Getting better at getting better

On Saturday I attended my first ever Product Camp Boston. This event, an unconference devoted to product management and product marketing, was massive in terms of attendance (over 500) and content covered (some 58 sessions). I was fortunate enough to nab a speaking slot. I debated what to speak about, and ultimately ended up giving a talk on applying agile scrum to the work of product managers to help a team improve their PM craft.

About now my non-engineering friends and family are looking at me with a little white showing in their eyes, and my engineering savvy readers may be skeptical as well. But I’ve written about this idea before in the context of agile marketing, that by committing to work up front for a limited period of time, documenting what we work on, publishing what you achieved, and being purposefully retrospective (what went well, what didn’t, what will we change), we can improve our effectiveness as individuals and teams.

For PMs the big payoff is in slowly transitioning out of firefighting mode and into bigger-picture thinking. It’s too easy to succumb to the steady pull of today’s emergency and tomorrow’s engineering release and lose strategic focus. Our kaizen has given me the ability to think farther ahead and be more purposeful about the work I take in.

I’ve posted the slides for the talk, and will write a little more about this topic soon.

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