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 Through User-Centered Innovation Processes

What does Open Source software, a tee shirt company and Google all have in common? They have all harnessed the power of "user innovation" to create new products and services...

Traditional idea generation techniques based on customer input usually collect information on new product needs from a random or typical set of customers. This more often than not leads to incremental improvements. On the other hand, the User-Centered or "lead user" process takes a different approach. It collects information about both needs and solutions from users at the leading edges of the target market, as well as from users in other markets that face similar problems in a more extreme form.

"Lead Users" of a novel or enhanced product, process, or service have been defined (von Hippel 1986) as those who:
Face needs that will be general in the marketplace - but face them months or years before the bulk of the marketplace encounters them.
Expect to benefit significantly by obtaining a solution to those needs (i.e. necessity is the mother of invention).

Darin Andersen, COO of ESET, will discuss why it is so important for businesses to work closely with lead users who are innovating at the edge and developing the next major set of ideas for the future. Darin will share with us examples and methods of identifying lead users, how to look more closely at lead users for new ideas and innovations, and why they are often very willing and excited to share their re-inventions with us.

Presentation:

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

Apr. 22

Product Development Best Practices – A Look Under the Hood of a PDMA Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award Winner

DJO (formerly DonJoy) is a world wide company with over 5000 employees that develops, manufactures and distributes products in the bracing and supports, electrotherapy and surgical implant markets. In 2005 DJO was awarded with PDMA’s Outstanding Corporate Innovator Award Winner.

The Outstanding Corporate Innovator (OCI) Award selection process has provided an excellent mechanism for identifying companies which create and capture value through Product & Service Innovation in New Product Development.  Past OCI Award winners have proven themselves exceptionally capable of integrating strategy, people, process, and technology to consistently transfer their creative ideas into successful new products.

In this program you will learn how DJO won its OCI award and will learn specific practices it uses to consistently launch successful new product including:

•    A review of critical process innovation tools.
•    Protostorming and customer storming.   
•    Voice of the Customer best practices: is it your Customer’s voice or your Engineers and Marketers?
•    A review of product development metrics and past performance, because you are only managing what you are measuring.

Presentation:

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

May 27

Software Product Management Best Practices - Establishing, Understanding, Supporting and Growing the Most Important Role in a Software Company

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.  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 their experiences and impact of software development best practices in their own organizations.

In this program you will learn:
•      Exactly what is Software Product Management at its best, and why it’s so important to the vitality of the organization.
•      Distinguishing between Product Management, Project Management and Product Marketing … amongst other titles and roles.
•      The differences between good, great and indeed harmful Product Management efforts, and the resulting impact on the company.
•      What methodologies work best?  What skills are required?
•      Anecdotal examples from panelists, along with important lessons learned.

Jun. 24

Making the Case: Improving the Success Rate of Launching New Products & Services

Building a business case that integrates with a portfolio management decision process is at the heart of innovation and successful NPD execution. According to Peter Drucker "the pertinent question (for a business) is not how to do things right but how to find the right things to do, and to concentrate resources and efforts on them."

Given the nature of product development and its inherent "unknowns," how does the business leadership team make the "right" decision in selecting the "best" product opportunity amongst all other opportunity choices?

The objective of June's roundtable discussion is to explore best practices in creating a compelling business cases and using a portfolio management system to choose the best business opportunity. Key takeaways covered include:

• The business case is an essential front end activity and powerful tool for NPD execution

• The content of the business case addresses the Project Portfolio decision criteria and is created using an idea-to-launch framework.

• It’s the 'process" of making the case that matters more than creating documents

• How Web 2.0 and "crowdsourcing" tools can be used to define and validate business opportunities.

Roundtable Leader: Kevin McGourty, NPDP and President of iNPD Center, Inc.

Presentation: http://www.techamerica.org/Docs/Making_The_Case_6-10.pdf

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