Thursday - May 24, 2007

9:10-
9:55 am

The State of You
Steve Johnson, Instructor, Pragmatic Marketing

Many product managers are too busy to be productive. Too busy with email and voicemail; too busy sitting in meetings and writing reports. Too busy filling the gap left by others on the team. Yet the strategic role of product management is how you deliver the most value to the corporation. What have you accomplished so far this year? Have you delivered strategic value to your product portfolio? Have you expanded your personal skills to deliver strategic value to the company? What is the "state of you?" It's time to take stock of your role in the corporation.

This presentation will explore the role of product management as well as its overlap with key roles in an effective product team.

As an instructor with Pragmatic Marketing® and an expert in technology product management, Steve Johnson has personally trained over 15,000 technology product managers. Steve has been working within the high-technology arena since 1981 with experience in technical, sales, and marketing management positions at companies specializing in enterprise and desktop hardware and software. His market-driven orientation allowed him to rise rapidly through the ranks from Product Manager to Vice President. In his various marketing roles, he has launched 22 product offerings. Steve draws heavily on his marketing and sales experience in both direct and multi-tier distribution; his quick wit adds an element of fun to his presentations.

Steve is also a frequent presenter for various technology marketing forums throughout the North America and Europe, author of many articles on technology product management, and is the webmaster of productmarketing.com — a website devoted to technology product management.

Agile and You:
a Product Manager’s Guide to Being Successful
in an Agile Environment
Laureen Knudsen, Value Delivery Chain LifeCycle Manager,
Management Software Division, Hewlett-Packard Co.

Many engineering and development teams are moving towards using agile methodologies, but what does this mean to a Product Manager? Keep abreast of industry changes and learn how to be successful in this updated view of software development. During this session we will review agile terminology and concepts such as: project backlogs, project owners, self-organized teams, stories, acceptance criteria, and customer advocates. Also learn how you can better track project progress and eliminate those last-minute surprises.

Laureen Knudsen is an award-winning writer and business manager with 22 years of software industry experience. She is currently responsible for Process Improvement/Reengineering for the ITSM group (formerly-Peregrine Systems) at Hewlett Packard Company. This Agile-based process provides the framework for Product Marketing, Management, Development, and Enablement and includes best practices from Scrum, XP, Lean, and Iterative development methodologies.

Previously, Laureen was employed at a leading medical billing and information systems software company and has experience in managing many areas of software development including Quality Assurance, Technical Publications, Product Marketing, Configuration Management, Installation Development, and Program Management. Laureen has a proven track-record for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of processes. For example, while managing a quality assurance organization she lowered the customer-found issues by 60%, saving the company millions in maintenance costs. She has helped grow a company from small and privately held to Fortune 500 and has worked on the integrations for mergers and acquisitions.

Becoming Market Focused
Stacey Mentzel, Director, Product Management, Business Objects

This session will present one company’s experience in changing focus from Sales and Engineering, out to the market we serve. How do you change a culture, from inward focus to outward focus? When do Requirements Tools become part of the solution? Where does Pragmatic Marketing fit in a cultural evolution? In the face of organizational inertia, how do Product Managers stop fire-fighting and maintain laser-focus on the market?

Stacey Mentzel is a Director of Product Management at Business Objects, within the Enterprise Information Management area. Stacey has more than six years of experience in software Product Management. During that time, she has developed a focused interest in the improvement of requirements gathering, analysis, and review. She has led efforts to increase market focus, improve roadmap planning, and increase the effectiveness of requirement reviews with Development teams.

Stacey graduated summa cum laude, earning a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration with a specialization in Management and Computer Information Systems from Viterbo College in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Friday - May 25, 2007

9:00-
9:45 am

Marketing to the Social Web:
How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
Larry Weber, Chairman, W2 Group, Inc.

Marketing is exploding with possibilities and complexities as it reaches out into new forms, media, and models. Software marketers have an exceptional opportunity to use these new tools and models to reach new markets, even in a fragmented media landscape. This session will help marketers understand the context of the new marketing and prioritize what they need to do to build customer communities and maximize profit in a time of marketing confusion and pandemonium. Weber will present specific approaches to find and engage customers, describe newly available tools and platforms, and will discuss with participants how to apply them to achieve immediate results and growth.

Larry Weber is chairman of W2 Group, a global marketing services ecosystem that helps CMOs in their new role as builders of communities and content aggregators. W2 Group companies are leaders in social media marketing in both paid and unpaid media.

In 1987 Weber founded The Weber Group, which within a decade became the world’s largest technology public relations firm. The Interpublic Group of Companies purchased The Weber Group in late 1996, and in early 2000, Weber was named chairman and CEO of Interpublic’s Advanced Marketing Services Group.

Weber is the co-founder and chairman of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX), the world’s largest interactive advocacy organization, and advises Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick on technology-related issues.

Weber is currently working on his second book, Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business.

9:50-10:35 am

How to Make Market Intelligence More Strategic for Your Organization
Ann Marie Beasley, VP Office of Strategy Management, Symantec Corp.

Market intelligence professionals are asked to contribute more to the organization than to general market research. They play a strategic role supporting corporate strategy and planning. They participate in technology tiger teams, providing competitive intelligence, developing market insight tools to assist and provide an advantage for sales and marketing teams.

Session attendees will learn about:

• Actively participating and becoming the key data resource in corporate strategy and planning processes
• Working closely with the CTO’s office on new technology projects
• Aligning competitive intelligence across the organization
• Developing key market insights tools and processes that support go-to-market activities
• Identifying the resources and required skills that make market intelligence different from market research

Ann Marie Beasley is responsible for developing the corporate level processes and content needed for informed decision making and for driving sustained strategic focus and alignment at Symantec, which is ranked at No. 25 on the 2006 Software 500. Beasley works with the executive team to ensure that business plans and activities reflect the corporate strategy and objectives; she is also responsible for measuring and reporting against those objectives. As a part of the Office of Strategy Management, Beasley directs Symantec’s market intelligence and analyst relations functions.