SESSION DESCRIPTIONS
September 16
9:30 am – 10:15 am
Elevated Insight Techniques for Product Managers
Jay Nakagawa, Dell Technologies
How does a product manager consistently develop a winning product strategy that leaves the competition in the rear view mirror? What frameworks can you utilize to understand where to dig for the treasure and deliver what customers really want? This is the goal of every product strategy but is difficult to consistently deliver without a methodology that goes beyond what most product managers learn. This session will focus on how today's product manager can gain Elevated Insights while developing their strategy and product plans.
The Non-Obvious Way to Engage Organization Support for Innovation
Doug Hall Dexter Bourbon Distillery
Innovation, particularly disruptive innovation, is often met with resistance. This workshop will detail key principles and processes to not just overcome the resistance, but ignite engagement from the wider organization. The methods are brought to life through real world examples from the Dexter Bourbon Distillery.
Alignment of Corporate Strategy and Portfolio Management by Application of New Product Magement
Jack Hsieh, Maestro Project Management
In most companies, there is a missing link between Strategy and Portfolio management. Which direction should we pursue to gain corporate benefit? What are the guidelines and principles for portfolio management (resource allocation)? The missing link is called new product development (NPD). It's a methodology that consists of strategy, market research, NPD process, team/people/ organization, and portfolio management. The session will include international content, to inspire the audience on how PDMA Body of Knowledge is applied in foreign countries.
1:00 pm – 1:45 pm
99 Problems but Discovery Ain’t One: Finding the Right Problems to Solve
Alex Coutney & Travis Duncan, BJ Health Systems
Everyone you talk with has an observation, opinion, pain point, or idea they feel would be a "game changer" for your product team. With so many opportunities and limited capacity, it's hard for these teams to determine what the real problem is and which problems are worth solving. During this session, you will hear how BJC Healthcare approaches problem definition through discovery, orients high-performing teams around the problem, and empowers them to solve the most challenging problems facing their patients, nurses, and providers.
Beyond Brainstorming: Leveraging the Power of Creativity in Product Development
Karin Anne Davis, Pink Pigs Fly
Ready to transform your product development process? Join us for this dynamic workshop where we reveal how to unleash the power of CREATIVITY in the backend phases of product development. Discover cutting-edge techniques to tackle real-world challenges and drive product innovation like never before. Through interactive exercises and actionable strategies, you’ll learn how to apply creativity to make impactful improvements in your product development journey. Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your approach and unlock new levels of impact & effectiveness!
A Novel Systematic Product Managers Framework
Nishant Parikh, Mastercard
This presentation is based on a systematic literature review that dispels the misconception that product managers are responsible for the entire product management framework. The presentation aims to elucidate the specific activities, responsibilities, and accountability of software product managers (PMs) within the diverse organizational landscape. It focuses on understanding the interplay between strategic product managers, technical product managers, and other cross-functional roles. The study/presentation describes 19 key activities, outlining the comprehensive role of Software Product Managers.
2:00 pm – 2:45 pm
How to Generate Awesome Ideas
Maggie Nichols & Gregg Lemmon, Eureka! Ranch
For the past 40 years, Eureka! Ranch has been doing research and experimentation with over 2,000 companies to identify the most effective way to generate ideas that are meaningful and unique. In this workshop, they’ll highlight 5 reproducible and reliable techniques that create top-box scoring ideas using collaboration, stimulus and A.I.
AI Superpowers: Accelerate Decision Making and Market Success
Luke Freiler, Centercode
In the race to integrate AI into products of all types, savvy product managers can harness its potential as a superpower to enhance decision making and expedite market entry. This talk will explore practical tactics for leveraging AI during development and delivery to gain actionable insights, streamline workflows, and outpace competitors. Learn how to transform your product management approach with AI-driven tools and techniques to achieve faster, smarter, and more impactful outcomes.
The Agility of Saturday Night Live
John Krewson, Sketch
There's a lot we can learn from how Saturday Night Live manages and delivers their product. Join us for a back stage and on stage view into the process SNL has developed over decades to get from concept to cash in one week. Along the way we'll gain a new understanding of empirical process control, continuous delivery, the care and feeding of high performing teams, and dependency & deadline management. We'll see how they maintain agility while delivering on time, and how they maintain alignment by keeping their work visible. And we'll probably laugh a lot too.
September 17
9:30 am – 10:15 am
Ask a Professional Stalker: Unveilling the Secrets of UX Research
Martha Valenta, Biogenerator Ventures
In this engaging presentation, Martha Valenta, a self-proclaimed "professional stalker," will take you on a thrilling journey through the world of UX research. By drawing parallels between the skills of a detective and those of a UX researcher, Martha will demystify the various research methods and their applications. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of when and how to employ primary, secondary, qualitative, quantitative, exploratory, descriptive, and causal research techniques. The presentation will also delve into current trends, ethical considerations, and the future of UX research.
Innovation for Everyday Products
Terry Carrol, Hillphoenix/Dover Food Retail
In a new book that's in the works, Terry Carroll and Jerry Fix explore product management from a practitioner's point of view and share many lessons learned during extensive careers in this field. The focus of their presentation will be to share excerpts from the chapter on innovation and walk the audience through a real-life NPD project that focuses on a utilitarian product that earned multiple patents for its clever innovations. They will take you on an innovation journey and share the "secret sauce" of how an ordinary product was transformed into something new and innovative.
Building Innovation Governance and Culture at James Hardie
Shion Hung, James Hardie Building Products
Throughout its over 100-year history, James Hardie has attempted to implement new product development (NPD) governance several times, though until very recently adoption was poor and ultimately these initiatives were abandoned. This case study will explore the company's most recent effort to deploy a stage-gate methodology, finally achieving the critical mass and organizational adoption that should accelerate meaningful innovation at the company.
10:30 am – 11: 15 am
SAE’S Idea Engine: SAE’s “Bad Idea” for Driving a Culture of Innovation
Steve Ezar, SAE
Adobe's Kickbox innovation program operates with the premise that the key to uncovering good ideas is to quickly evolve "bad ideas". SAE International has incorporated Adobe's Kickbox process into its innovation process for new products and we acknowledge that a "Bad Idea" needs to continually evolve and improve. Participate in the dismantling of SAE's innovation program: the SAE Idea Engine. Your active participation in critiquing, evaluating and evolving the program will serve as a hands-on case study on how, we as a team, can take a "bad idea" and make it a value-adding process. The sharing of perspectives and best practices will provide actionable insights to the participants to apply to their innovation programs.
Deliver Customer Value with Product Thinking
Valerio Zanini, 5D Vision
Product people know to focus on outcomes and not on outputs. They know the need to measure value metrics and not vanity metrics. Yet, changing behavior is often hard, and many fall back to feature development and execution when they receive marching orders from management or important stakeholders. Product Thinking shifts the mindset from inside-out thinking to outside-in thinking by focusing on the key metrics that matters the most: retention. Without retention, there is no customer value, there are no outcomes, there is no successful product. In this session we'll discover 3 techniques to drive product thinking and create products that deliver outcomes.
Leveraging AI for New Product Development
Brian Collard, Novaisys
This session will discuss how AI tools and prompting techniques improved over the past year and are delivering amazing results for companies like WalMart. Then we will then capture audience input and follow a similar process to create a new product brief from scratch. The session will be broken into roughly three areas – using AI tools to identify new markets, determine product tradeoffs, and create product documentation.
11:30 am – 12:15 pm
Gut-Level Design: How to Trust (but Verify) Your Innovation Intuition
John Eaton, Re: Build Tekna
Running an effective internal innovation initiative means implementing a solid mechanism for the intake, evaluation, curation, and communication of early product concepts. To manage this, Re:Build Tekna developed its "Gut-Level Screen" (GLS), by pairing Design Thinking tenets (Desirability, Feasibility, Viability, or DFV) with a scaled evaluative tool targeted at early ideation and concept creation phases. Recently, Re:Build Tekna concluded a 6-month innovation exercise to identify high impact problems across three unique markets. Then, R&D teams ran multiple solution concepts through the GLS to assess DFV maturity alongside organizational context, urgency, and importance. With this "informed intuition" in hand, Re:Build Tekna leadership compared the multiple value propositions to determine which concept would be funded for further R&D. This presentation will include a background on Re:Build Tekna's approach, the outline of its GLS, and how the tool can be applied to both internal and customer-focused innovation initiatives.
Overcoming Common Failure Points in Product Launches
James Whitman, Growth Guidepost
Why do product launches, a high-stakes activity at the heart of corporate growth strategy, have such a significant failure rate? In this session, product leaders will learn how the most successful companies approach launch & overcome the most common organizational dysfunctions around metrics, incentives, communications, priority setting, and alignment. Participants learn practical approaches to overcome common challenges, a framework to become world-class launch team, and case studies of successful organizations to inspire. Participants will learn the skills to scale more consistently, attract investment, and deliver strong returns to shareholders.
Connect, Co-Create, Innovate- Power of Community-Driven Product Innovation
Diana Stepner, Product Gold
Fostering creativity and staying ahead of the curve can be challenging, especially in business unit silos. Enter the power of product communities. This case study dives deep into the creation, management, and ongoing engagement of the Future Technologies Champions product community, showcasing how you can unlock the collective genius of a community to ignite innovation by: Increasing knowledge sharing & collaboration and Boosting innovation & problem-solving. Participants will understand the power of product communities and their impact on innovation, while learning practical strategies for building, managing, and sustaining a thriving community.
