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By 2020, it’s estimated that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. This phenomenon is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). With this explosive growth, consumer and industrial companies alike are seeking a new breed of product professionals who can make the unique strategic decisions that IoT products require, and manage the added complexity and risk that IoT products present.
In this interactive workshop, you will learn to develop a strong IoT product strategy. You’ll learn to identify the biggest pitfalls companies face when building IoT products, along with the tools and knowledge to start addressing them right away. You’ll also gain hands-on experience using Daniel’s IoT Decision Framework, a step-by-step strategic framework for making IoT product decisions in areas such as business models, UX, security, and more.
About your trainer: Daniel is an IoT Product Leader with over 17 years of experience managing the complete lifecycle of connected products. He is the founder of TechProductManagement and is also the creator of the IoT Decision Framework, taught at Stanford, Oxford, and Cornell and used by top Silicon Valley IoT companies.
Daniel’s diverse background includes working at Fortune 500 companies and growth-stage start-ups. Most recently, as head of products for Stem, Inc, Daniel managed the full product lifecycle of an end-to-end IoT Energy Storage solution for the Smart Grid.
More teams are moving toward a truly cross-functional product team model where the teams that develops the product (i.e. product manager, designers, software engineers) are the ones responsible for doing their own discovery. They do their own user research, connect their own experiments, and synthesize what they are learning week over week to support their daily product decisions.
In this workshop, you’ll learn how to develop the habits necessary to create a continuous feedback loop between your product development ideas and your customers. You’ll learn how to start with a research question on Monday and end with some answers by Friday, in a way that is sustainable every week of the year.
This workshop will mix real-world case studies with hands-on exercises and discussion about your specific situations, to make sure that you go home with actionable takeaways. Come learn what the future of product discovery looks like.
About your trainer: Teresa is a product discovery coach who helps teams adopt user-centered, hypothesis-driven product development practices. She works with companies of all sizes on integrating user research, experimentation, and the right analytics into the product development process resulting in better product decisions. Recent clients include Allstate, Capital One, The Guardian, and Snagajob.
Before becoming a coach, Teresa spent the majority of her career leading product and design teams at early-stage internet companies. Most recently, Teresa was VP of Products at AfterCollege, an Internet startup that helps college students find their first job. She was CEO of Affinity Circles, an online community provider for university alumni associations and a social recruiting service used by Fortune 500 companies. She also held product and design roles at Become.com and HighWire Press.
Interviewing is undeniably one of the most valuable and commonly used user research tools. Yet sometimes we forget that it’s a skill we need to learn, because it’s based on skills we think we have (talking or even listening). Often, it’s not taught or reflected on and so people tend to ‘wing it’ rather than develop their skills. Without good interviewing skills, research results may be inaccurate or reveal nothing new, suggesting the wrong design or business responses, or they may miss the crucial nuance that points to innovative breakthrough opportunities.
In this session, we’ll focus on the importance of rapport-building and listening and look at techniques for both. We will review different types of questions, and why you need to have a range of question types. This workshop will explore other contextual research methods that can be built on top of interviewing in a seamless way. We’ll try some practice exercises for improving your own interviewing skills. We’ll also practice observation of users in an environment.
About your trainer: Steve Portigal helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. He is principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: The classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and new, Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.
The goal of this class is to refine communication and execution for better outcomes. In Essentials 102 we address the strategic aspects of the role of product manager.
The class focuses on how to apply strategic thinking to your communication, product and business, enabling product managers to navigate complex landscapes.
The activities are driven by case studies to enable you to get hands-on experience using the concepts immediately.
Your trainer’s product management experience enriches the curriculum by delivering diverse perspectives on best practice in different scenarios.
The class covers the following in-depth modules:
- Business Model Validation
- User Research – synthesis, analysis and implementation
- Acceptance
- Stakeholder Communication Strategy
About your trainers:
Emily Tate, Mind the Product
Emily Tate is General Manager for the US for Mind the Product, the world's largest community of product people. Prior to joining Mind the Product, Emily spent over 10 years in product leadership as a consultant with Pivotal Labs and product manager in the travel industry. She started her career managing software solutions for airlines before taking her experience to the traveler’s side of the journey as the product manager for a leading travel management app, TripCase. Emily is passionate about the craft of product management and loves talking about new ways to make products people love. She was listed as one of “52 Women Making an Impact in Product Management".
Jeremy Glassenberg, Product Leader & Advisor
Jeremy has over 10 years’ experience as a Product Leader, having led Product and Platform initiatives at companies like Box and Tradeshift. He has helped startups grow to IPO as he built several Product teams and trained many colleagues to become Product Managers. Jeremy further supports companies in Platform, Product, and Marketplace strategy, as a startup advisor and mentor to Alchemist, Acceleprise, and Techstars.
Molly Norris Walker, Lead Product Designer & Product Manager
Molly is the Lead Product Pesigner at Voom, an on-demand helicopter booking service. Additionally, she’s often acted as a product manager to bring new initiatives to market with human-centered design and agile methodologies. Molly has developed a strong record of growing businesses in dramatically different economies, including Europe, North America, Latin America, and Africa. Molly has been an in-house creative at the WashingtonPost.com, ABC News and The World Bank, and agency-side at IDEO.org, Blue State Digital, and Pivotal Labs. She's an Oxford Internet Institute alumni and author of the book UX Design for Growth.
A practical, hands-on way to understand how the human brain works and apply that knowledge to User Experience and product design. You know somethings are ‘good design’ and some things are ‘bad design’ for UX but have never been quite sure why? Learn the psychological principles behind how our brain makes sense of the world and apply that to product and user interface design.
After the workshop you’ll be able to:
Design products, apps and websites that match how people think and behave
Make more compelling designs
that use psychology theory to enhance their effectiveness
Make better, informed design decisions and advocate to the wider team using psychology theory
Come to the workshop and you’ll able to put psychology into practice as soon as you get back to the office!
About your trainer: Joe Leech helps companies and startups with Product Design Strategy (building the right stuff in the right order), applying Psychology in Design (training, workshops and consultancy) and User Experience (User research, IA, prototypes). He wrote the book Psychology for Designers and speaks regularly at Product Management, UX and web conferences.
Ask 10 people what a product roadmap is and you will get 10 different answers! This artifact is often misunderstood, yet an incredibly powerful if done right. Creating a great one is part art and part science. In this full-day session, we will talk through the purposes of a roadmap and a process for establishing your product's vision, gaining alignment with your stakeholders, validating themes, and presenting to upper level execs in order to maximize your team's impact.
Key questions to answer:
What are the differences between product strategy, a product roadmap and a feature release plan?
- How do I relate my product work to business objectives?
- How can I balance the need to plan, while staying lean and agile?
- How do I look beyond the next quarter without over-committing?
- How do I confirm projects or initiatives that have not been fully validated by customers
- How do I manage stakeholders and their pressure/influence?
- How do I prioritize what product aspects to work on 1st, 2nd, 3rd…?
- What's the best way to present a product roadmap to my stakeholders?
About your trainer: Bruce McCarthy is CEO of UpUp Labs and President of the Boston Product Management Association. Bruce helps organizations improve the return on their investments in product development. He is an internationally-recognized thought-leader and sought-after speaker on product roadmapping, prioritization, team effectiveness, and leadership.
Bruce and his team work with companies such as Vistaprint, Localytics, Zipcar, Johnson & Johnson, and Huawei, providing coaching, mentoring, and tools such as Awesomeness, a solution for measurably enhancing team effectiveness. His book, Roadmapping Relaunched: Setting Direction While Embracing Uncertainty, is due out in September from O’Reilly.
What does a great user experience have in common with a great story? Everything.
Translating complex concepts into simple, impactful narratives can help you more effectively imagine and evaluate your products, campaigns, content, and features – before committing to expensive pixels and code. Developing a product with an experience that engages, influences, and inspires can be a daunting task – but the art of crafting a compelling story is easily learned.
In this workshop you will learn how simple storytelling techniques can transform your next idea, product, campaign, or strategy from good, to great. Whether you are creating something from scratch, or optimizing it for conversion, activation, or engagement, mapping the story first will help you determine how to envision and develop something people not only love to use, but utilize and recommend often.
Learn how to increase first-time and lifetime customer engagement by:
- Crafting simple, powerful business, product, and customer stories that inspire your target audience
- Defining and refining your product’s core value proposition
- Evaluating the product-market fit as it relates to audience engagement
- Identifying how and why people will discover, use, pay for, and get excited about your product
- Mapping out strategies to get people to adopt, utilize, and evangelize your product
Who Is This Workshop For? This workshop is for anyone who builds products, services, or campaigns that people engage with: designers, product and project managers, marketers, content strategists, developers, entrepreneurs, and executives have all taken the workshops and reshaped how they build, talk about, and sell products. The workshop has garnered praise from top names in the technology, publishing, entertainment, and consumer goods, including PayPal, Spotify, NY Public Radio, Wall Street Journal, Walmart, Conde Nast, and Yahoo!.
“In total love with this process.”
“The best workshop I've been to in years.”
“Your workshop has really changed the way I work.”
“My sketch of a product idea has now made it to the very top of my company. Your workshop was awesome!”
“The storymapping concept was incredibly inspiring and, for me, game-changing in the way I approach content creation and user experience. LOVED it!”
About your trainer: Donna Lichaw is the author of The User’s Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love . Through her writing, speaking, and much loved Storymapping Workshop, Donna guides startups, non-profits, and global brands in optimizing their digital products and services by providing them with a simplified way to drive user engagement. Utilizing her ‘story first’ approach, she helps organizations define and refine their value proposition, transform their thinking, and better engage with their core customers. Prior to her career in technology, she refined her talent for storytelling and narrative development as an award-winning documentary filmmaker. You can find her on Twitter.
A great user experience should be standard for all products - even in enterprise companies! But often, product managers can be so focused on creating roadmaps, tracking analytics, and managing stakeholders that they fail to build a product that anybody wants to use.
In this full-day workshop, Laura Klein will give product managers a crash course on how to create a useful, usable product that users love.
You’ll learn how to:
- Get better qualitative feedback from users and customers.
- Identify the key facts about your most important users.
- Pick and prioritize the right features to solve your users’ problems.
- Stop just shipping features and start focusing on building great user outcomes.
- Use design thinking methods to find the best possible solutions to user problems.
- Sketch your ideas to be a better visual communicator.
- Make better use of maps, canvases, and other visual communication tools to improve team alignment
About your trainers:
Laura Klein, Product Coach & Author
Laura fell in love with technology when she saw her first user research session in 1995. Since then, she's worked as an engineer, UX designer, and product manager at both startups and large companies in Silicon Valley. She is the author of UX FOR LEAN STARTUPS (O'Reilly '13) and Design for Voice Interfaces (O'Reilly '15) and product management book, BUILD BETTER PRODUCTS (Rosenfeld '16). She currently trains and coaches product teams that want to improve their research, UX, and product development processes.
Kate Rutter, Consultant and Instructor
Kate is an entrepreneur+designer and Principal at Intelleto, where she creates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable and shareable. Kate works with teams to build better products. She pioneered the UX learning track at Tradecraft, Co-founded Luxr.co, and was Senior Practitioner at UX consultancy Adaptive Path. She teaches design at California College of Arts, co-hosts the NSFW podcast What Is Wrong With UX with Laura Klein, tweets at @katerutter and blogs at intelleto.com.
Here are five great reasons why you should join us at Mind the Product Mind the Product San Francisco 2018, and it’s not just about the coffee. Read more
Mind the Product Mind the Product San Francisco 2018 is brought to you by a team of product managers who spend all day building start-ups, and all night building a community for their product manager peers. Read more