ProductCamp Atlanta this year was on Saturday,October 18th. It had all its winning ingredients of awesome sessions, easy and casual networking, intra-company learning and knowledge sharing with added buzz from a crowd larger than ever and some seriously Sublime Donuts.
The crowd had many of the regulars and an influx of many new faces, many from industries beyond software. There were teams from larger companies like Home Depot, IBM, Silverpop along with startups from ATV or ATDC and even Georgia Tech students. The topics of discussion ranged newly minted ideas and trends to battle hardened methodologies. It’s the energy of this intermingling of ideas, frameworks, people and realities that ProductCamp brings every year to the Atlanta product management, UX and product marketing communities.
The sessions, voted in by the attendees, had the usual suspects – customer experience, agile, product design and marketing. There were also several newer ideas or fresh takes on popular topics such as linking sales and customer discovery and using improv in business.
Here are some top moments – Add yours!
- Walking into the total ‘un-conference’ vibe at 7:30 am and getting pulled into an ever-growing volunteer group, packing bags, stapling session proposals and assembling sign in paraphernalia.
- Seeing the filled up auditorium for the kickoff and soaking in the energy and expectation of some great sessions and good networking
- Listening to the session proposals (over 40) – from executives at large and small companies along with entrepreneurs
- Using text voting and feeling like I am part of American Idol
- Seeing many companies from around Atlanta pitch at least 12 job opportunities for the community and feeling that the economy is definitely on the way up
- Listening (and joining in) to some great sessions on a variety of topics, and being able to choose how to mix up my day on the fly – doing a workshop, then a townhall, then listening in on a presentation.
- Walking off with tools that can be used the next day at work such as a 60 second business case framework or customer discovery worksheets.
- Learning after the first Kindle Fire giveaway, that there was a second
- Winding down an Ri Ra Irish Pub
- So how was your experience? Did you attend? Let us know.
Oh and one more thing……it was all free.
