Product Strategy for Start-ups with Des Traynor + Unconference

Note: All tickets on sale via eventbrite (http://lean-february.eventbrite.com).

Early bird $20, Late bird $30, Last ten tickets $50, Student tickets $10

Agenda:

6:30 pm - Doors open for food, beer & networking 7:00 pm - Unconference session 1 7:30 pm - Unconference session 2 8:00 pm - Product Strategy for Start-ups with Des Traynor Main Talk: Product Strategy for Start-ups with Des Traynor

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/1/f/9/c/event_328748092.jpegSolving your own problem is a great way to start building a product. With traction comes pressure to expand your feature set to satisfy more potential customers. Without a product strategy it's all too easy to build a toolbox of tangentially related features, rather than a holistic product. In the short term the former wins more customers, but in the longer term it costs you deeply. It becomes impossible to market your product. Your elevator pitch is still going when everyone is out of the building. Your product becomes hard for customers to use, or adopt. Without a product strategy you can quickly drift into building consultingware, just that one more feature for that one more customer.

This fast paced, light hearted talk builds upon lessons learned from consulting with, and helping over 100 start-ups identify their core features, and orient a product strategy around them. It explains the commonly-used and commonly-misunderstood approaches to start-ups and presents easy to action takeaways for analysing your product and planning your product roadmap.

About Des Traynor:

Des Traynor is co-founder and Vice President of Customer Success at Intercom. Founded in 2011, Intercom is a simple, personal messaging service for businesses and their customers. It is a single, integrated platform for marketing, product, support and sales communication. At Intercom, Des works with customers on a daily basis. Through these interactions, he gains valuable insights that help influence Intercom’s product roadmap.

Prior to Intercom, Des was co-founder of Exceptional, which was acquired and is now part of Rackspace.

Des writes Intercom's blog (http://insideintercom.io/) and is a regular conference speaker on topics such as product strategy, UX design, customer experience, and the business of start-ups.

About the unconference:

We'll start this month's event unconference style with Lean Startup Circle members sharing their knowledge in open spaces. Last month we had sessions such as:

Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups - Q&A David Bland, Principle Advisor at Neo - What do I do with this custdev data? Gagan Biyani & Morgan Springer, founders of Sprig - Q&A Alex Cowan, author of Starting a Tech Business - Storyboarding Mair Dundon, UX Facilitator at QuietAction - Self Persona Workshop Jacob Esparza, CEO of Making Friends - Lessons Learned from Steve Blank's Lean Launch Pad Anyone can pitch a session to:

Share their knowledge Discuss a topic Ask for help NO PITCHES OR SOLICITATIONS! Beer, (real non-pizza based) food, and a good hang with great people is included thanks to the price tag. After expenses, extra proceeds go to building out LeanStartupCircle.com (http://leanstartupcircle.com/) for the community.

Note: All tickets on sale via eventbrite (http://lean-february.eventbrite.com).