Meet and Learn With Boston’s Best PMs at Unbox 2019
A Product Manager Is Nothing Without Influence
Product managers, rejoice! Unbox, our annual conference for frontline product managers, is returning on September 20, 2019 at the Boston Marriott Copley Place. If you’re a product associate, manager, director, VP, executive, or founder, this is your chance to sharpen your skills and build a better team.
Boston offers a uniquely broad mix of perspectives from B2B SaaS, e-commerce, fintech, blockchain, healthcare, gaming, and more — and you’ll meet all of them at Unbox.
This year our product managers will focus on how they can recognize, leverage, and increase their influence.
Product management is always evolving, and that requires ongoing education and discussion. Unbox sessions provide attendees with thoughtful and actionable new ways of approaching PM that you can apply at work the very next day. This year, we have sessions to help you break through the noise with storytelling, reverse engineer your ideal manager, leverage poker skills to make smarter decisions, and decode engineering-speak to strengthen team cohesion. And that’s (literally) not even close to the half of it!
This isn’t an attend-it-and-forget-it event. At Unbox, you’ll learn about concepts you’ll actually use and meet great people you’ll actually keep in touch with—things you can’t do unless you get out of the office. Grab your team and come have a great day nerding out about product with us.
The Essential Product Manager
As product managers, we have a unique degree of responsibility and influence. We are an organization’s APIs—charged with translating and relaying ideas and information across critical paths. We translate a CEO’s vision into jobs to be done. Customer feedback into functional requirements. Discussions into decisions. Data into insights. The ugly secret is that there’s very little quality assurance applied to the act of product management itself, because it’s often misunderstood. Poor product management is hard to diagnose, and can be cancerous to a company’s performance.
A subpar product manager can do more harm to a company than having no product manager.
The critical translations for which product managers are responsible can make or break a company. If you’re going to have a product function, you have to invest in it. Any product manager, by definition, must be essential to the organization. A product manager without influence is merely a project manager turning cogs.
We created Unbox because our roles are constantly evolving and the level of autonomy and influence—which we love—deserves a higher degree of professional development. Attendees at this year’s Unbox will get the knowledge, skills, and relationships they need to wield their influence and empower their companies to succeed.
Unbox Represents Our Community Values
Empathy
We know what boring conferences feel like, and we consider others with our event design. We optimize for interaction—that means fewer keynotes, more workshops, and more time to connect with people in the room with our custom Funbox games. Since last year’s event, we’ve moved to a more spacious venue to reduce noise pollution between rooms. We’ve also built longer breaks into the schedule so people don’t burn out.
Inclusivity
Everyone deserves a voice, and while we’ve always had diverse representation with our speakers. we want to extend that commitment to our attendees as well in 2019. That’s why we’ve partnered with The Tech Connection for our Pay the Way program. A portion of our sponsor proceeds will go towards covering the ticket prices for underrepresented entrepreneurs in the community. Incorporating more perspectives allows all of us to create better teams and products.
Gratitude
We are deeply appreciative of our community for giving us permission to put this event on each year. The new friendships, new job leads, and new skills people leave with are the motivation we need to put in the extra hours bringing Unbox to life. We express our gratitude by investing ourselves into every single detail. We hand sign every notebook and hand pick every song on the playlist each year.
Be a Part of Unbox
Ask your manager about going to Unbox in your next 1:1. Product managers are supposed to get out of the office, and this is a day we know will be worth it. Ditch your desk for a day to build relationships and skills that will last your whole career.
If you want to support our mission and meet the best PMs in Boston, become an Unbox sponsor.
