Product Development Roundtable

Feb. 11

KICK OFF PROGRAM!

From Vision To Execution – The Power of Teams/Enrollment

High-performance teams rarely occur naturally.  They must be created and managed.  Real success in any rapidly changing business environment requires learning how to create and lead more effective teams.  To do this, organizations need to apply an effective working theory to consciously and systemically build teamwork within their organization.  We will discuss a theory that encompasses, systemically, all aspects of organizational life, from creating the strategic vision and winning customers, to implementing and executing the processes to support the strategic vision.

Enrollment is a key conversational skill used by leaders to bring forth new possibilities. In the enrollment conversation, leaders generate an invitation that, when accepted freely, creates an authentic commitment to bring their Vision into reality.  Without enrollment, leaders can only strive for compliance in the best case; in the worst case, they get malicious compliance.   
We will discuss what does it mean to build a high-performance team and what it means to enroll?

Presenter: Kobe Bogaert  - Strategic Momentum

Presentation:
http://www.techamerica.org/Docs/From_Vision_to_Execution_Presentation.pdf

Feb. 25

Future Workforce – Leading, Managing and Designing by Understanding the Multi-Generational Workplace and Increasing Communication

Experiencing problems with generational communication challenges in your company? Designing products with a particular generation in mind to increase sales?  This roundtable session will show how you can increase your generational quotient and reduce the misunderstandings that abound with four generations in the workplace together.   Come learn solutions other companies are implementing by leveraging their knowledge of generational thinking.  You will learn proven tips on how to decrease misunderstandings; increase awareness, innovation and productivity; and develop products that hit the generation right where their motivation lies.
During the session, we will:
1)  Define the generational mix of Traditionalists, Boomers, Gen X, and Gen Y.  
2)  Discuss the motivations and consequences of four generations in the workplace.
3)  Share best practices to decrease generational conflict and create better communication internally and externally.
Participants will leave with a better understanding of why each generation thinks the way they do and how to leverage that information.

Presenter: Sherri Petro is the President of VPI Strategies

Presentation:

http://www.techamerica.org/Docs/Cross_Generation_TechAmerica.pdf

Mar. 25

Building User Innovation into your Next Product

User innovation refers to innovation by consumers and end users, rather than suppliers. Eric von Hippel (von Hippel 1986) of MIT and others 'discovered' that many products and services are actually developed or at least refined, by users, at the site of implementation and use. These ideas are then moved back into the supply network. This is because products are developed to meet the widest possible need; when individual users face problems that the majority of consumers do not, they have no choice but to develop their own modifications to existing products, or entirely new products, to solve their issues. Often, user innovators will share their ideas with manufacturers in hopes of having them produce the product, a process called free revealing.

Presenter: Darin Andersen - COO of ESET

Apr. 22

Hardware Product Development Kaizen – Process Improvement/Lean Product Development at DJO

• What does lean product development mean at DJO?
– LPD is all about the reduction or elimination of non-value add activities. This allows more time for innovation and great product releases.
• Why should I care?
– Your current or future competitors do.
– You’ll make more money from organic growth.
– You’ll increase your work quality of life.

May 27

Software Product Management Kaizen / Best Practices

Software product management's primary role is to be an effective messenger of the market.  The software product manager's key function is to first identify urgent, pervasive problems an addressable market will pay to address.  Second, to then communicate these market facts and requirements to the organization in order to build products people want to buy.  However, for many in product management the ability to spend time in the market is limited by activities inside the office supporting Software Development and Sales.  Software Development best practices allow for an optimized and disciplined approach to building world class and sustained software solutions."

A distinguished panel of experts will review the role and impact of software development best practices in their own organizations.

Jun. 24

Improving Product Development Decision Making Using Web 2.0 (++) and Digital Resources

The nature of product development and its inherent "unknowns" forces product development teams and leaders to make critical decisions without complete and often imperfect knowledge. Decision making spans all phases of the product development cycle, but perhaps the most critical decision a company makes is deciding whether or not to pursue a product opportunity.  
The objective of this interactive learning opportunity is to teach members of the roundtable how to build a business case with sufficient data using a wealth of information and tools the World Wide Web provides to validate core assumptions. Participants will learn how to:
•    Define the right set of information to build a good business case: the questions you need to ask to make an informed decision and how to go about answering these questions:
•    Secondary research and tools
•    Primary research and tools
•    Organizing data into actionable information for effective decision making
•    Judgment Day: Making a go/no-go decision based on imperfect knowledge.
•    Balancing intuition, experience, data and facts.
•    Improving your decision making process by integrating information and web based tools into your NPD processes and practice

Jul. 22

Voice Of Customer – Separating The Great From The Good From The Ugly

Can you rely on customers for cutting edge or innovative ideas? There is an art and a science to bringing your customer to the design table and a wide range of powerful methods to capture and integrate the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into strategic planning. Often, these methods are skipped or incorrectly used with less than favorable results.

In this session, you will learn:

• Two questions you must be able to answer about your customers.

• A method to catapult planning efforts from a focus on expected improvements to leading edge innovative thinking.

• Several structured yet flexible approaches to truly understanding and integrating both the emotional and functional needs of your customers into your products and services.

• How industry leaders use methods to understand customer needs, enhance customer satisfaction, prioritize resources, promote constancy of purpose, and provide a rational, fact-based procedure for decision-making.

Aug.

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Sept. 23

What Software Disciplines Should Teach Hardware Development and Vice Versa

From the days of IBM’s System 360 project to develop the first evolutionary computer operating system came The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks advocating prototyping and the second-system effect.  Since then, structured programming, object oriented programming and the Agile Manifesto have been a few of the many waves of software development disciplines that have attempted to reduce the chaos and impose order, efficiency and predictability on the process of writing programs.  By the 1960’s, hardware development techniques of prototyping or learning to design something new by building a throw away were well known but to software developers, at the time, not obvious.   Much progress has been made in the management of software development projects in the intervening 50 years.  Has software development thinking so eclipsed hardware development best practice that it is time now for hardware developers to learn from software developers?  What can engineers on both sides take from the best software and hardware product development disciplines?

Oct.

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Nov. 18

Global Development – Leading And Managing Global Teams – Virtual Teams
Cultural – Tools

We are becoming more familiar with companies that are actively creating global development teams, either through outsourcing or building up their own development capability in other geographic regions.

In this session, we will cover some of the considerations you should look at when you consider global development as well as hear some lessons learned that could improve your global development operation:
•    Explore reasons to set up global development teams (cost, shorter product life cycle, new technologies, increased complexity, global markets, improved communications)
•    Challenges in setting up global development (language, local presence, alliance, division of work, etc.)
•    How to design global groups allowing for effective management (process, roles and responsibilities)
•    The importance of understanding culture, cultural values and language.
•    How do you lead and manage your development team in different time zones?
•    What are some of the tools that work very well in a global development environment?

Dec

Dark - Holiday Reception