2. “Imagine in your minds eye, an average Utah product manager (although I ask you
are any of us really average), sitting awake in a hotel room in Bangalore April 16th
2012 at 2:00AM. The problem that is causing the insomnia (if jet lag wasn’t good
enough a reason), no keynote for the Spring 2012 Utah Product Management
Association pCamp. If this pCamp were a conference, we were stuck. Tossing and
turning, guilt ridden perhaps, the chances of finding a really rockem’ sockem’
speaker were dwindling fast.

3. Now picture a PM awake with inspiration….
“What if this problem keynote could be treated like a product management
exercise? What if product management principles could turn this into an
opportunity? What if we could practice our craft in front of our peers?”
We hereby present to you: Four Great Principles that Make Great Product
Managers

4. Principle one: Great PMs find problems, especially hard ones, and turn them into
opportunities.
How many of you use the “5 Whys” method of problem solving? According to
Wikipedia “The 5 Whys is a question-asking technique used to explore the cause-
and-effect relationships underlying a particular problem ("Five Whys Technique".
adb.org. Asian Development Bank. February 2009.
http://www.adb.org/publications/five-whys-technique.
http://www adb org/publications/five-whys-technique Retrieved 26 March 2012)
2012).
The primary goal of the technique is to determine the root cause of a defect or
problem.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys)
So here we go. No keynote. (the problem)
First Why? – Why did we have no keynote? Because keynote speakers cost a lot of
money.
Second Why? – Why do keynote speakers cost a lot? Because people want
fantastic speakers driving up demand. (second why)
Third Why? – Why are keynote speakers wanted? Because they deliver what
conference attendees want in a keynote (third why)
Fourth Why? – Keynote speakers know what people want because they want it too:
inspiration, motivation, entertainment. (fourth why, a root cause)
Mindshift: Not having a keynote is an opportunity. Why have a keynote at an
UNconference? Have an UNkeynote. If we can inspire, motivate, and entertain this
particular audience, we could do better than the most expensive keynoters.
So at this point you may be wondering what the picture in front of you has anything
to do with anything?

5. The picture you saw is the genesis of a great opportunity that started with a problem,
p y g g pp y p ,
heaps of rotting garbage.
Magleby's Fresh, a Provo, Utah, restaurant, is famous among students at Brigham Young
University for its all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet. It was there in 2009 that Dan Blake first
took notice of the staggering amount of food that ended up in the restaurant's garbage
cans. Then a junior studying English and business at BYU, Blake began pondering the
business opportunities. If your cost of raw materials was nothing, he thought, that would
make for fantastic margins.
And so it was that EcoScraps was born. Founded in 2010, the company collects roughly 20
tons of food waste a day from more than 70 grocers, produce wholesalers, and Costco
stores across Utah and Arizona. Then, it composts the waste into potting soil, which retails
for up to $8.50 a bag in nurseries and garden stores throughout the western United States.
The company has eight full-time employees and 14 part-time employees. Sales are
expected to hit more than $1.5 million in 2011.
Bottom line: Principle one of great product management is to look for problems and why
yourself to opportunity.

6. So returning to our problem, figuring out a keynote that will inspire, motivate, and entertain
PMs. Principle two: Great PMs take the problem to the people. They use personas to help
them understand the problem in terms of a particular target market. If they get stuck, they
dig into their target market until they know them so well that they can think, act, and even
emote as they do.
So, what inspires Product Managers, in particular what inspires Utah Product Managers?
Product managers love entrepreneurial spirit. They love the challenge of unsolvable
problems, solving th
bl l i them with i fi it i l constrained resources, and with unrealistic
ith infinitesimal t i d d ith li ti
timelines. They love the thrill of the hunt, and the exhilaration of the kill, even more than
their over-demanding management and sales teams do. Utah Product Managers like doing
amazing outdoor things with their free time, and with an unrelenting job like being a PM,
you need amazing things for those rare free times you do get. They live here because it is a
family friendly environment, and with such an un-family friendly job like being a PM, we can
use all the help we can get. They love Utah because it is a pre-hyped growth area a place
they can find great start up companies over and over again, without the hyper infatuated
again
silicon implanted traffic jams found in other places.
What inspires Utah Product Managers attending a un-conference, in particular on a
Saturday? Un-conferences give the rare opportunity to see creation in action rather than
go to a pre-packaged, homogenized, and pasteurized conference. They provide an
opportunity to choose the subjects we want rather than have the subjects chosen for us or
even worse subjects sold to the highest bidder Un-conferences give us enlightenment
bidder.
because smart presenters and even smarter participants join together to explore,
collaborate, and challenge the frontiers of our evolving field. We learn more because we
actively participate on the application of concepts to our own limitless circumstances, rather
than listening to one person talk about their own limited ones. And we are willing to spend
extraordinarily precious Saturday time, because we have an insatiable desire to improve
ourselves. We sacrifice that time because we know that being a PM requires that we
explore our innermost selves to maximize the most powerful resource we have at our

7. Principle three: Great PMs don’t find new products. They take existing products and
make them better, incrementally. This involves taking those existing products and
looking for the most valuable increments that can be changed with the fewest
resources and the fastest time. They find new methods and new technologies that
can streamline and maximize. They look for waste and eliminate. They look for
weaknesses and exploit them. They know how to take a team of people and get
them to contribute their best skills, and working with them to leave their weaknesses
behind.
behind They turn constraints into stepping stools and problems into opportunities
opportunities.
And Great PMs are disciplined, taking great principles, product management or
otherwise, and applying them consistently, relentlessly, energetically, and
enthusiastically, until a great product emerges and success is achieved.
So we took the traditional conference keynote, and did the same. We took our
problem as an opportunity. We took the good: inspiration, motivation, entertainment.
We kept the flashy graphics and left out the expensive celebrity. We eliminated the
monolithic ego and replaced it with a collaborative open source process, letting the
keynote evolve through the diverse talents of an anonymous humble cross
functional team.
We ignored the constraints of presentation length, and focused on the real need, to
provide concise usable material. We ignored copyrightable, publishable, patentable,
and commercializable content, and focused on making our customer truly improved.
`
Keynotes are often too long. So our product can be short. Keynotes are often a
non-attendee selling a generic concept to a captive audience (picture Lance
Armstrong at a Las Vegas Internet Security Conference). So our product can be
targeted, specific, and simple.

8. And finally, Great PMs know how to present. They know how to take a product and
present it through a great user experience. They know how to take a great concept
and make it a resonating message. They know how to package, polish, and perfect.
They know how to select, sizzle, satisfy, and sell.

9. So in summary, find and master the tools of our trade, the principles of product
management:
1. Don’t avoid your biggest problems, embrace them as your greatest opportunities
for success. Seek them out like you would uranium, once thought to be a useless
and even dangerous material, now known to be a resource of almost limitless
power. Find ways to ask questions and seek new perspectives.
2. Get personal with your target market. Get to know them better than you know
yourself.
yourself
3. Take your problems to your people. Find how they have been solved before and
solve them better, incrementally, methodically, relentlessly.
4. Take your finished product and make it an experience. Add to everyday food the
sizzle, spice, and sauce, to make pasta into primavera, clams into chiapino, fruit into
flambé. Don’t settle for players, make iPods. Don’t stop at iPods, evolve to iPhones.
Don’t acquiesce to iPhones, invent Android. And don’t end with Android, expand to
cupcakes, donuts, eclairs, gingerbread, and ice cream sandwiches.
By raise of hands, who caught that last reference?

10. And since we have no speaker, we won’t open this up to questions and answers,
but propose that you take this presentation (URL) and turn it into your own. For the
next X minutes, come up to the microphone comment, challenge, question,
collabortate, and contribute and tell us what you think makes a great PM.

11. Thank you all for making this a g
y g great keynote and for making this a g
y g great conference.