Product Camp is an Open Space conference, or un-conference, similar to Agile Open Northwest. This means that attendees pitch potential sessions and everyone votes on the topics they want to attend.
The pitch process took about half an hour and it was interesting how interactive even that process was. Teresa Torres was the first woman in the line-up. She remarked how the gender ratio was biased 5:1 towards men. From her encouragement, more women proposed sessions and the end result for the conference was closer to 50/50. It was an immediate and inspiring outcome.
There were slots for 16 sessions in all. I was only able to attend four, but I took sketchnotes of the sessions I attended. It's a fun way for me to quickly internalize the topics and I like to share with attendees on twitter. It's also a good way to meet people.
Here are my notes.
Arya from Cambia told her story how she became a product owner, and then discussed the key points for creating a compelling story that engages customers and colleagues.
Dave Flotree covered the key points of how to gather user-validated design data through interviews. He also discussed how to use Affinity Diagrams to create a holistic picture of your users' needs.
Teresa Torres gave her definition of continuous product discovery and then discussed the problems and questions people had about the process.
Paul W. Save and Dr. Quentin Caudron from CBRE had traveled all the way from Vancouver, Canada to talk about how product managers can integrate machine learning into their systems. I really appreciated their talk, and also how enthusiastic they were about my sketchnotes.
Overall, Product Camp Portland was conference which managed to stay cozy despite having over 350 attendees. I look forward to attending again.
FYI, here's Mike Rohde's "The Sketchnote Handbook" which has a lot of good ideas and inspiration about using drawing to capture the ideas during meetings and conferences.
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