Product Management Essentials at GA Melbourne
I recently attended a product management night run by the stellar people at General Assembly. Firstly let me say how good these guys are at what they do. In short they pool great minds in cities all over the world and have them speak to classrooms about business and starting up.
Since 2011 GA has moved at a blistering speed securing a $35m financing round in March 2014 and have amassed numbers of around 100,000 students attending classes both online and in cities such as New York, London, Sydney and Melbourne.
I started online classes on GA a while back however the product management night was my first on site. The Melbourne campus was just as you’d imagine. A Slick, modern, Google-esque office filled with brains upon brains and experience you couldn’t even imagine. Oh and there is a hammock and indoor creeping vines (that’s Google-esque right?). As you can gather, I was hooked.
If I wasn’t already addicted to GA’s extensive online collection, I had now banked some familiar faces and a place where they all meet. All of these positive vibes and my first thought was a negative one: “I have to leave hear at some point tonight.” I checked my diary for when my next class was scheduled. Two weeks… Not sure I can make it that long.
Addicted.
The Product Management class was run by Brad Dunn. Brad is the Executive Director at Nazori, an award winning software company based in Melbourne. In short, he knows his shit.
The main take away from this session was “context”. Brad stressed context and with some very interesting examples of how context can or could affect business ventures.
The motor car. Think of our world today as we know it. Electricity, Internet, iPhones and all. Everything the same except there were no cars no roads. Just say you came up with the idea of the motor car. You try to pitch this ideas to investors. You list out it’s obvious advantages and proceed break the ‘costs’ to potential angels.
- It will cost you roughly a quarter of your yearly salary to buy.
- You will need to pay a couple of hundred dollars a month to run and service it.
- Another $1000 a year to register it with the government and insure it with basic cover.
- It will pollute the environment beyond comprehension.
- and it will kill thousands of people per year (even those who don’t buy one).
How much luck would you have getting seed investment for you motor car idea?
The take away, context. Times, world events, trends all matter.
Without giving away much more of what was involved in the night I’ll let you in on a little secret…
It was free!
Sign up and come along. A couple of beers after a casual talk and I walked out overflowing with ideas and business prowess.
I encourage you to sign up, or if you can’t afford the monthly subscription head over and subscribe to their Youtube channel and as I said, they have free classes running all of the time. As an aspiring business owner and beyond these classes are definitely worth your while.
Visit generalassemb.ly for more and let me know what you think.
Adam
Links
Road Toll: http://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/ongoing/rda/files/RDA_Dec13.pdf
Originally published at huntsmanlabs.squarespace.com on August 3, 2014.
