And it’s a wrap! Thank you to all the attendees, sponsors, speakers and volunteers for a wonderful Product Camp 2023!!! When we first started planning Camp in early 2023, we weren’t sure how many people would want to be in a large crowd or if we’d need to be wearing masks and still felt like there were a chance we wouldn’t be able to go ahead at all so… being in the room with 200 people and being able to experience camp again was fantastic!
If you have written a blog post or are speaker who’s written up your talk, reach out on the ProdAnon slack to be included below.
We hope you’ll read thru this little summary and give love to everyone involved including keynotes, sponsors, speakers & volunteers!
Our Keynotes: Ken Sandy & Kendra Vant
Product Camp is an ‘unconference’ which means most of the talks are done by attendees though we always organise a keynote or two.
This year we kicked off the day with Ken Sandy‘s Think Like a Product Manager Talk and closed it out with Kendra Vant‘s Kicking the Tyres of AI to See if it’s Right for Your Product. You can check out Ken’s book – The Influential PM – and Kendra’s Substack where she’s posted 4 articles related to her keynote.
Sponsors
Our sponsors are critically important as they give us a place to host Camp and make sure we are not hangry during the day. Massive thank you to:
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Session 1 Talks
Our fantastic attendees offer to share their knowledge and hopes and pain by suggesting topics and then having those voted upon. We had 32 people come up to pitch which was fantastic to see. Thank you!!
First up we had …
Steve Bauer & Amir Ansari with ‘Product is the Enemy of UX‘ – their slides are here and now include the the audience participation via the tag clouds.
Georgia Hart from nDeva talked about finding a product manager job.
Ollie Newbery talked about how to find and tell captivating stories about your work. Slides here
Amplitude ran a workshop twice during the day on Finding your product’s Truth North.
Session 2 Talks
Pearly Yee on the Mistakes I Made becoming a Leader to help us not the same mistakes
Matt Richmond talked about using Continuous Discovery IRL. Slides here.
Shreya Pawar on the art of A/B experiments and drew from a e-comm case study
Brent Snook talked about going from conversation to backlog in minutes.
Andrew Murphy with Debugging Difficult Conversations. Andrew did a talk at NDC Oslo earlier this year on the same topic which can be watched on YouTube
Session 3 Talks
Craig Brown with Product Management Working at Scale. Craig has put together a blog post about his talk (part 1) and part 2
Liz Blink talked about vanity metrics. Her talk was inspired by John Cutler’s article ‘What are Vanity Metrics and How to Stop Using Them‘
Steve Bauer led a conversation about burnout
Josh Centner talked about what to do during your 1st 90 Days
Penelope Barr on Finding a New Role
Shimona Kee Samson on How to Advocate for Digital Accessibility. Shimona’s has written this post about her talk.
Session 4 Talks
Donna Spencer on Uncertainty
Corina Best on being a PM at a startup
Nick Costner talked about D&D (yes, dungeons and dragons) and product management
Alex Stewart James spoke about Technical Product Manager vs Product Manager. He’s put his thoughts into this post about Unraveling the Differences of the 2 roles
Sakthee Ravi Kumar spoke about Product Vision. Slides here
And we had a room of card games – Cards Against Agility and ShipIt! (the game of product management) courtesy of Craig Brown & Steve Bauer
After Party
Thank you to Craig Brown & the Everest crew for continuing the chats into the evening!
More Summaries of the Day
If you have written up anything, let us know & we’ll add it to the list below:
- A Quick Take on Product Camp by Kevin Hwang with some talk summaries
THANK YOU!
Thank you to these amazing people who all volunteered their time over the last several months to plan this day – Steve Bauer, Sakthee Ravi Kumar, Daniel Kinal, Brooke Noble, Gwen D’souza, Bryce Chee, Nosh Darbari, Hugh Osbourne, Yau Hui Min, Michael Lambert, Zain Franciscus, Richard Bourke & me – Jen Leibhart plus these amazing people who got across all the things right before the event as our ‘on the day’ volunteers – Yasha Lim, Nigel D’Souza, Ana Rowe, Marija Becker, Steve Cheah, Rebecca Jackson, Mel Brunner, Nat Yan-Chatonsky, Sid Jukar, and Chris Duncan.
