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Define the “True North” for your Product
A Presentation Workshop by Susan Culkin
People don't download your app because they want an app, they download it for what it will do for them. Does your app sell tickets or grow a community of fans? Every product has tangibles and intangibles (which is not the same as tangible and intangible goods...). Defining the core, actual, and augmented characteristics of your product makes the difference in the end-product, as well as increase efficiency and decrease time to launch.Susan Culkin is an Interaction Design & User Experience Specialist. She works with clients to bring to market commercially successful products. She believes that everyone is an expert at some point. Currently, Susan the Product Director for Nurse Backpack and an instructor at the Nashville Software School.
Marketing Like a Media Company
A Presentation by Justin Seeley
In a world where everyone is fighting for attention, whether it's for products, services, or their own personal brand, it's more important than ever to create compelling content. If you're company doesn't have a content strategy, you're doing it wrong! Let's discuss the fundamentals of content, creating value within your industry, and driving sales without opting for the hard sell.Justin Seeley is a graphic designer, digital marketing specialist, and CEO of Edupixel.com. He is a best-selling author for LinkedIn Learning, CreativeLIVE, and Pluralsight, and has created over 150 online courses which have been viewed by over 4 million users all over the world.
The Persistence of Firefighting in Product Development
A Presentation by Daniel Norton
As a product manager, you lead teams of smart, dedicated, hard working developers who diligently guard against poor quality making it into the hands of customers. Yet, it seems that new value creation and quality are both in decline. Why? In this session we will use a high-level introduction to the concept of system dynamics thinking to begin to to explore and understand the causes and potential remedies of this common scenario.Daniel is a software developer by trade. He is a co-founder and former CTO of LeanKit, a Nashville based, VC funded SaaS company [acquired by Planview, Inc. in 2017]. He is now an MBA student at MIT where his focus is on entrepreneurship and business analytics.
Improv for Product People
A Workshop by Becca Groner
Much like improvisers, product professionals juggle many tasks at once, think quickly on their feet, and deal with ambiguity. We can learn many valuable skills and tools from improv comedy that apply to managing products and working with diverse teams. In this workshop, we will play improv games together that will help us hone skills such as listening, creativity, managing group dynamics, and quick thinking. No experience is necessary, just bring a "Yes And" attitude.Becca Groner is a co-organizer of the Nashville Product Meetup and a Product Manager at Stratasan. Becca has been performing and teaching improv comedy for 5 years and founded two local improv troupes that perform regularly at Third Coast Comedy Club. With her group Lady Bits, Becca hosts free monthly improv workshops open to women and gender nonconforming folks. Becca is passionate about all things healthcare, comedy, and community.
Recruiters Suck. Use them.
A Presentation by Taylor Desseyn
In today’s tech market there are more recruiters than JavaScript libraries. And just like JavaScript libraries, it’s hard to pick a good recruiter that that won’t burn out in 6 months. In this open forum talk, I will be answering any and all questions you have always wanted to ask us. Like how do we price positions? What do I look for when working with a recruiter? I will also give tips to everyone like how to write a good resume, are cover letters still relevant, how do I approach a job hunt, and what can make you the most attractive as a candidate in the interview process. This talk is geared for the recent software school grad to the Architect who has recently found themselves back on the job market. I look forward to answering all your questions!Taylor graduated from the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina in 2011 and immediately jumped into the world of recruiting. He started his career at Vaco in 2011 where he has recruited for clients such as Disney, Pacific Gas & Electric, Yahoo!, and Sony. After achieving top producer for 2013 out of a team of six, Taylor was recognized by Vaco and was brought to Raleigh to be instrumental in the building of the Technology division. During his time in Raleigh Taylor helped to scale the team from three to seven and focused on recruiting in all things technology, where he ultimately found his niche within development and TriNug (Raleigh .NET User Group). In June 2014 Taylor was asked to return to the Nashville office to help build out the technology team. Since his return, Taylor has been elected VP of the .NET User Group in Nashville for the last three years. He focuses 100% of his time within the development vertical in technology. As of 2017 Taylor is the Recruiting Manager of Vaco’s Nashville Technology division that is responsible for grossing $4.5 million a year in revenue and ranking in the top of over 30+ Vaco Technology offices. From his time at Vaco he has seen the team double in size from seven to eighteen and has spoken at multiple conferences ranging from Nashville's very own Music City Code, the Raleigh Code Conference, to Vaco’s National Engage the World Conference and continues to be heavily involved within both the local and national tech community.
How to Shake the Money Tree: Funding Your Idea or Company - Early Stage
A Roundtable by Nancy Everitt
Good news you have a killer idea for an app or company. Bad news you need capital to scale. Knowing how and when to "shake the money tree" is critical. Participate in an interactive discussion with an active Angel Investor and healthcare founder and learn how to get funding by knowing what investors want, biggest mistakes to avoid and key resources to demystify the process. Knowledge is power.Nancy C Everitt, PMP is an active angel investor, serves on the Board of Nashville Capital Network and is founder and CEO of HEOPS Inc and CENTIPEDE Care Solutions. She is a healthcare veteran with stints at Quorum, HCA and Life Point Hospitals. In 1999, Nancy left LPNT two days after the IPO to found a series of other healthcare companies. Her focus has been on identifying and productizing niche opportunities in complex healthcare environments with fast turn around times for Fortune 500 Payors and large regional health plans. Today, Nancy and her team are working on their 100x scale opportunity to create a “life coordinated” ecosystem; a platform and infrastructure to coordinate the complexities between service providers and health plans to deliver a broad array of non traditional support services to members at home. Find out how they’ve bootstrapped success and the good, bad and the ugly lessons learned in their Series A adventure (misadventure).
Walk With Customer Goals Before You Run With Problems & Products
A Presentation by John Mansour
Contrary to popular belief, the bulls-eye for your products isn't customer problems. It's customer goals. A walk-through of real-world examples shows you how a customer goal approach simplifies product management, product marketing and sales.John Mansour is the founder and managing partner of Proficientz, Inc., a training and consulting firm that specializes in B2B Product Management, Product Marketing & Sales Enablement. Since 2001, John has worked with more than 2000 organizations that span high technology, business services, telecom, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and others.
What is UX (for POs, recruiters, noobs, whomever)
A Presentation by Mike Gallers
There seems to be a lot of chatter on slack about recruiters sending out terrible job descriptions that either are 5 jobs in one, or confusing requirements (UX Designer that can do full stack coding). So why not give a high level overview of all the disciplines for those interested.Mike is a UX designer and Digital Strategist with 17 years of experience in financial services, tv ratings data, and healthcare. He recently moved to Franklin from Tampa Bay. He is active on slack and loves attending meetups and chatting UX with anyone who will listen or has knowledge to share! #TeamworkMakesTheDreamWork
When Managers and Makers Meet
A Presentation by Jon Shearer
Too many Business Managers and Digital Makers waste time tripping on misunderstandings and staying stuck in assumptions. Both sides think the other just “doesn’t get it.”
Business Managers who don’t think their team gets their vision, their challenges, the complexity of running a business, department, P&L, managing cash flow, profits, revenue, and what’s important to them.
Digital Maker Teams made up of Developers, Designers, Product Managers, Content Creators, and Marketers who don’t think their Business Managers care about quality, their challenges, and what’s important to them or the complexity of building, running and maintaining digital products and systems (it’s not just cut and paste).
We’ll talk about strategies to help Business Managers and Digital Makers step into each others’ shoes to create common understanding, reduce biases, stereotypes, and assumptions. With the goal of refocusing negative energy on empathy, healthy alignment, leveraging each other’s strengths and growing businesses to serve customers better.
Jon Shearer is the Founder of Cadence Co., a consulting group that helps companies build better leaders, teams, and products through executive coaching, workshops, and consulting engagements. He has 20+ years of experience in crafting and scaling digital experiences through design and technology to build businesses with gross revenues over $100 million.
Using MicroLearning to Create MacroSuccess
A Presentation Workshop by Luke Benfield
UX, UI, and functionality are all important factors for increasing utilization. But are you factoring learning into the end-user experience? In this session, we’ll introduce a microlearning approach as a solution for increasing customer satisfaction and utilization. We’ll talk through sample development processes and discuss ways to partner with a learning function or add a learning resource to a cross-functional team. Finally, we’ll experiment with some hands-on activities to put microlearning concepts into action.Luke Benfield is a senior instructional designer at naviHealth where he designs and develops classroom, virtual, and e-learning experiences for corporate, clinical, IT, external client, and product audiences. Luke is a huge learning nerd with a passion for discovering innovative ways to develop and deliver educational content.
Have you talked to your customer?
A Presentation by Fatima Karwandyar
It sounds simple, but ensuring market adoption requires talking to potential users. This session will explore a quick how-to on testing new features and products.Fatima Karwandyar is a solutions-oriented entrepreneur with a personal interest in simplifying access to care. She is driven by the belief that technology can be a powerful tool to empower, educate and engage users to improve patient health. Ms. Karwandyar currently consults for the healthcare industry in areas of new product development, user-centered design and workflow optimization for providers, payers and vendors.
How to Roll a Penny When Starting a Company
A Workshop by Gail Peace
- A perspective on one founder’s journey of doing it all to then figuring out when to invest in people, process and structure.
- How do you decide when product is "good enough" to go to market.
- Securing your first clients, can you get them as clients and not pilots?
- Balancing trade offs of early decisions.
Gail Peace is a healthcare executive with 20 years of healthcare industry experience. Prior to founding Ludi in 2012, she was Vice President for Business Development at Vanguard Health Chicago, which was acquired by Tenet. In that role, Gail led the business development function, including hospital strategy and the physician alignment strategy. She worked on innovative service line structures, co-management agreements, and physician outreach strategies, as well as overall strategic planning and local growth initiatives. As the Vice President, Client Solutions of WebMD, Gail managed the rollout of new web-based tools to a diverse client base. She has also held senior leadership positions at Subimo, MacNeal Hospital and Sachs Group.
For the past six years, Gail has focused on helping hospitals and health systems nationwide track, manage and optimize their physician alignment strategy. Gail developed Ludi’s signature software, DocTime Log® in response to a significant, yet unmet, need she identified during her years as a health system executive. In 2018, Gail was recognized by Becker’s Hospital Review as a Female Healthcare IT Leader to Know.
Gail has a Bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Missouri. She earned both a Master’s of Business Administration with an emphasis in finance and a Master’s of Health Administration from the University of Missouri.
Is Agile Development Killing the Role of the Product Manager?
A Presentation by Travis Nisbett
It seems that as more software development organizations adopt Agile development methodologies, more people are led to the conclusion that a Product Manager and a Scrum Product Owner are the same. This discussion will center on the similarities, but more importantly the differences, between these two roles in terms of responsibilities, behaviors, and skills.Currently serving as Senior Product Manager for DaVita Kidney Care. Nearly 20 years experience in Product Management and Product Marketing for software solutions in the telecommunications, CRM, cloud computing, and healthcare markets.
This Maze Wasn't Meant For You: Using Westworld's Lessons in Product Development
A Presentation by Cortlin Dunlevy
Let's use the lessons learned from HBO's hit series Westworld for application in Product Development! This presentation will walk through some of the major issues experienced by the "Product Owners" of Westworld and how we can learn lessons on what to practice and what to avoid. Some of the presentation's main points will be: 1. Why is a unified direction important? 2. How can marketing and sales be our allies? 3. What benefits can an Agile approach bring?Cortlin Dunlevy is a Product Analyst with Capital Confirmation, Inc. and is currently participating in a complete redesign effort for the Confirmation platform.
He has previously worked as a Business Analyst for Levi, Ray, and Shoup, CJC Technologies, and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy. He also obtained his Bachelor's Degree in Software Engineering from the University of Phoenix.
5 Tips On Leveraging Diplomacy in Product Management to Get More Done
A Presentation by Charles Topping
Charles has spent much of his career in big offices in cross-functional roles that have required him to navigate troublesome political waters. In this session Charles will share with you lessons learned over time – lessons learned through error, trial, error, and more error and more error and more trial. With these 5 tips from Charles you will be better equipped to take on the diplomatic challenges of getting stuff done in Product Management, and have a laugh or two along the way.
As founding partner of Product Growth Leaders and founder of The Win-Loss Agency, Charles has a reputation as a truth-teller in business. His approach cuts past opinions, bluster and fluff to get to the truth of the matter. Charles has a past in Big Retail and has worked with brands like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and P&G to bring new products to market.
Intro to Rapid Prototyping with InVision
A Workshop by Mark West
Learn how to take your mockups (low-fi to hi-fi) and convert them to clickable prototypes and test with your users. The workshop will focus and guide participants through the process of taking mocked screens into InVision and building a clickable prototype.Product/UX Designer at Change Healthcare under the Consumer Engagement/Data Sciences department. Half of my time is spent working on consumer-facing virtual products, with the other half working to improve various facets of the healthcare experience.
Why You Still Suck At Designing For Humans
A Presentation by Shane Morris
Why bad ideas work beautifully, and why good ideas fail. You're human, but you suck at being human.Founder of Beautiful Majestic Dolphin / Physics Hobbyist
Africa and Back: Better Products
A Presentation by Aaron Yusef Johnson
It's time for the West to learn from the Rest. Upon my recent trip to Africa, I had the opportunity to tour everything from slums to 5-star hotels, and my guides were the indigenous people of the land. I want to pack in as many stories and lessons that I can from the entrepreneurs, business owners, and lives everyday people. People in poverty and people wealthy beyond what can be imagined. I want you to change the way you see yourself, and the products you and your clients have to offer humanity.Passionate about reconciliation, entrepreneurship, and the arts. An identity activist and consultant to entrepreneurs in the areas of branding, marketing, and in helping them discover their unique identity. Asked to come back after formerly speaking at ProductCamp, BarCamp, and Craft Content. Regularly travels between Chicago and Nashville to work with police officers, pastors, non-profits, and other entities to help bring healing to the race crisis America is facing.
