Notes from Digital PM Summit 2016
I’m the closing speaker today at Digital PM Summit in San Antonio, TX, and I’ll be taking notes (or in fancy terms, liveblogging) for every session that I sit in until it’s my turn. I’ll be following the basic rules of Min/Max note taking and will update this post as the day goes on. It’s the first PM event I’ve been to in years – brings back many memories from my first career.
Please forgive typos, I’ll get to them when I can. Here we go!
1. Brett Harned – Army of Awesome (slides)
Brett, one of the organizers of PM Summit, asked the audience how many people became Project Managers / Producers on purpose, vs. how many fell into it accidentally, and most of the room raised their hands as accidental! (He joked with a slide that said “You are not an accident” :) This isn’t a surprise as often the role evolves as a project or organization gets larger.
It’s also a related observation that most people don’t know what a project manager does, particularly digital project managers. Once during a trip he was stopped by a UK immigration officer who seemed baffled by his job title and asked: “what kind of projects do you manage then?” He shared a list of quotes from colleages who he asked to explain what he did for a living:
“As far as I can tell project managers do nothing, but if they stopped I’m pretty sure everything would fall apart” – Paul Boag
“You help teas organize their work” – Brett’s Mom
“Project management is like sweeping up after the elephants, only less glamorous” – @zeldman #dpm2016
He shared how the History of Project Management goes back at least 4000 years, and that there’s a long history of teams of people making difficult things. But that digital project managers have yet to be entered into that history in a meaningful way, and part of what he’d like to see is greater recognition for the contributions digital project managers make.
7 DPM (Digital Project Manager) Principles: The balance of his talk was an exploration of 7 principles about leading teams and projects.
Chaos Junkies – we thrive on problems because we know we can solve them. We break processes to make new ones. We make our own templates. We managed with our minds, not our tools.
Multilingual communicators – listen and take cues from our team and clients.
Loveable hardasses – reputation for being firm but wise and well intentioned.
Consumate learners and teachers – that teaching teammates helps the project, the organization and the pm
Laser focused
Honest Always – cultivate a reputation for straight talk
Pathfinders – do more than take care of budget and timeline
His final question for the audience was: where will you take us? Which principles resonate the most?
2. Natalie Warnert – Show Me the MVP!
The core of her talk was about the concept of MVP, or Minimum Viable Product, and how to apply it to projects. She referenced Eric Reis’ book, The Lean Startup, and asked who had read the book: I was surprised how few hands went up. Perhaps I’ve been to too many start up events the last few years. I had a hard time following the thread of her talk – she referenced many models and frameworks but it was tough to find salience to pm situations, or connections to each other.
She offered four goals or objectives:
Building just enough to learn
Learning not optimizing
Find a plan that works before running out of resources
Provide enough value to justify charging
She mentioned loop models, were you have a cycle of behaviors you repeat, such as: Think -> Make -> Check. Briefly she touched on Lean UX, and how customers must be involved as part of that check process – “Customers don’t care about your solution, they care about their problem”.
Next she talked about metrics, and offered this quote: “A startup can only focus on one metric and ignore everything else” – Noah Kagan. I didn’t agree with this, as it sounded more more like hyperbole than sanity – plenty of successful startups have focused on multiple metrics, or at least prioritized them.
She offered “Pirate” metrics as good choices for what the primary metric should be:
Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral
Regarding building software, she explained the Build Model:
There are 3 desirable criteria, but you rarely can do all three
Build right thing
Build it fast
Build thing right
(reminds me of “you can have fast, cheap or good: pick two”)
Which she compared to the Learning Model (Learning, Speed, Focus), but I didn’t quite understand how they related to each other.
Lastly she provided this outline, in reference to a project she managed:
Reduce scope
shorten time to feedback
get out of the deliverables business
learn from customer behavior
