INDUSTRY: The Product Conference returns, March, 10th,11th, 2020, RDS

When and where is it on?

The European edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference takes place on March 10-11, 2020 at RDS — with pre-conference workshops taking place on March 9th at the Morrison Hotel.

How many years has it been going?

INDUSTRY dates back to 2015, taking place each Fall in the United States and each Spring in Europe. This upcoming conference in March marks the third European edition

INDUSTRY Conference returns

What was the inspiration to start it?

We are passionate about helping product managers and other product people become better product people. It wasn’t very long ago before we were in product roles, yet were secretly confused about what it even meant to be a product person. Of course, we mostly kept that confusion to ourselves. What might happen if our bosses figured out we didn’t know what we were doing?

But then something happened. We started sharing this confusion and fear with other product people and quickly realized we weren’t alone. So many product people felt the same way we did. It shouldn’t have surprised us, really. None of us actually went to school for this. Most product people sort of “fell into” product management. We’re all trying to figure this thing out.

Selfishly, we thought, “What if we could bring the best product management professionals in the world to us — and learn from them?” And thus, INDUSTRY: The Product Conference was born. We bootstrapped the very first edition of INDUSTRY in 2015 with the idea of bringing amazing product people to Cleveland, Ohio (where we both met) so we could meet them and learn from them — and maybe people in the area would benefit, too. But it wasn’t just people from the area that made their way to INDUSTRY. In that very first year, we had attendees from 21 states and 7 countries. And that blew our mind.

We asked ourselves, “What if?” What if we had been planning that first conference full-time and not just on the side of our full-time jobs? What if we were to create other resources that could help product people in the other 363 days when this conference wasn’t taking place?

A lot has happened since we organized that first conference.

Attendance has increased from a couple hundred attendees in 2015 to over 1,200 product people for our Global edition in the United States in 2019. In fact, we’ve moved to a larger venue in Cleveland Public Auditorium, a venue with a storied history with the likes of The Beatles, The Who, The Jackson 5, and others playing on its stage.

With as popular as INDUSTRY has been, we brought it to Europe for the first time in 2018 making Dublin, Ireland our home away from home.  We’re now onto our 3rd European edition, taking place each Spring. Of course, for my partner, Paul – it is more of a true homecoming for him. He is a native of County Tipperary and most of his family is still in Ireland.

Beyond INDUSTRY, we also established Product Collective as a true community for product managers — now serving 30,000 through our weekly newsletter, semi-monthly INDUSTRY Interview live video Q&A chats, and massive Slack channel, where people give feedback, receive advice, and share resources and stories on all things product each day.

We still consider ourselves to be product people. It’s just now, instead of software — our product happens to be a conference and community. Regardless, we are just so grateful that we get to work with and serve product people each day and cannot wait to keep thinking of more ways that we can do that even better.

What exciting things can people look forward to?

Attendees can look forward to getting a lot out of INDUSTRY. While there, we expect them to:

Learn how to gain more influence: Get internal stakeholders to think like product people and buy in to what the customer truly needs. As a result, you’ll get more time from your engineers, budget for new tools and find more time to focus on higher-level strategy

Gain confidence that they’re spending their time and money on the right things:  Be more confident about testing your ideas, prioritizing your features, understanding data, building out your roadmap, and ultimately, managing your products and team better.

Who will be speaking?

There are 12 product-oriented speakers representing all different types of industries from North America and Europe, including:

• Gibson Biddle, former VP of Product at Netflix
• John and Brenda Romero, Legendary video game designers
• April Dunford, Author of Obviously Awesome
• Oji Udezue, VP of Product at Calendly
• Louise Bernstein, Group Product Manager at Hubspot
• Shellye Archembau, Board Member of Verizon, Nordstrom, and elsewhere
• Roman Pichler, Product Management Consultant
• Laura Fay, VP of XAAS Product Management at TSIA
• Richard Banfield, VP of Design and Transformation at InVision
• Tanya Cordrey, Former Chief Digital Officer of Guardian Media

What tips would you give to people attending to get the most out of it?

We’ve been fortunate to have some attendees that have attended every year of INDUSTRY, and we asked many of them this very question so that we could help new attendees. Some of the answers we heard included:

• Take advantage of all of the social events that are planned. While many of these events are social in nature, really… it’s a great way to meet and connect with other product people.
• Download the official event app as soon as it’s released, as it not only provides up-to-date information, but also allows attendees to connect with one another before the conference takes place. Many new attendees make comments that even though they attended alone, they actually felt like they already had friends there because they had been communicating with other product people through the app.
• Stay in touch with us! We not only organize INDUSTRY, but we operate Product Collective — which is a community of product people. Many of our attendees also participate in our Slack channel year-round and attend our free live-video Q&A chats each month. This way, the idea of learning and collaborating happens not just the two days at INDUSTRY, but year round.

How can people book tickets / when does it usually sell out?

People can register at https://www.industryconference.com/europe.  We’ve moved to a larger venue this year (RDS) in order to accommodate more people, so tickets should be available up until the week of the event. That said, the pre-conference Product Strategy workshop with Gib Biddle (former VP of Product at Netflix) will sell out — and is likely to do so by mid-February.  Access to that workshop is included with a Conference Plus pass.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

We have selected a handful of community-oriented organizations in Ireland to make extremely discounted passes available to — specifically for product people in early stage startups. Those product people at companies with less than €1M in revenue and/or less than €5M in capital can receive up to a 70% discount off of a General Admission pass through our startup programme — which folks can apply for here.

All others can still save quite a bit! Simply by using the code IrishTechNewsVIP when registering will save 25% off of any pass — including the Conference Plus pass with Gibson Biddle’s Product Strategy workshop.

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