ProductCampRTP™ 10th anniversary Spring unconference kick-off: Wisdom From Opening Panel!

ProductCampRTP™ is where innovators, entrepreneurs, product designers, developers, managers and marketers connect to discover, educate, and network. The goal of conference was to give effective tools to improve your work processes and was filled with enlightening speakers, engaging activities, and the opportunity to network.
The conference kicked-off with a product discussion panel, facilitated by Steve Johnson, VP Products, Pragmatic Institute. Product leaders from RTPs' area's tech firms discussed the future of product and the tech industry. The panelists included Claire-Juliette Beale, Principal Product Marketing Manager, SAS, Eric Iwashita, Associate Product Manager, Pendo, Jack Hilton, Product Manager, UserVoice, and Troy Knight, Founder & CEO, BLDG-25.
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Here is some wisdom from the product discussion panel to help with your career:

• Need product manager and product developer to co-exist, work in partnership, and be on equal footing. To collaborate and be as one team to be successful.
• Sometimes product marketing and management can be like sex. "Everybody is talking about it, but nobody is doing it right." Must focus on best practices and have frameworks to follow that work
• Knowing what you users want is of upmost important. Don't build products people "ought to want". Build products people really need and want.
• Its so easy to switch vendors or brands for other products so you must differentiate and have a product that really delivers and makes people happy and/or does a far superior job for people. Turn your customers into advocates to share your product with others to help evangelize and grow your business from your happy customers.
• Qualitative data from spending quality time with your customers and seeing how they use the product or handle their issues you are trying to solve is critical to your success. Need to use both quantitative hard data, but most importantly spend quality time in the field with your customers for hours observing them with the problems they have and how they interact with your product to really get to know them and pick up on colorful signals you can't discover through numbers alone.
• How is that working for you? This is the key question to stop and learn from your past and where you are at to move forward upward and onward better new and improved.
• Draw a quadrant. One horizontal line is sustainability of your product being offered to be long and strong over time and vertical is vision of your company alongside the product
• Nothing seems hard to people who don't have to do it. Keep all in perspective.
• Do retrospectives and post-modem on business and products that fail to learn from it and ensure you don't do similar failure moves moving forward and get better & stronger in your future iterations and pivots.