The second productcamp for Austin is just around the corner! Are you going to be there? You should.
Announcement
Paul Young has written a great announcement and explanation of what product camp is. I really enjoyed and benefited from the one we did last spring, and I can’t wait to attend and present at this one! If you are or can be in the Austin area on Jan 24th, make sure you head to the UT Austin College of Communications CMB building, studios 4B through 4E from 8 to 5:30. And the networking afterwords is sure to be even better than last year too.
Presentation Topics
A key takeaway from our first productcamp was that people most enjoyed the presentations that were more collaborative. These sessions tended to give attendees the ability to immediately put to use some really good ideas. I’ll wager that we’ll have a mix of presentation styles again this year, but that it will skew to the interactive and practical. The roundtables were also very well received, and I hope we’ll have more of those too.
I’m really looking forward to presenting again, and would love suggestions from you about topics you think would be valuable. I guess this is pre-collaboration :). At the moment, I’m leaning towards a presentation around using wireframes to rapid-prototype ideas in support of an agile development team. I’m currently doing this with the developers and stakeholders at OtherInbox, an Austin start-up that was one of this year’s TechCrunch 50, doing some awesome stuff to eliminate email overload.
So far, this is proving to be an effective way to rapidly evolve ideas and minimize the overhead of communication – and we’re doing it with a distributed team. We’ve been using a combination of balsamiq mockups and google docs. By the time product camp rolls around, we’ll have many sprints worth of experience under our belts, and I should be able to provide a mix of how-to’s and lessons learned.
Add a comment below if you have another idea, or if you have any feedback on this one.
Scott, looks like you, Paul and others in Austin are doing a great job preparing for PC Austin. Congrats and keep up the great work! Not sure yet if I’ll be able to make it; either way I’ll be watching. -Michael
If you’re in the Boston area and are interested in Product Camp, check out the first PCamp Boston that’s coming together for Sat. Feb 28 at the Microsoft Start up Labs in Cambridge. Sponsored in part by the Boston Product Management Association (BPMA).