ProductCamp Austin
2 comments / Posted on 18. Jun, 2008 by Austin Startup in Events
Guest blogger Doug Wick works for Powered and blogs on their Engaged Consumer site, as well as his own personal wicksite.
This past Saturday I finally got to attend my first “unconference.” ProductCamp Austin, an offshoot of the successful and irreverent BarCamp format, convened bright and early at 8 a.m. The event was held at St. Edward’s Professional Education Center.
Following the unconference mantra that “there are no attendees,” the agenda and event were all arranged and run by participants. The idea is that by breaking through traditional conference norms, likeminded people can gather in a workshop format (for free) and learn more from each other through the higher level of interaction and participation that results.
While BarCamp is traditionally focused on development, ProductCamp was designed for product management, marketing and development folks. Apparently this ProductCamp was only the second of its kind, the first having been held in the Valley in March of this year. Pragmatic Marketing had a strong presence with John Milburn, and Paul Young of Productbeautiful.com did a lot of the organizational heavy lifting as the unconference planner. Sponsors included Pragmatic, Austin Ventures, NetQoS, Seilevel, and Ryma – who supplied us with a steady stream of coffee, a great lunch, and happy hour drinks.
Overall, the event was a tremendous success by either conference or unconference standards, attracting around 130 marketing pros from Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas – and on a weekend no less. The energy in the sessions, which ranged from “How to Manage a Successful Product Launch” to “UX 101″ to “Agile Development,” was positive, sometimes contentious, but always collaborative.
Unfortunately, like an underground band that unexpectedly hits it big, it was exactly ProductCamp Austin’s popularity that worked against it as an “unconference.” In many ways it ended up feeling a bit too mainstream. Sessions were a bit too large for forming the small groups and deep discussions that are a BarCamp signature, and you could sense that the larger sessions weren’t always meeting their participants’ diverse needs (startup folks at one point started a Twitter backchannel discussion about a more focused “Startup Camp”).
The last session I attended, “How to Deal with Sales,” was smaller with only around 15 people, and really got with the BarCamp spirit as nearly everyone chimed in with tips, tricks, and laments about the role Sales sometimes plays in corrupting perfectly good products! It was a great, lively exchange. Other highlights were the consensus by product professionals that the application they can’t live without is Excel (!) and the pronouncement in one of the sessions that “West Coast startups are hipster startups, Austin startups are hippie startups.” The best overall presentation as voted by participants was “Navigating the Political Minefields of Product Management,” presented by Charlie Ray.
Overall, it was a great first ProductCamp for Austin. It was as well run by its own participants and as valuable as any formal conference I’ve attended, a fact that really highlights the fantastic and committed marketing community we have here.
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Posted by Austin Startup
http://www.austinstartup.com |