Resources: Archives — Past Meetings
Past Meetings — 2005
The NorCal PDMA chapter holds meetings approximately 8 times per year. Meetings have covered a variety of product development topics of current interest to our audience.
August 17
Using Outsourcing and Offshoring as a Product Development Growth Strategy
Outsourcing and offshoring has evolved from being a simple means to cut project costs into an essential revenue recognition and growth strategy for many product development companies. Rather than an optional staffing decision, it has become a necessity. Increasingly, enterprises are drawing on the strengths of their outsourcing partners to bring in the right mix of people, process and technology.
Come learn product development offshoring tips from industry experts including:
Keith Jaeger - Vice President of Product Development, Finaplex
Raj Sundaresan - Senior Director, Software Development, PayPal
Steve Yen - Founder/CEO, Metaha
Rich Marino - Chief Strategy Officer, Innova Solutions
Moderated by Dr. Bill Musgrave of The Enterprise Network (TEN).
July 16
Optimize Performance for the Product Launch or Strategic Initiative
Are you planning a product launch, a new marketing program, or strategic initiative rollout? What will it take to get sales and field marketing on board, aligned, and fully prepared to execute? In most companies, legacy processes and templates drive the same types of messages, collateral, and programs from one launch to another; or else things get re-invented each time. Do you have a planning framework to prevent the team from missing factors that impact results, or from developing program components that conflict? If you have a planning framework, is it working? Would you like to have planning sessions where everyone's focused on performance?
Carl Binder has been helping companies identify performance needs, design performance improvement programs, and implement strategic initiatives and product launches for over 20 years, based on his research at Harvard on human learning and performance during the 1970's. He's developed a simple yet powerful model for performance improvement called The Six Boxes™ that you can apply immediately to optimize results for product launches. The Six Boxes™ can also be used to analyze and drive performance in many other product management situations and challenges.
This rapid-fire workshop will teach you the basics of Six Boxes™ Performance Management and give you an opportunity to apply it to a product launch, implementation planning, performance problem-solving, or performance improvement challenge of your choice.
June 15
Delighting The Customer Through User Experience Design
Product management professionals working on products ranging from software to hardware to consumer packaged goods grapple with user experience design. It is one of the most important factors determining the success or failure of a product. Come hear a panel of experts describe how you can develop products that not only satisfy but delight your customers. Through case studies and examples, this panel will show you:
- How to design and develop products with the user in mind
- Factors that determine user delight
- Tools/techniques for capturing user input
- How best to bring users together with design teams
- How to augment the product development process to incorporate user-centered design principles
This event is moderated by Adam Richardson of the award-winning industrial design firm frog design.
May 18
Managing Critical Product Information – The Value In Achieving a Single Source of Truth
Companies traditionally have treated product data as departmental information with individual users building data warehouses and deploying specialized tools to address the problem of consolidating and managing product data. Those days are drawing to a close; however, as companies are realizing that to gain a competitive edge, they need a strategy for developing a cross-enterprise single source of product information. Speakers Hardeep Gulati and Rimi Bewtra, both with Oracle, will describe how and why to consolidate product information and also describe how that single source of product data has implications for the organization downstream impacting processes like supply chain, manufacturing, retail, company recalls, etc.
Do you do competitive analysis on a regular basis? If you answered, "no, but we want to", you're in very good company. Knowing your competition is critical to your company's success. In this session, Blair Koch and Paul Lang will discuss what competitive intelligence is, why it is so important, and how you can take steps to understand your competitors.
Susanne Rasmussen, Former International Marketing Manager, Leapfrog Enterprises
Mick Malisic, Director, Corporate Communications, frog design Inc.
Packaging, too often an afterthought for many companies, is an important part of the product. It can make the difference on how the product is viewed by the customer and how successful the product is in a retail environment. Packaging is both a marketing tool and a protective housing for the product.
Join us for a lively discussion on packaging processes, tips and best practices, as our experts discuss key packaging design and development issues and why you should care.
Part 1 – What is Product Wargaming?
Part 2 – Interactive Product — Miniwargame
Featuring: Jay Kurtz, President, KappaWest
In this interactive two-part session, the speaker will teach you what Product Wargaming is and how to use it effectively to improve your product development efforts and the success of your products.
- Part 1 will include:
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Product Wargame purposes and deliverables at different phases
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Using selected Product Wargaming tools such as the Market and Competitive Map and the Silver Bullet Analysis
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Lessons from Real-Life Product Wargames
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How to put it all together to be effective in your Product Wargame project
In Part 2, the speaker will lead the audience through an actual Product Miniwargame. Participants will form teams, each representing a company with a high tech product.
Why should hardware companies think about providing services to augment their offerings? Where should companies look for services opportunities?
What is different about the process of developing services versus that of products?
What tools and techniques do leading companies deploy in rapid service development environments?
Jeneanne Rae and Tim Ogilvie, founders of Peer Insight, LLC (www.peerinsight.com), will shed new light on these questions. Their ongoing project -- The Global Service Innovation Consortium -- is based on interviews with 150 senior service innovators from 50 Fortune 500 companies during the past two years. Jeneanne and Tim will draw upon this research to present new insights into topic
Successful product development requires the right corporate infrastructure with respect to both organization and process. The right infrastructure can help shorten development cycles, facilitate buy in and support, and ensure successful launch.
How does a product development practitioner go about building this internal infrastructure and support? What does a successful organization look like? What kind of process should be developed that facilitates rather than inhibits product development efforts? This session will provide answers to these key questions.
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