The Product Management Workshops You’ve Always Wanted — Announcing our Product Lineup at Front 2018
8–9 November 2018 • Salt Lake City, Utah
If you attended the Front Conference last June and found yourself wishing you could practice some of the methods shared in their case studies now is your chance. Come join us this November in a more intimate setting that allows you to interact in more detail with some of the top Product professionals in our industry.
Learn from the decades of experience of those who’ve lead teams in journey mapping, building a 3x conversion product playbook, literally wrote the book on user story mapping, how to effectively work together over the course of projects to ship great software products, and how to create intelligent products.
Check out the workshops below and grab yourself a ticket.
Limited seats available.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: How to effectively work together over the course of your project to ship great software products
Friday, 9 November 2018, at 1:30 PM
World-class product teams are greater than the sum of their parts — but how does that happen? Sometimes you’re lucky, and if you put a cross-functional team into a small room, they spit out magic. More often, though, product teams struggle to work together effectively, spending more time bumping into each other than actually building a product. PMs, UX designers, and executives all try to drive definition, engineering isn’t brought in early enough, and QA sees a story for the first time when they test it.
In this workshop, Vicky will share methods and models of working together that have transformed her teams at Adobe, Lucid Software, and Vivint Smart Home. As a participant, you’ll get hands-on practice writing OKRs, crafting the perfect one-pager, navigating the project cycle from wireframes to defined JIRA tickets, breaking down dev work for estimation, and building roadmaps that work. You’ll leave the session with tools and templates that you can implement right away, and an understanding of how to build the single most important capability of any product team.
About Vicky
Vicky Thomas is the Director of Product Management for Vivint Smart Home’s mobile apps. At Vivint, Vicky leads product teams to envision and build the next generation of smart home experiences, leveraging software, hardware, AI, voice, and conversational interfaces. Prior to joining Vivint, Vicky served as Lead Product Manager at Lucid Software, makers of top-ranked productivity apps Lucidchart and Lucidpress, and as a Product Manager at Adobe on Adobe Analytics. She is passionate about building world-class product teams and bringing new ideas to life.
Vicky holds an S.B. in Aerospace Engineering from MIT, with a certificate in Advanced Engineering Leadership from the Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program. She has received numerous awards for her industry and community impact, including a 2015 Women Tech Award from the Women Tech Council, and a spot on Utah Business Magazines 2017 30 Women to Watchlist. In her free time, Vicky enjoys backpacking with her husband and dog, playing soccer, backcountry skiing, and flying single-engine aircraft.
User story mapping
Friday, 9 November 2018, at 8:30 AM
Ideal Agile development teams build small valuable chunks of functionality. But, that’s easier said than done. Not all products or features are small and breaking them down into small buildable parts is challenging. And, even when you do, how do the people building those small parts not lose sight of the big picture? Story mapping is a simple practice for telling the story of a whole product or feature starting by telling the stories of the users who’ll use it. In this fast-paced workshop, you’ll learn the concepts of story mapping by building a map collaboratively with others. You’ll learn advanced techniques for slicing a map to find small viable product releases, and then how to build your product using smaller stories without losing sight of the big picture.
About Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton helps companies adopt a way of working that’s focused on building great products, not just building stuff faster. Jeff blends a mixture of Agile thinking, Lean and Lean Startup Thinking, and UX Design and Design Thinking to end up with a holistic product-centric way of working. Jeff is the author of the bestselling O’Reilly book User Story Mapping which describes a simple holistic approach to using stories in Agile development without losing sight of the big picture. You can learn more about Jeff at jpattonassociates.com.
The 3x Conversion Playbook: Step-by-step instructions for Product Managers to increase customers and fuel their business.
Thursday, 8 November 2018, at 8:30 AM
Most PMs focus on building high-quality features. This workshop will demonstrate why that isn’t enough in today’s world of competitive products, and it will show you how to appeal to people through Growth and conversion principles.
During the workshop, you will learn through actual examples about how to improve conversion and take the growth mindset back to your product organizations.
About Barron
Barron Caster is the Director of Growth at Rev.com, where he has the pleasure of working alongside Andy Branch (Front co-founder). Over the past couple of years, he’s built a world-class growth team that acquires customers at scale. In a previous life, he worked as a VC at General Catalyst and an operator at Zenefits. In his spare time, Barron writes about Growth and management, as well as advises and invests in early-stage companies. He is also pursuing a walking handstand in the next 12 months, although little progress has been made.
Journey Mapping for PMs: Why building a journey map will help you build the right thing, on time.
Thursday, 8 November 2018, at 1:30 PM
How often do you, the PM, build journey maps? The answer for me used to be basically never. In this workshop, we’ll practice building them and talk about how they can help you build the right thing and ship on time.
About Blake
Blake McClary is a product manager at Instructure, a publicly held ed-tech company in Utah. Outside of work he enjoys cycling, eating and working on side projects with friends.
How to Create Intelligent Products
Thursday, 8 November 2018, at 3:45 PM
According to Gartner “AI Technologies will be in almost every new software product by 2020”. With this explosion of AI products, many will fail. However, there are common trends that are emerging among the intelligent products that are succeeding. So what is it, that makes an AI product that customers love? In this workshop, you will deep dive into the most relevant concepts across various disciplines that help answer this question.
You will learn:
- Analytics for AI products
- Machine Learning for AI products
- UX for AI Products
- Common Use Cases for AI Products
- Discovering AI Product OpportunitiesYou will also learn how to embed AI into your software development methodology and design and effective AI product team. Through exercises, case-studies and lessons learned, this workshop will empower your product team with an actionable path to incorporate AI in an impactful way into your business.
About Jaekob
Jaekob is leading AI innovation at Adobe Analytics, the heart of Adobe’s next-gen digital experience cloud. Over the last five years, Jaekob has worked in startup, non-profit, and enterprise environments. In each case, Jaekob sought out and led projects that were disrupting the status quo. His passion for trailblazing opportunities married with his background in AI led him to focus his career on building Intelligent Products. When not at work, Jaekob enjoys spending time with his Russian/Ukrainian wife Galina and their three children. He and his family have a passion for all forms of exploration from ice-fishing to genealogy.
Check out our highlight video from last year. We had 160+ attendees from 5 countries and 28 states across the US.
Don’t miss our team discounts: 10% off groups of 3–5, 15% off groups of 6–7, and 20% off 8 or more. These workshops are great for teams and we want as many team members to be able to attend.
