2020 Speakers

Keynotes

April Dunford

Positioning Jujitsu - How to Win Against Powerful Competitors
Our products compete in markets that are frightfully crowded and competitive. In this session, I will show you how to use positioning to ensure your buyers intuitively understand why your product is different and extraordinary.

April Dunford is a consultant and author who helps companies make complicated products easy for customers to understand and love. She is a globally recognized expert in Positioning, having launched 16 products across her 25-year career as VP Marketing at a series of successful startups. She is the author of the best-selling book Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it
www.aprildunford.com

Rich Mironov

What Do Product Leaders Do? (and How Do I Become One?)"
Career paths for product folks are murky: job responsibilities are unbounded, and most of us got our first product management jobs accidentally or through internal transfers.  Opportunities for advancement can be just as unclear.  We'll break this down into:

•  What do product leader do, as distinct from (individual contributor) product managers?
  
• Ways to signal interest and demonstrate product leader skills
  
• “Should I want that?”
  

Rich Mironov is a 35-year veteran of Silicon Valley product management including 6 startups. He is a smokejumper product executive – parachuting into software companies to run product teams on an interim basis – when he's not coaching product leaders or helping design product organizations. He founded Product Camp, has been blogging about software product management since 2002 and his “Art of Product Management” was one of the first books on the subject. 
www.mironov.com

---

Session Speakers

Payal Arora

Tech Design for the Next Billion 


We are immersed in a graveyard of apps. We seem to be producing more of the same. As these products have gone global, we appear to mistake scalability for adoptability. Part of this failure rests on predictive fictions on what motivates users outside the West. Those long at the margins of our imagination have now become the norm – the next billion users -  and are pushing ahead with novel demands on interfacing, design preferences, and aspirational consumption, demanding in turn that we rethink what we deem as efficient, effective, and thereby good design for the next billion.

Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist and author of several award-winning books including the ‘Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press. She is a Professor in Technology, Values, and Global Media Cultures at Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Founder of a digital storytelling organization, Catalyst Lab. Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and the right kind of person to reform tech. She is Indian, Irish and American, and currently lives in Amsterdam.

Hara Mangipudi

Product Management for Startups - Is it an Art or Applied Science?

Software has emerged as the key value driver for every product and business in the digital world. Therefore, software product management is a critical leadership competence for the success of any software intensive product and business. While it is a well known practice in various well established product companies, most Software Product Management(SPM) aspects are still adhoc within a startup. Startups are challenged to find the product-market fit early on, there are less room for errors, hence a Lean Product Management framework would be extremely essential for startups. Lean SPM is an adaptation of the SPM framework and syllabus that covers the topics relevant for an early stage product in a startup.

Brian Nejmeh

Digital Disruption Hits Product Management: A Taxonomy of Product Management Tools
Brian Nejmeh is the President of INSTEP, Inc., a software technology advisory firm where he is an advisor, investor and board member to start-up and advanced stage software companies. Brian’s focus over the past 25 years has been on building and scaling enterprise software companies leveraging his core competencies in software product development, product management and technology leadership. Brian began his career as a software engineer at Bell Labs. He has held executive leadership or advisory positions at start-up, expansion stage and both privately and publicly held middle and large market enterprise software companies.

Brian has published two books and over 40 technical articles in journals such as IEEE Software and Communications of the ACM. His widely-cited work on feature vectors and increments (IEEE Software), is used for incremental product planning in agile SaaS companies. Brian is also the co-creator of the SaaS Framework Model (SFM), a leading industry framework used to guide companies in their SaaS journey in the key areas of business model, sales/marketing, product, architecture, operations, process/people. Brian is an Adjunct Professor in the Master of Science in Product Management Program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Hans-Bernd Kittlaus
Increasing Diversity in Software Product Planning and Development Approaches


Product managers are used to the requirements-driven approach to product planning which continues to be relevant. But in addition, we also need to master the data-analysis-driven approach based on experimentation, and the data-input-driven approach for components utilizing machine learning, and combine all three. In this talk we’ll discuss the characteristics of the three approaches from a PM perspective, and how they can be combined.


Hans-Bernd Kittlaus is the chairman of ISPMA e.V. (www.ispma.org). He is also the owner and general manager of InnoTivum Consulting (www.innotivum.com) which he founded in 2001. Before, he was Director of SIZ GmbH (Computing Center of the German Savings Banks Organization, Germany) and Head of Software Product Management and Development units of IBM. His main focus area is software product management.

---

Al Nejmeh

Digital Disruption Hits Product Management: A Taxonomy of Product Management Tools

This session will provide a newly created product management tools taxonomy for the five product movements of the SaaS Product Manager (strategy, planning, development, marketing, operations). The taxonomy provides a framework for evaluating a company’s current use of product management tools and for creating a roadmap for the acquisition of tools to improve the product management function.

Al Nejmeh is a current product manager for the Ambient Intelligence platform at a Fortune 10 Healthcare company. Al's strong passion for product management tools has led to a curated and classified list of nearly 300+ PM tools in the five product management movements framework. Al has received both his Pragmatic Level VI and Scrum Alliance Product Owner certifications.