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ProductCamp Minsk 2014 - video and conference review

In August, the ProductCamp-2014 conference was held in Minsk, for people not in the topic, probably, representing some kind of “Market of Products-2014” with the theme of food Belarusian import substitution (“Hamon-Parmesan-Belarusian octopuses”, that's all).

In fact, it was a conference of productologists (product managers, Product Owners, etc.), a fairly new, not established profession (not even a separate habrahab!) Adjacent to the classic project management, and marketing, sales and business. analysis, and in all this an important part is the design and the UX. Yes, product managers can often be referred to as sales marketing analysts, usability analysts, and even project managers who understand and influence the development of the product as a whole.

And among the speakers there were a lot of product managers, as from large companies with popular products (Yandex-wargaming-2gis, etc.) is the most ideal place to catch them and try to lobby for a long-awaited feature, I really did not find someone to kill for death yarushki), so from kofaundery different niche startups of different degrees of fame and sustainability .... There were usability specialists, strategic thinking trainers ... whoever was not there.
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I actually filmed this conference, I mounted and published videos for a long time - shooting from several cameras, a clear screen, sound from a microphone (almost everywhere), technology of invigoration. But it was only on these holidays that they got around to see and briefly classify / describe / annotate all these reports (in general, I hoped someone else would do it).

If very briefly and without words - this is the actual one-minute video, almost coub, squeezed out of all three dozen conference reports of 14 hours duration (do not watch epileptics):

If you are interested - waiting for you under the cut, you can read the annotations, you will find yourself to watch a couple of interesting reports. It is especially useful if you yourself want to grow into product management - a fresh confit conveys all the state of the area - terminology and problems, and picking up key words and business stories, you can easily pass any interview on the product line that you can’t pull out of the outdated textbooks .

Strategic planning. Vision, trends, etc.

What is behind the trends is the language of the product strategy ?” - This is the only report that I almost completely watched there (this is how the nonstop used to run between cameras and halls), and the speaker is a professional trainer, and thoughts like the right ones, and it’s nice to have a strategy. to dream up. The author has a good experience in conducting successful strategic sessions (and I have a terrible experience in participating in such events). On niches, the theory of weak signals and everything so global and tasty.
Roadmap Roadmap ” - Metastrategic planning from mail.ru, although when recalling the title of the report, I recall the draft “prototype concept for the technical specification table of contents” from my past, but the author himself honestly admitted that he still does not fully understand what a roadmap is . Brief "TL; DR:" from the author - "Roadmap, is an artifact that tells where we are, where we are going, and that we will follow the path to our goal. It serves to ensure that everyone who works on one product or in one company, understood and knew 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 " - a professional psychologist made a diagnosis in a couple of minutes according to the username of the audience and spoke about the hierarchy of oil and icro neurotic needs. Tru Psychologist - this report is an advertisement of the author’s publicly available book , however, the author has already published on this topic even on the web site . I put it in the “strategic section”, because it seems to me that there is a sense in this approach, and it will be useful in strategic planning, at strategic sessions (for example, defining the “psychologically weak” sides of my product).
How we searched for our strategy ” - and here is the mundane history of LevelUp startups generator re-generation. “Yes, with scrum I will do 20 games in a year - but I know that we are capable of more.” The “20 days - 6 projects for $ 4000 each” pipeline was built. When they realized that the artists were driven, and the quality declined, they introduced gamification with bonus days. From the point of view of management, it's probably cool, but God forbid, it will be like that everywhere ...

Research, metrics, etc.

The role of research in shaping the company's product vision ” - “As researched in 2GIS” - Field stories, with Arabs-taxi drivers, with a focus group of Filipinos who believe they are being hired. It is clear that if you want to actively travel at the expense of the company - you have to get there. As a video player, I agree with the thoughts about the need for total cheap video fixation, indexing important moments, 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 tie together analytics, qualitative and quantitative research ” - here not only “as they do in Wargaming” (the conference sponsor, provided a room with a tank, next to which everyone takes pictures, that's what I couldn’t hold back ), but in general, it’s more like a survey lecture , how it all works, what services you need to measure and in what units (NPS, etc.), some obvious facts (“see technical support tickets, what people are complaining about” - who can think of it).
How to find a KPI where it doesn’t exist ” - Yandex.Map Product Manager shares his pain - “how to make maps better when goals are not obvious.” "Faster to find a target on the map?", "Features or speed for those who do not need features?". And even the super laboratory did not help (“complete garbage”). Until they gave birth to their method "Study of the readability of the card."
How and why did we do YandexTransport? ” And then another Yandex GIS service, which seemed to use thousandths of a percent, would have to be killed, but not — after all, the Pedestrian School Students audience, the most important audience, is the most IT Advanced and Decision Makers for choosing IT products in families.
Qualitative research and design (round table) ” is a philosophical discussion of qualitative research (not in the sense of well-knit, but in the sense of “not quantitative”), “do I need my work and this research and how to sell them to my superiors” and all that little things.
Food metrics (round table) ” - Another round table - now on the topic of what and how to measure - Flurry / Mixpanel / GoogleAnalytics and all that. Personally, I’m wondering if something useful and good is obtained from round tables, do they need to be filmed in the future, or only prepared reports?

Business analysis and design

" Unobvious subtleties of the Customer Journey Map application "
... CJM is a directed graph, where the path of the consumer of the provided service is displayed using contact points. CJM captures the details of the interaction with the service. ...
The author of the leading propagandist of this design tool ("the best User Experience tool, over the past 10 years, after the characters") synergistic interface at the junction of different interfaces (web-mobile, etc.), by the way, his article is an introduction to the topic + last year's report Well, here we have an advanced level of problems and solutions.
Interface as a source of requirements ” - How the Targetix interface was built - from dox-gugldocks and mayndmap, moved to a user / feature story, mocap prototypes, and it looks like SCRUM. And the actual requirements were written after the user’s feedback on prototypes. No wonder, one more team "switched to agile", surprises some mess with the systems - there is both Trello, and TeamPulse, and BaseCamp ...
" Analysis of competitors using usability testing " - The approach seems obvious, we take competitors' products, UX-analyze, identify features and form requirements (at the same time and competitive analysis for marketing). Sometimes it turns out that users dream of what has been done for a long time (but hard to find). There are interesting cases when it turned out that users are not people at all ...
Self-indulgence in grocery companies - symptoms, consequences ... ” - in fact, it’s probably easier for the reader to read the article by the author “ Patterns in the reasoning that create unsuccessful products ” on the topic “Everyone lies in allegedly logical reasoning”.
Jem Ludum Dare ” is probably still in this section of the start-up experience of a special gaming hackathon, where in 48 hours you need to design, code, roll out and unleash a 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, it will probably be banned in runet.

Company and Processes

How to make friends with a PO with a UX team ” - a product manager from designers who reflect on the topic of role conflicts in the process. “The product manager doesn’t understand the value of UXer”, “The designer doesn’t see the business and deadlines, and in general the dolt is overloaded”, etc. In any case, this is not “XXX asshole”, but a manager’s mistake.
New management of a mature product ” - a fresh product manager encourages everything around the B2B product of an ambitious office (the closest goals are $ 100mln, IPO, ...), reveals vision, business strategy, product strategy, builds organizational structures, processes, and so on. , despite the fact that the formal authority, as is usually the case with food producers, was not enough.
Growth problems of a grocery company - we give a fight to acne and more serious adolescent challenges ”: The speaker only guessed to take a microphone in a few minutes ... (a lesson for all future speakers - “don't be like that!”), Then everything will be OK with sound. The classic anthropomorphic metaphors of the company's development (“childhood-youthhood — rapid growth of the body — hormonal adjustment”), but it’s one thing to listen to growth horrors from people from a company to a hundred people, another thing is Wargaming, no one doubts that they had to not weakly grow, and suppress a lot of acne.
Fitbit Belarus - from outsourcing to the development of its products ” - “In Belarus, nobody knows us ... but in the States - at the Apple level ... Everybody knows!”. Lucky tale - the owners fell in love with the hired Belarusian outsourcers, and took them to Valinor and opened a full-fledged office here.
Creating products for one’s own needs ” - in Minsk, of course, it was not without EPAM, even at a product conference (there are dozens of such “Fitbits inside EPAMA”). On the evolution of internal process systems, from Excel, to opensource issue trackers, to the conscious desire to do something perfect for yourself, and the creation of a self-made monster. Then they accumulate money on good specialized applications, remove the monster's home-made product, but soon end up with a bunch of poorly integrated specialized systems. They are starting to write a common platform ... well, it all came to the classic custom enterprise development ...
Managing Crisis Products ” —The very first report of the third section, when everything was lumpy — the slides were not playing, the sound was not written, in general, the whole technique was buggy ... a serious stress for the speaker. “What is good, what is bad when there is a crisis in the company ?, bad and good symptoms of team health, when you can kill a product, stories ...”. The most important thing is “to keep your head in the cold, to have a model of analysis, to support your team, take it easy - the fact that you are engaged in crisis management does not mean that you will succeed”. A speaker from Kaspersky Lab, but he clearly saw crises before LC, and, in my opinion, a real crisis, this is when it is much, much worse. In my opinion, the discussion from the audience is interesting from 16 minutes .




Sales, and other Grow Hacking

How to wake up mobile app sales is a collection of inexplicable conversion stories of the popular Ultimate Guitars app. With a subscription model, the main money is paid by a livetime subscription, consider buying. Reducing upgrade options - increases conversion. The introduction of free trial for time-limited plans increases the purchase of a lifetime, where trial is not. These stories are still waiting for their Sherlock Holmes, although there are reasonable hypotheses, like "The presence of trial plans increases the credibility of the service."
Grows hacking - Users Activation and Retention in SAAS - “Activation and Retention” at any cost from Weavora CEO (famous products - Everhour ). And 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 did not notice the most important thing here - "Grows hacking", i.e. non-trivial solutions leading to explosive growth.
The product is the main vs. mobile. On the example of Ostrovka , how to graze in parallel a mobile and web project, what kind of analytics, what to watch, how to promote ... interesting insights and hypotheses on what is observed from well-known Ostrovka. And yes, here I was able to splash out my hatred (an uninstallable application for booking hotels for the night on my daughter’s children's tablet - and this is also called “we are inactively promoting on the Android platform”).

Bonus

Slides and contacts of speakers in social networks - in the links from the video description.
If suddenly someone missed - then the remaining reports here . I will be glad to any feedback in the next couple of weeks - the video source is still there, and you can fix something - change the plan (show the screen larger, or on the contrary, show the laser pointer on the screen, etc.), speed up if the report is still it seems boring, or vice versa, to slow down, if I went over a bit with acceleration, change the sound track, etc. - I will definitely fix it, I am reviewing it now, I noticed a lot of jambs myself.

The sound doesn’t promise a true result - there was a terrible situation with acoustics - three halls without partitions, a common echo ... I specifically recorded on voice recorders, but there was no sound engineer there, and partly the dictaphone recording was filmed. I spent a couple of months tinkering with attempts to improve "normal sound" (denoisil, singled out Central Pan, played in every way) - if someone 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 photos , everything is as usual, everything was positive, "#wishyouwerehere", "#cooking the table and passing the pass".
If you want more reports on ProductManagement - the channel of reports on the topic , you can join the FB-community .

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/242313/


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