multiple product lines, who compete for sales' attention.

Some of the interactive topics addressed include:

- key questions that sales teams need answered – and the opportunity costs of not doing so
- putting segmentation to use in lowering customer acquisition, support, and retention costs
- top mistakes product marketers make – and why many marketing activities never translate into results
- strategies and tactics that ensure the sales force follows your lead

PRESENTER BACKGROUND
Russell Scherwin was voted top speaker at Atlanta’s 2011 Product Camp, and has also been voted top speaker at IDC and Gartner shows on multiple continents. Russell currently leads Commerce Solutions Software Sales for IBM in the south. A passionate Product Management and Marketing leader, Russell has “gone undercover” in sales roles for the past 4 years, to better understand field realities. Russell has a passion for technology’s socio-economic impact, and is known for expertly fusing sales, economics and innovation management into a deeply relevant, and entertaining message.