Yesterday, I attended the PCamp 2010, an annual event for Product Managers to share Prod Mgmt best practices from, mostly software, product companies of various sizes. Attended several good sessions on PM practices, met interesting people, product use cases, and learnt about how PMs operate and make decisions in the agile (as opposed to waterfall) development world.

I picked up a few things at the conference:

• Porter's 5 forces, and other strategic models to understand the market environment and formulate / articulate strategy.
• Lean software engineering development process.
• Agile Product Management processes: Companies that need have shorter times to market on small budgets, for various reasons, use agile engineering processes, an umbrella term for various styles of development processes. The goals of the Product Manager who works in such an agile development org are the same as that of the traditional "enterprise / watnerfall" PM, building great products that customers love. But the agile PM has to work within the constraints of fewer resources and dramatically shorter schedules under a more flexible management structure. In agile PM methodology, product design is done by smaller teams of more empowered PMs, design decisions & processes are documented less (PMs don't have a lot of time for 100 page MRDs, PRDs, etc) in favor of getting things done faster, project mgmt is done on symbolic white boards, etc. The lightweight process of gathering requirements uses frameworks to a). gather requirements, model and validate the customer business process and value chain in a white-boarding style discussion with a subject matter expert from the customer organization in a live face-to-face setting, as opposed to customer advisory board meetings, surveys, etc and b). prioritize product features, identify dependencies, define scope for releases, identify / mitigate risks, develop schedules etc, without using classical project management techniques. There is a lot more..
• Chatted with PMs from Insurance industry who build products that use predictive modeling; more on this in a future post.

I loved the presentation on Porter's 5 forces. On this topic, I found the following ppt on slideshare, not related to PCamp, for future reference on the topic.