ProductCamp Austin 11; Are you investing in the right areas?

Austin ProductCamp 11 this weekend
In my last post, I mentioned that I’ll be in Austin on July 20 for the upcoming ProductCamp Austin. (Texas in July — what could be better!) If you haven’t signed up yet — well, you’re a bit late, since registration is full, though you can sign up for the wait list. There are a bunch of great sessions proposed, including two I’ve submitted (see descriptions below) which hopefully will get selected. If you’ll be at ProductCamp Austin, maybe you’ll have the chance to attend these sessions. If you won’t be there but are still interested in learning more, contact me:

  • Effectively Communicating Product Roadmaps: You’ve figured out the future roadmap for your product, so the hard work is done, right? Not by a long shot. Even the “best” roadmap will fail if it’s not documented, presented, and communicated appropriately. Do customers misinterpret your roadmap? Do salespeople misuse it? Do executives question it? Do developers laugh at it? There are common mistakes that most product managers make when communicating their roadmaps, and certain tips and tricks that can be employed to avoid common pitfalls. This session will present challenges, examples, and some recommendations, and then open the discussion for participants to share their experiences on what’s worked and what hasn’t.
  • Product Management and Marketing Alignment: Product managers tend to spend a lot of time working with product development, but there’s another important function that often doesn’t get enough attention – marketing. In many organizations, product management and engineering work in isolation on building a product, only to throw it over the wall to marketing and expect them to somehow “market it.” It’s not just alignment with product marketing that’s an issue – most b-to-b companies are bifurcating marketing into specific roles like demand generation, corporate marketing, content marketing, regional/field marketing, channel marketing, marketing operations… and the list goes on. Having product management work effectively with product marketing and other marketing functions is essential for product success. In this session you’ll have an opportunity to talk about challenges related to working with marketing and get your questions answered on how product managers can more effectively engage with their marketing peers.

At ProductCamp Austin 11, I’ll also be representing SiriusDecisions, which is a proud sponsor, so please look for me there and introduce yourself.

Innovation Strategy – are you investing in the right areas?

Many companies struggle with deciding what new and existing products to invest in. They base their investment decisions on internal politics and legacy investments rather than the markets and buyers that will best contribute to company growth.

I’ve written here a few times over the past year about research I’ve been working on at SiriusDecisions related to innovation investment strategy. Recently, we’ve begun to help organizations support overall strategy with innovation decision-making, and share best practices on how to measure innovation success using our new SiriusDecisions Innovation Strategy Framework.

You can download a free research brief which introduces the framework — appropriately titled Introducing the SiriusDecisions Innovation Strategy Framework — and the related investment approaches, along with risks and considerations in each approach.

Over the coming weeks on this blog I’ll be sharing more information about the Innovation Strategy Framework along with some of the exclusive findings that were part of the research supporting it.

What’s Hot on Twitter

Here are a few of my tweets which have generated the most interest over the past few weeks; to get these in real-time, follow me at @jefflash: