Very First Meeting

  • 27 Mar 2001
  • 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
  • Unknown

Toronto Product Management Association  Kick-off Meeting

Meeting Notes, Tuesday, March 27, 2001

 

Summary:

  • This was the kick-off meeting, first every gathering.
  • Purpose is to gather and share experiences, stories, and tricks of the product management trade
  • We decided to meet monthly, last Tuesday of every month at 6:30 pm.
  • Next 2 meetings held at Sitraka Software, Basement Conference Facility.
  • More information available at: http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/tpma
  • Next meeting will be a break-out session. Topic to be chosen by poll on the TPMA website.

 

Meeting Minutes

Introduction of organizers:

 

Alan Armstrong - Director of New Products at Sitraka Software

Paul Chen - CTO, Flonetwork

Praising Gaw, Sr. Product Manager, Q9 Networks

 

Schedule for tonight: Discuss the topics that we want to address in future meetings. Allow some structure to develop; we will determine among ourselves what the Association will become

 

Show of hands:

How many people are product managers?

A few VPs, a few PMs, a few TPMs, a few Program Managers

 

On your way in the door, Praising Gaw asked you to think about the following question:

What s the biggest challenge you face with your job in the last year?

Answers were as follows when posed to the floor:

 

·        Thinking strategically; determining what will drive us as a business.

·        Staying focussed

·        Viewing all user requirements, which can be viewed as strategic and which are not

·        Definition and shaping of the PM role; especially if you are new to product management

·        Putting theory into practice

·        Create a process to meet end user (customer) requirements

·        Striking the correct balance between product management and marketing

·        The senior roles in the organization: example: VP of product management has technical and marketing responsibilities: is this too broad a role?

·        Strategic alliances: stretch from straight channel deals vs. delivery of technology that will change the final product and the end user product experience

·        Focus on the strategic vs. the tactical

·        How far in advance to you pitch what is not yet developed? How long is the sales horizon for selling vapourware? Discussion: A lot of that depends on your sales cycle. Match the marketing activities to your sales cycle.

·        Shrinking product and sales cycles:  used to be 6-8 months, but are getting shorter (4 months). This is great for sales, but bad for product management

·        Communication. Example: (Hyperion) Small development office – 100 people, 2 product managers. Product managers are “meetings to death”. Need to create a balance.

·        Keeping to the letter of the development contract. Issue of being too rigid about product requirements as originally outlined. Zealousness can be a downfall. (Discussion) Keep a top down view of what is needed; this allows you to move more quickly in making the product meet end user requirements. Balance is required - too much structure can impede innovation.

 

 

Several reporting structures were described:

       into VP of Product Management and Alliances (DWL)

       program managers report into a product manager (Reg)

       into VP of Line of Business (Basis100); development for new products draws from a pool of developers that span existing product lines

 

Topics that we would like the TPMA to examine:

·        Validating user requirements. How to reach out to customers, end users, beta evaluators, the experiences and resources of internals

·        For the start-up: When is the best time to ramp up training? Documentation? Marketing?

·        How to determine product direction

·        Beta test programs – keeping them on track. Keeping people involved. Keeping aggressive. Bringing those with practical marketing understanding to the table to provide product direction; leads back into the validation process

·        The tools for facilitating product management:

·        Many companies struggle with the infrastructure for data collection and management

·        Companies are using: email, the intranet (issues of accessibility within the organization; to what degree do you involve / inform sales of new products)

·        Example: Use PBCS for bug tracking

·        Use StarTeam to track document changes, product requirements, and code. Can be used for software builds. In use for several years

·        The difficulty of finding commercial solutions. A good tool for product release is not available.

·        MS/2 product. Based on the Pragmatic Marketing framework. Very focussed on product management. Creates views based on user. Extends intranet and rolls out what we need as product managers. May not be the ideal view for sales, however.

·        Extreme programming – Is there a role for a extreme product manager? Brief discussion about the process for extreme programming.

·        Strategy and positioning of products

·        Tools and tricks of the trade: any good books, tools, web sites that we have run across? Let’s share the wealth

·        War stories.

 

 

Format for the evenings was discussed. What would work well? What are expectations?

·        Book a brief presentation of individual’s processes. Filter down to a 30 minute presentation on a particular situation: identify issues and what the product manager’s challenges are.

·        Throw a number of topics on the wall, break up and see what we would like to discuss.

·        Other geographic TPMAs (various U.S. urban centres) are in existence. In these organizations, panels will speak for 3-5 minutes each on a particular topic and their own experiences, and then open it up for a Q&A session to the audience.

·        Do we want to bring speakers in?

·        there is a lot of expertise in this room; we need to channel and take advantage of this fact. We don’t need to have external speakers

·        Allow for a transfer of information and knowledge. Let the people that have experience share it with the uninitiated. After a few sessions, we may find something that we cannot solve within the group – and then we could bring a speaker in.

·        Cofee break session topics. At the coffee break, announce a particular issue or inquiry, and meet in a corner to discuss personal unique experiences. Informal; treat it like a trade show.

·        Go through the Pragmatic Marketing chart, have a session for each of the 32 boxes in the Pragmatic matrix

·        Steve Johnson, from Pragmatic Marketing, could come in and speak for an evening.  We may want to consider hosting a public session of the Practical Product Management course.

·        “Birds of a feather”. Create breakout sessions for those facing similar issues

·        Should we discuss WHAT needs to be done to be a successful product manager, rather than HOW to do the things that need to be done?

 

Housekeeping items:

·        Recruiting.  No recruiters to be allowed in the session – we hope that the people that we work for would be pleased to have us attending the sessions.

·        Forum for sharing ideas and experience, not employees

·        Need to have a kickoff volunteer for the next six months. If you would like to volunteer your time, please contact the TPMA organizers.

 

 

We wanted to come out of the meeting with an idea of what we will do for the meetings for each of the next three months. Generally agreed that the last Tuesday of each month would be satisfactory for the group

 

Keep the participant’s experiences separate from their company. We don’t want have to be signing NDAs for attending the association meetings – avoid the immaterial details. Some company information will undoubtedly be discussed, but we must work to keep this protected.

 

We want to make the Toronto area a better place to be a product manager. We need to do this; make the environment attractive in light of the pull for product management in California.

 

Action: Have a summary of cool books / sites we have read. We can place this on the Yahoo Groups forum that has been set up for the TPMA; try and keep the list digital and dynamic. The TPMA Yahoo Group can be found athttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/tpma

 

For the next meeting    outline a single topic beforehand to be discussed.  One the topic has been introduced in the meeting, break into multiple groups for discussion. Post discussion topics on the Yahoo forum, and allow the people that didn’t attend the opportunity to vote on the topics.

 

The following month (May) outline multiple topics, and based on the interest among the group, break into  multiple groups for discussion.

 

For the next meeting, allow everyone to stand up and briefly introduce themselves.

 

 

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