Please note that In response to the global crisis and respect for the safety of our Peers, we moved this month’s meeting to an all-virtual setting.

• The unexpected joy of not having your meddling CEO be able to do casual walk-by conversations with Product - and then having to scramble when that same executive started scheduling Roadmap Review sessions with individuals instead!

• Productivity has soared for some teams and plummeted for others - this crisis is certainly not affecting all Product teams the same way.

• Pandemic or not, some C-Suites are still not grasping the notion of scare resources and seem to believe we have even more time now to take on additional projects.

Thank you to all the folks who joined and engaged with the group this month!

There are many ways we can improve our knowledge of the craft. In this first of a three-part series, I want to focus on podcasting.

Join us to engage with successful Product podcasters to learn more about producing and consuming meaningful, valuable content through this popular medium. What motivates podcasters to create content? What do they look for in terms of guests, formats, audience engagement? What makes for a successful podcast?

In April, I will be hosting a virtual conversation with some of our favorite Product podcasters. Our guests will be joining us via video conference to lead an engaging discussion with the breakfast group around their respective podcasting efforts.

RSVP to info@theproductpath.com for details on how to join.

Note that this event will be online only. We will officially kick off the discussion at 9 am but feel free to arrive as early as 8:45 am Central to ensure a good virtual A/V conference experience.

About our guests

Hope Gurion is the founder of Fearless Product LLC and serves as a coach to product leaders and product teams seeking growth through customer-centric, evidence-based strategies. She has led more than 40 B2B and B2C product teams throughout her career. She was Chief Product Officer at CareerBuilder and SVP, Product Management at Beachbody. She led several verticals as a product and business leader at AOL.  When she’s not building great products and product teams, she sharing best practices on product leadership topics through the “Fearless Product Leadership” podcast to help product leaders shorten their learning curves.

Suzanne Abate is a leading advocate, educator, and consultant on expert product management. As Founder and Chief Product Officer for 100 PM, her mission is to expand approaches, accessibility, and conversations in tech and business, making the fields more accessible, diverse, and playful. Beyond 100 PM, Suzanne actively serves the PM community through her role as CEO of The Development Factory, Enterprise Product Management Instructor at General Assembly, and public speaker. She loves coaching companies and mentoring individuals who want to achieve great things.

Chad McAllister is the host of The Everyday Innovator podcast, author of Turning Ideas into Market-Winning Products, and founder of Product Innovation Educators. He is recognized as a Top 40 Product Management Influencer and a Top 10 Innovation Blogger.

In response to the global crisis and respect for the safety of our Peers, we moved this month’s meeting to an all-virtual setting. The group assembled from our home offices to catch up on how our respective companies and teams are holding up and then launched into a collaborative online activity to brainstorm about the new normal. We talked about what life will likely be like for Product people and our users once this crisis has subsided, exploring both the short term adjustments and the longer impact on our culture.

It was a wonderful discussion and I thank everyone from the group who joined us! See you next month.

Please join us this February for a conversation with Steve Johnson, founder of Under10 Consulting. Steve is an industry thought leader on product processes and frameworks and recently worked with Pragmatic Institute to revamp their courses for online delivery.

Steve will be joining us via video conference to lead an engaging discussion with the breakfast group around his recent work with Pragmatic Institute and a bold new endeavor he is championing called the Quartz Open Framework.

*** Please note that space is limited for this event!

RSVP to info@theproductpath.com

Breakfast, juice, tea, and coffee will be provided. We will kick things off with Steve at 9 am but feel free to arrive as early as 8:30 am Central for food and mingling.

About our guest

Steve Johnson is an author, speaker, and product coach using modern methods to move products from idea to market. His approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product team.

Steve's work experience includes technical, sales, and marketing management positions at companies specializing in technology-based products. His market and technical savvy allowed him to rise rapidly through the ranks from product manager to the executive suite.

Steve has been a long-time advocate for product management, serving as an executive and advisor to a number of technical product organizations and industry associations including Pragmatic Institute and QuartzOpen.

About the Quartz Open Framework

The Quartz Open Framework is a new open product innovation methodology. Quartz is designed from the ground up to drive innovation in an efficient, easy to understand way. It contains both the steps you need to get product out the door and the tools you need to get the job done. Plus, it’s all wrapped in a license that gives you the freedom to use Quartz as you see fit. It is this combination of process and framework packaged in a Creative Commons license that makes Quartz special.

About Pragmatic Institute

Founded as Pragmatic Marketing in 1993, Pragmatic Institute has a strong track record of providing real-world insights, actionable best practices and proven tools to product managers and product marketing managers around the world.

We’ve helped over 150,000 students from more than 8,000 companies across 25 countries and numerous industries refine and perfect their strategies and goals through our proven Pragmatic Framework. This framework gives product teams a standard language and a blueprint of core activities required to create and market products people buy.

Find more at PragmaticInstitute.com

Our February PM Peers meeting was hosted by Abbie Bys at Lumere. A great turnout for the group with some new faces and some we haven’t seen enough of in recent months. The Product conversation was lively as always flowing from high-level strategic approaches down to roadmaps and whether we should use them at all!

Thanks to Abbie for being such a wonderful host and leader for our group!

I hosted the first meeting of 2020 at Centro’s HQ in the Loop as the PM Peers group celebrated the start of our 5th year. The January group brought together old-timers with a few new faces. Was wonderful to see the participation and engagement. Very excited about the year ahead for the greater Chicago Product community.