“Imagine in your minds eye, an average Utah product manager (although I ask you are any of us really average), sitting awake in a hotel room in Bangalore April 16th

2012 at 2:00AM. The problem that is causing the insomnia (if jet lag wasn’t good enough a reason), no keynote for the Spring 2012 Utah Product Management Association pCamp. If this pCamp were a conference, we were stuck. Tossing and turning, guilt ridden perhaps, the chances of finding a really rockem’ sockem’ speaker were dwindling fast.

Now picture a PM awake with inspiration….Now picture a PM awake with inspiration….

“What if this problem keynote could be treated like a product management exercise? What if product management principles could turn this into an opportunity? What if we could practice our craft in front of our peers?”

We hereby present to you: Four Great Principles that Make Great Product MManagers

Principle one: Great PMs find problems, especially hard ones, and turn them into opportunities.

How many of you use the “5 Whys” method of problem solving? According to Wikipedia “The 5 Whys is a question-asking technique used to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem ("Five Whys Technique". adb.org. Asian Development Bank. February 2009. http://www adb org/publications/five-whys-technique Retrieved 26 March 2012)http://www.adb.org/publications/five-whys-technique. Retrieved 26 March 2012). The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or problem.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys)

So here we go. No keynote. (the problem)First Why? – Why did we have no keynote? Because keynote speakers cost a lot of money.Second Why? – Why do keynote speakers cost a lot? Because people want fantastic speakers driving up demand. (second why)Third Why? – Why are keynote speakers wanted? Because they deliver what conference attendees want in a keynote (third why)Fourth Why? – Keynote speakers know what people want because they want it too: inspiration, motivation, entertainment. (fourth why, a root cause)

Mindshift: Not having a keynote is an opportunity. Why have a keynote at an UNconference? Have an UNkeynote. If we can inspire, motivate, and entertain this particular audience, we could do better than the most expensive keynoters.

So at this point you may be wondering what the picture in front of you has anything to do with anything?

The picture you saw is the genesis of a great opportunity that started with a problem, p y g g pp y p ,heaps of rotting garbage.

Magleby's Fresh, a Provo, Utah, restaurant, is famous among students at Brigham Young University for its all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. It was there in 2009 that Dan Blake first took notice of the staggering amount of food that ended up in the restaurant's garbage cans. Then a junior studying English and business at BYU, Blake began pondering the business opportunities. If your cost of raw materials was nothing, he thought, that would make for fantastic margins.And so it was that EcoScraps was born. Founded in 2010, the company collects roughly 20 tons of food waste a day from more than 70 grocers, produce wholesalers, and Costco stores across Utah and Arizona. Then, it composts the waste into potting soil, which retails for up to $8.50 a bag in nurseries and garden stores throughout the western United States. The company has eight full-time employees and 14 part-time employees. Sales are expected to hit more than $1.5 million in 2011.

Bottom line: Principle one of great product management is to look for problems and why yourself to opportunity.

So returning to our problem, figuring out a keynote that will inspire, motivate, and entertain PMs. Principle two: Great PMs take the problem to the people. They use personas to help them understand the problem in terms of a particular target market. If they get stuck, they dig into their target market until they know them so well that they can think, act, and even emote as they do.

So, what inspires Product Managers, in particular what inspires Utah Product Managers?Product managers love entrepreneurial spirit. They love the challenge of unsolvable

bl l i th ith i fi it i l t i d d ith li tiproblems, solving them with infinitesimal constrained resources, and with unrealistic timelines. They love the thrill of the hunt, and the exhilaration of the kill, even more than their over-demanding management and sales teams do. Utah Product Managers like doing amazing outdoor things with their free time, and with an unrelenting job like being a PM, you need amazing things for those rare free times you do get. They live here because it is a family friendly environment, and with such an un-family friendly job like being a PM, we can use all the help we can get. They love Utah because it is a pre-hyped growth area a place they can find great start up companies over and over again without the hyper infatuatedthey can find great start up companies over and over again, without the hyper infatuated silicon implanted traffic jams found in other places.

What inspires Utah Product Managers attending a un-conference, in particular on a Saturday? Un-conferences give the rare opportunity to see creation in action rather than go to a pre-packaged, homogenized, and pasteurized conference. They provide an opportunity to choose the subjects we want rather than have the subjects chosen for us or even worse subjects sold to the highest bidder Un-conferences give us enlightenmenteven worse subjects sold to the highest bidder. Un-conferences give us enlightenment because smart presenters and even smarter participants join together to explore, collaborate, and challenge the frontiers of our evolving field. We learn more because we actively participate on the application of concepts to our own limitless circumstances, rather than listening to one person talk about their own limited ones. And we are willing to spend extraordinarily precious Saturday time, because we have an insatiable desire to improve ourselves. We sacrifice that time because we know that being a PM requires that we explore our innermost selves to maximize the most powerful resource we have at our

Principle three: Great PMs don’t find new products. They take existing products and make them better, incrementally. This involves taking those existing products and looking for the most valuable increments that can be changed with the fewest resources and the fastest time. They find new methods and new technologies that can streamline and maximize. They look for waste and eliminate. They look for weaknesses and exploit them. They know how to take a team of people and get them to contribute their best skills, and working with them to leave their weaknesses behind They turn constraints into stepping stools and problems into opportunitiesbehind. They turn constraints into stepping stools and problems into opportunities. And Great PMs are disciplined, taking great principles, product management or otherwise, and applying them consistently, relentlessly, energetically, and enthusiastically, until a great product emerges and success is achieved.

So we took the traditional conference keynote, and did the same. We took our problem as an opportunity. We took the good: inspiration, motivation, entertainment. We kept the flashy graphics and left out the expensive celebrity. We eliminated the monolithic ego and replaced it with a collaborative open source process, letting the keynote evolve through the diverse talents of an anonymous humble cross functional team.

We ignored the constraints of presentation length, and focused on the real need, to provide concise usable material. We ignored copyrightable, publishable, patentable,provide concise usable material. We ignored copyrightable, publishable, patentable, and commercializable content, and focused on making our customer truly improved. `Keynotes are often too long. So our product can be short. Keynotes are often a non-attendee selling a generic concept to a captive audience (picture Lance Armstrong at a Las Vegas Internet Security Conference). So our product can be targeted, specific, and simple.

And finally, Great PMs know how to present. They know how to take a product and present it through a great user experience. They know how to take a great concept and make it a resonating message. They know how to package, polish, and perfect. They know how to select, sizzle, satisfy, and sell.

So in summary, find and master the tools of our trade, the principles of product management:1. Don’t avoid your biggest problems, embrace them as your greatest opportunities for success. Seek them out like you would uranium, once thought to be a useless and even dangerous material, now known to be a resource of almost limitless power. Find ways to ask questions and seek new perspectives.2. Get personal with your target market. Get to know them better than you know yourselfyourself.3. Take your problems to your people. Find how they have been solved before and solve them better, incrementally, methodically, relentlessly.4. Take your finished product and make it an experience. Add to everyday food the sizzle, spice, and sauce, to make pasta into primavera, clams into chiapino, fruit into flambé. Don’t settle for players, make iPods. Don’t stop at iPods, evolve to iPhones. Don’t acquiesce to iPhones, invent Android. And don’t end with Android, expand to cupcakes, donuts, eclairs, gingerbread, and ice cream sandwiches.

By raise of hands, who caught that last reference?

And since we have no speaker, we won’t open this up to questions and answers, but propose that you take this presentation (URL) and turn it into your own. For the next X minutes, come up to the microphone comment, challenge, question, collabortate, and contribute and tell us what you think makes a great PM.

Thank you all for making this a great keynote and for making this a great conference.y g g y g g