November 5, 2014 at 01:01ProductCamp Minsk 2014 - video recordings and conference overview
In August, the ProductCamp-2014 conference was held in Minsk , for people not in the topic, probably representing some kind of “Product Market-2014” with the theme of the Belarusian food import substitution (“hamon-parmesan-Belarusian octopuses”, that's all).
In fact, it was a conference of product experts (product managers, Product Owners, etc.), a fairly new profession, not established (even there is no separate hubrahab!) - adjacent to classical project management, marketing, sales and business analysis, and in all of this, design and UX play an important part. Yes, product managers can often be attributed to marketing sales, and analysts, and usabilityists, and even project managers who understand and influence the development of the product as a whole.
And among the speakers there were many product managers, as from large companies with popular products (Yandex-wargaming-2gis, etc.) - the most ideal place to catch them and try to lobby for a long-hungry feature, I really did not find anyone to kill for death of Yarushka), so from the cofounders of different niche startups of varying degrees of fame and stability .... There were usability experts, strategic thinking trainers ... who weren’t there.
I actually shot this conference, edited and published videos for a long time - shooting from several cameras, a clear screen, sound from a microphone (almost everywhere), energizing technologies. But it was only during these holidays that people got around to look and briefly classify / describe / annotate all these reports (in general, I was hoping someone else would do it).
If very briefly and without words - this is actually a one-minute video, almost a coub, squeezed out of all three dozen conference reports of 14 hours duration (do not watch epileptics):
If you are interested, I’m waiting for you under the cut, maybe after reading the annotations, you will find a couple of interesting reports for yourself to watch. It is especially useful if you yourself want to grow in product management - a fresh konfa conveys all the state of the region - terminology and problems,and grabbing keywords and business stories, you can easily go through any interview for a product position that cannot be pulled out of instantly aging textbooks .
“ Roadmap Roadmap ” - Metastrategic planning from mail.ru, although in the title of the report I recall the project “prototype of the conceptual table of contents of the terms of reference” from my past, and the author honestly admitted that he still does not fully understand what a roadmap is . A short “TL; DR:” from the author - “Roadmap, this is an artifact that talks about where we are, where we are going, and that we will go along the path to our goal. It serves to ensure that everyone who works on the same product or in the same company understands and knows the answers to these questions. There are no dates in a good roadmap, and a good roadmap does not exist in electronic form, but in the form of a physical artifact. ” If you need more details, or covered "WAT?" - see the report.
“ 19 personal needs, or what users of IT products really want ” - in a couple of minutes a professional psychologist diagnosedthe userpic of the audience and spoke about the hierarchy of neurotic needs & oil . Tru psychologist - the report publicly advertising the book of the author , however, the author has published on this subject even Habré . I placed this in the “strategic section”, because it seems to me that there is a sense in this approach, and it will be useful precisely in strategic planning, in strategic sessions (for example, identifying the “psychologically weak” sides of my product).
“ How we searched for our strategy ” - and here’s the mundane history of levelup startup generator repototings. “Yes, with a scrum I will make 20 games in a year - but I know that we are capable of more.” The conveyor “20 days - 6 projects for $ 4000” was rebuilt. When they realized that the artists were driven and the quality was falling, they introduced gamification with bonus days. From the point of view of management, it’s probably cool, but God forbid it will be so everywhere ...
“We bind analytics, qualitative and quantitative research together ” - here not only “how they do it in Wargaming” (the sponsor of the conference, provided a room with a tank, next to which everyone takes pictures, so I could not bear it ), but in general, it’s rather a lecture how it all works, what services you need to measure and in what units (NPS, etc.), some obvious facts (“see technical support tickets that people complain about” - #to think of).
" How to find KPI where it is not there " - Yandex.Mart product manager shares his pain - "how to make cards better when goals are not obvious." “Faster to find the target on the map?”, “Features or speed for those who do not need features?”. And even the superlaboratory did not help ("complete garbage"). We have not yet given birth to our method of "Study the readability of the map.
“ How and why did we do YandexTransport ” - And then another Yandex GIS service, which would seem to be used by thousandths of a percent, should be killed, but no - because the audience is “Schoolchildren-Pedestrians”, the most important audience is the most IT- Advanced and Decision Makers for choosing IT products in families.
“ Qualitative research and design (round table) ” - a philosophical discussion of qualitative research (not in the sense of well-knit together, but in the sense of “not quantitative”), “do I need this work and this research and how to sell it to my bosses” and all that little things.
“ Product metrics (round table) ” - Another round table - now on what and what to measure - Flurry / Mixpanel / GoogleAnalytics and all that. Personally, I’m interested in whether something useful and visible comes from the round tables, do I need to take them off in the future, or just prepared reports?
“ Interface as a source of requirements ” - How the Targetix interface was built - from Google docks and mindmaps, we switched to user / feature story, prototype mockups, and it seems like SCRUM. And actually the requirements were written after the user's feedback on the prototypes. No wonder, another team “moved to agile”, it’s surprising some mess with the systems - there are Trello, and TeamPulse, and BaseCamp ...
“ Analysis of competitors using usability testing ” - The approach seems to be obvious, we take competitor products, UX-analyze, identify features and form requirements (at the same time and competitive analysis for marketing). Sometimes it turns out that users dream about what has been done long ago (but hard to find). There are also interesting cases when it turned out that users are not people at all ...
“ Tyranny in food companies - symptoms, consequences ... ” - in fact, it is probably easier for the reader to read the author’s article “ Patterns in reasoning that create unsuccessful products ”, on the topic “Everyonelies in supposedly logical reasoning.”
“ Jam Ludum Dare ” is probably still in this section the startup experience of a special game hackathon, where in 48 hours you need to zameymdesign, code, roll out and promote the game (not enough to do, you need to communicate, evaluate other people's projects and all that). By the way, the guys made a game, let's say, on the theme of “Breaking Bad”. If it takes off, in RuNet it will probably be banned.
hollow is overloaded”, etc. In any case, this is not “XXX asshole”, but the manager’s mistake.
" New mature product management " - a fresh product manager energizes everything around the B2B product of an ambitious office (immediate goals are $ 100mln, IPO, ...), reveals vision, business strategy, product strategy, builds organizational structures, processes, etc. , despite the fact that formal authority, as is usually the case with grocery stores, was not enough.
“The problems of the growth of the food company - we give battle to acne and more serious challenges of the teenage period ”: The speaker here only a few minutes later guessed to take a microphone ... (lesson to all future speakers - “don’t do it!”), Then everything will be OK with sound. Classical anthropomorphic metaphors for the development of the company (“childhood-youth — rapid growth of the body — hormonal restructuring ...”), but it’s one thing to listen to the horrors of growth from hundreds of people from the company, another thing is Wargaming, no one doubts that they had to not weak to grow, and suppress a lot of acne.
“ Fitbit Belarus - from outsourcing to the development of its products ” - “Nobody knows us in Belarus ... but in the States - at the Apple level ... Everyone knows!” A happy tale - the owners fell in love with the hired Belarus outsourcers, andtook them to Valinor and opened a full-fledged office here.
“ Creating products for your own needs ” - in Minsk, of course, it could not do without EPAM, even at a food conference (there are dozens of such “Fitbits inside EPAMA”). About the evolution of internal process systems, from excel, to opensource issue trackers, to the conscious desire to do something ideal for yourself, and the creation of a homemade monster. Then they accumulate money for solid specialized applications, remove the monster’s homemade products, but soon find themselves with a bunch of poorly integrated specialized systems. They begin to write a common platform ... in general, everything came to the classic custom enterprise development ...
“ Crisis Product Management ” —The very first report of the third section, when everything was lumpy - the slides were not reproduced, the sound was not written, in general, all the equipment was buggy ... serious stress for the speaker. “What is good, what is bad, when a company is in crisis ?, bad and good symptoms of a team’s health, when you can kill a product, stories ...” The most important thing is to "keep your head in the cold, have a model of analysis, support your team, take everything lightly - just because you are engaged in crisis management does not mean that you will succeed." A reporter from Kaspersky Lab, but he saw the crises clearly before LC, and, in my opinion, a real crisis is when it is much, much worse. In my opinion, a discussion from the audience from 16 minutes is interesting .
Grows hacking - Users Activation and Retention in SAAS - "Activation and Retention" at all costs from CEO Weavora (well-known products - Everhour ). And the obvious things about feedback and interesting services, personal letters from the CEO ..., "after registering the user, you need to hold the handle", ... all the tips are useful, alas, I didn’t notice the most important thing - “Grows hacking”, i.e. non-trivial decisions leading to explosive growth.
“ The product is the main vs. mobile. On the example of Ostrovka ”- how to graze a mobile and web project in parallel, what kind of analytics, what to look for, how to promote ... interesting insights and hypotheses from what Ostrovka knows from everyone. And yes, here I was able to throw out my hatred (an undelete application for booking hotels for the night on my daughter’s children's tablet - and this is also called “inactive promotion on the Android platform”).
If you suddenly missed someone, then the remaining reports are here . I will be glad to any feedback in the next couple of weeks - there are still video sources, and you can fix something - change the plan (show the screen larger, or vice versa, show the laser pointer on the screen, etc.), speed up if the report is nevertheless it seems boring, or vice versa, to slow down, if I went over a bit with acceleration, change the soundtrack, etc. - I’ll definitely be fixing it, now I’ve reviewed it, I noticed a lot of jambs myself.
I don’t promise the result in terms of sound - there was a terrible situation with acoustics - three rooms without partitions, a general echo ... I specially recorded on voice recorders, but there was no sound engineer there, and partly the voice recorder was floppy. For a couple of months I was busy trying to improve the “normal sound” (denoise, emphasized Central Pan, played in every way) - if someone is a specialist and can show how to improve - pliz, contact me.
If you want independent reports on the event itself, then here is the report , here are the little photos , everything was as usual, everything was positive, "#wishyouwerehere", "#kuseteloktiesli missed."
If you want more reports on Product Management - a channel of reports on the topic , you can join the FB-community .
In fact, it was a conference of product experts (product managers, Product Owners, etc.), a fairly new profession, not established (even there is no separate hubrahab!) - adjacent to classical project management, marketing, sales and business analysis, and in all of this, design and UX play an important part. Yes, product managers can often be attributed to marketing sales, and analysts, and usabilityists, and even project managers who understand and influence the development of the product as a whole.
And among the speakers there were many product managers, as from large companies with popular products (Yandex-wargaming-2gis, etc.) - the most ideal place to catch them and try to lobby for a long-hungry feature, I really did not find anyone to kill for death of Yarushka), so from the cofounders of different niche startups of varying degrees of fame and stability .... There were usability experts, strategic thinking trainers ... who weren’t there.
I actually shot this conference, edited and published videos for a long time - shooting from several cameras, a clear screen, sound from a microphone (almost everywhere), energizing technologies. But it was only during these holidays that people got around to look and briefly classify / describe / annotate all these reports (in general, I was hoping someone else would do it).
If very briefly and without words - this is actually a one-minute video, almost a coub, squeezed out of all three dozen conference reports of 14 hours duration (do not watch epileptics):
If you are interested, I’m waiting for you under the cut, maybe after reading the annotations, you will find a couple of interesting reports for yourself to watch. It is especially useful if you yourself want to grow in product management - a fresh konfa conveys all the state of the region - terminology and problems,
Strategic planning. Vision, trends, etc.
“ What lies behind the trends - the language of the product strategy ” - This is the only report I watched there almost entirely (this is how I usually ran non-stop between cameras and halls), and the speaker is a professional trainer, and the thoughts seem to be true, and “finally for the strategy” everyone is pleased dream up. The author has good experience in conducting successful strategic sessions (and I have just the terrible experience of participating in such events). About niches, the theory of weak signals and everything so global and tasty.“ Roadmap Roadmap ” - Metastrategic planning from mail.ru, although in the title of the report I recall the project “prototype of the conceptual table of contents of the terms of reference” from my past, and the author honestly admitted that he still does not fully understand what a roadmap is . A short “TL; DR:” from the author - “Roadmap, this is an artifact that talks about where we are, where we are going, and that we will go along the path to our goal. It serves to ensure that everyone who works on the same product or in the same company understands and knows the answers to these questions. There are no dates in a good roadmap, and a good roadmap does not exist in electronic form, but in the form of a physical artifact. ” If you need more details, or covered "WAT?" - see the report.
“ 19 personal needs, or what users of IT products really want ” - in a couple of minutes a professional psychologist diagnosed
“ How we searched for our strategy ” - and here’s the mundane history of levelup startup generator repototings. “Yes, with a scrum I will make 20 games in a year - but I know that we are capable of more.” The conveyor “20 days - 6 projects for $ 4000” was rebuilt. When they realized that the artists were driven and the quality was falling, they introduced gamification with bonus days. From the point of view of management, it’s probably cool, but God forbid it will be so everywhere ...
Research, metrics, etc.
“ The role of research in shaping the company's product vision ” - “How to research in 2GIS” - Field stories, with Arabs-taxi drivers, with a focus group of Filipinos who believe that they are being hired. It is clearly seen that if you want to actively travel at the expense of the company, you need to get there. As a video geek, I agree with the idea of the need for total cheap video recording, indexing of important points, so as not to bother with full transcripts (I know that if it is outsourced, it will be nonsense, if you do it yourself - you will die).“We bind analytics, qualitative and quantitative research together ” - here not only “how they do it in Wargaming” (the sponsor of the conference, provided a room with a tank, next to which everyone takes pictures, so I could not bear it ), but in general, it’s rather a lecture how it all works, what services you need to measure and in what units (NPS, etc.), some obvious facts (“see technical support tickets that people complain about” - #to think of).
" How to find KPI where it is not there " - Yandex.Mart product manager shares his pain - "how to make cards better when goals are not obvious." “Faster to find the target on the map?”, “Features or speed for those who do not need features?”. And even the superlaboratory did not help ("complete garbage"). We have not yet given birth to our method of "Study the readability of the map.
“ How and why did we do YandexTransport ” - And then another Yandex GIS service, which would seem to be used by thousandths of a percent, should be killed, but no - because the audience is “Schoolchildren-Pedestrians”, the most important audience is the most IT- Advanced and Decision Makers for choosing IT products in families.
“ Qualitative research and design (round table) ” - a philosophical discussion of qualitative research (not in the sense of well-knit together, but in the sense of “not quantitative”), “do I need this work and this research and how to sell it to my bosses” and all that little things.
“ Product metrics (round table) ” - Another round table - now on what and what to measure - Flurry / Mixpanel / GoogleAnalytics and all that. Personally, I’m interested in whether something useful and visible comes from the round tables, do I need to take them off in the future, or just prepared reports?
Business Analysis and Design
“The Unobvious Subtleties of Using Customer Journey Map ”... CJM is a directed graph, onto which, using contact points, the path of the consumer of the provided service is displayed. CJM captures details of the interaction with the service. ...The author is the leading promoter of this design tool (“the best User Experience tool for the last 10 years, after the characters”) of a synergistic interface at the interface of different interfaces (web-mobile, etc.), by the way his article is an introduction to the topic + last year’s report Well, here is an advanced level of problems and solutions.
“ Interface as a source of requirements ” - How the Targetix interface was built - from Google docks and mindmaps, we switched to user / feature story, prototype mockups, and it seems like SCRUM. And actually the requirements were written after the user's feedback on the prototypes. No wonder, another team “moved to agile”, it’s surprising some mess with the systems - there are Trello, and TeamPulse, and BaseCamp ...
“ Analysis of competitors using usability testing ” - The approach seems to be obvious, we take competitor products, UX-analyze, identify features and form requirements (at the same time and competitive analysis for marketing). Sometimes it turns out that users dream about what has been done long ago (but hard to find). There are also interesting cases when it turned out that users are not people at all ...
“ Tyranny in food companies - symptoms, consequences ... ” - in fact, it is probably easier for the reader to read the author’s article “ Patterns in reasoning that create unsuccessful products ”, on the topic “Everyone
“ Jam Ludum Dare ” is probably still in this section the startup experience of a special game hackathon, where in 48 hours you need to zameymdesign, code, roll out and promote the game (not enough to do, you need to communicate, evaluate other people's projects and all that). By the way, the guys made a game, let's say, on the theme of “Breaking Bad”. If it takes off, in RuNet it will probably be banned.
Company and processes
“ How to make friends with a UX team ” - a product manager from designers who reflect on the role of conflicts in the process. “The product manager does not understand the value of UXer”, “The designer does not see the business and the timing, and in general the" New mature product management " - a fresh product manager energizes everything around the B2B product of an ambitious office (immediate goals are $ 100mln, IPO, ...), reveals vision, business strategy, product strategy, builds organizational structures, processes, etc. , despite the fact that formal authority, as is usually the case with grocery stores, was not enough.
“The problems of the growth of the food company - we give battle to acne and more serious challenges of the teenage period ”: The speaker here only a few minutes later guessed to take a microphone ... (lesson to all future speakers - “don’t do it!”), Then everything will be OK with sound. Classical anthropomorphic metaphors for the development of the company (“childhood-youth — rapid growth of the body — hormonal restructuring ...”), but it’s one thing to listen to the horrors of growth from hundreds of people from the company, another thing is Wargaming, no one doubts that they had to not weak to grow, and suppress a lot of acne.
“ Fitbit Belarus - from outsourcing to the development of its products ” - “Nobody knows us in Belarus ... but in the States - at the Apple level ... Everyone knows!” A happy tale - the owners fell in love with the hired Belarus outsourcers, and
“ Creating products for your own needs ” - in Minsk, of course, it could not do without EPAM, even at a food conference (there are dozens of such “Fitbits inside EPAMA”). About the evolution of internal process systems, from excel, to opensource issue trackers, to the conscious desire to do something ideal for yourself, and the creation of a homemade monster. Then they accumulate money for solid specialized applications, remove the monster’s homemade products, but soon find themselves with a bunch of poorly integrated specialized systems. They begin to write a common platform ... in general, everything came to the classic custom enterprise development ...
“ Crisis Product Management ” —The very first report of the third section, when everything was lumpy - the slides were not reproduced, the sound was not written, in general, all the equipment was buggy ... serious stress for the speaker. “What is good, what is bad, when a company is in crisis ?, bad and good symptoms of a team’s health, when you can kill a product, stories ...” The most important thing is to "keep your head in the cold, have a model of analysis, support your team, take everything lightly - just because you are engaged in crisis management does not mean that you will succeed." A reporter from Kaspersky Lab, but he saw the crises clearly before LC, and, in my opinion, a real crisis is when it is much, much worse. In my opinion, a discussion from the audience from 16 minutes is interesting .
Sales, and other Grow Hacking
How to wake up sales of a mobile application - a set of inexplicable conversion stories of the popular Ultimate Guitars application. With the subscription model, the basic money is brought by a life-time subscription, consider purchase. Reducing upgrade options - increases conversion. The introduction of a free trial for time-limited plans increases lifetime purchases where there is no trial. These stories are still waiting for their Sherlock Holmes, although there are reasonable hypotheses, such as "The presence of trial plans increases the credibility of the service."Grows hacking - Users Activation and Retention in SAAS - "Activation and Retention" at all costs from CEO Weavora (well-known products - Everhour ). And the obvious things about feedback and interesting services, personal letters from the CEO ..., "after registering the user, you need to hold the handle", ... all the tips are useful, alas, I didn’t notice the most important thing - “Grows hacking”, i.e. non-trivial decisions leading to explosive growth.
“ The product is the main vs. mobile. On the example of Ostrovka ”- how to graze a mobile and web project in parallel, what kind of analytics, what to look for, how to promote ... interesting insights and hypotheses from what Ostrovka knows from everyone. And yes, here I was able to throw out my hatred (an undelete application for booking hotels for the night on my daughter’s children's tablet - and this is also called “inactive promotion on the Android platform”).
Bonus
Slides and contacts of speakers in social networks - in the links from the video description.If you suddenly missed someone, then the remaining reports are here . I will be glad to any feedback in the next couple of weeks - there are still video sources, and you can fix something - change the plan (show the screen larger, or vice versa, show the laser pointer on the screen, etc.), speed up if the report is nevertheless it seems boring, or vice versa, to slow down, if I went over a bit with acceleration, change the soundtrack, etc. - I’ll definitely be fixing it, now I’ve reviewed it, I noticed a lot of jambs myself.
I don’t promise the result in terms of sound - there was a terrible situation with acoustics - three rooms without partitions, a general echo ... I specially recorded on voice recorders, but there was no sound engineer there, and partly the voice recorder was floppy. For a couple of months I was busy trying to improve the “normal sound” (denoise, emphasized Central Pan, played in every way) - if someone is a specialist and can show how to improve - pliz, contact me.
If you want independent reports on the event itself, then here is the report , here are the little photos , everything was as usual, everything was positive, "#wishyouwerehere", "#kuseteloktiesli missed."
If you want more reports on Product Management - a channel of reports on the topic , you can join the FB-community .