We understand that when you are meeting tight deadlines and clients are turning up the pressure, you just don't have time to get to all of the tasks that need to get done in your business. We are a full service legal and accounting team that serves the technology industries. We can give you tips on how to create an intelligent business strategy that will supercharge your back office and take the stress away from day to day operations so that you can focus on delivering the kinds of results that your clients demand and deserve.
Our goal is to protect your creativity and help you come up with creative solutions that will improve your business.

With all the focus on social media and the opportunities it affords organizations, there is still very little traction in many sectors and roles. While marketing and communications, pr and other functional groups in technology companies have rapidly embraced social platforms and tactics, the evidence indicates that the majority of Product Managers are less likely to use social options to improve products, engage the market and identify new problems to solve with their solutions. This session will examine the state of product management and social media, while identifying 3 key takeaways which you can put in practice tomorrow to improve your understanding of buyers, your customers and the problems waiting to be solved.

Have you met User? You know, the guy in "as a user, I want to..."?

The nameless, generic user that serves as the actor in many user stories does little to encourage empathy in your Agile project teams. Beyond that, it's highly unlikely that all of the desires encapsulated in a project's user stories would be shared by one individual. But when every story is told from User's perspective, it becomes incredibly difficult to understand the value of each story so that it can be effectively prioritized.

Research-backed personas provide a powerful tool to understand the people for whom you are building a product, and they're a natural fit for transforming User into someone to whom your team can actually relate.

In this session, I'll explain how to conduct guerilla research to create personas for your product, and I will outline the business and user experience benefits that come from allowing those personas to guide your requirements definition and discussion.

Does your product enhance people's lives, create happiness, surprise and delight even for a moment?
Can your product make someone feel more empowered, inspired or in control of their destiny?
Do your customers recommend or better yet, rave about your product to others?
OR
Does your product simply perform a function or solve a problem: to save time, money, effort or frustration?

Break the habit of simply fixing bugs, adding features and addressing complaints and take a step back and look at real user experience.
Look at your products from the user's perspective and in the user's context.
Discover small changes that can have big impact - and how to generate new ideas.

Could your product surprise and delight?

Take User Experience beyond "what's wrong?" into the land of "What could be awesome?"

Short presentation then open discussion - specifically on how to work awesome design into a real product life cycle.

Are you managing a product without the benefit of a design team and need to improve the quality of design? Are you working with a design team, but wish you could speed up their design efforts? Do you struggle with defining requirements at the right level to guide your design team without limiting their creativity and potential innovation?

Collaborative design workshops allow you to harness your stakeholders' domain knowledge to quickly generate a wealth of design ideas. Using these ideas as input into traditional design processes can lead to better, more innovative designs--in less time.

In this workshop, we'll follow the studio critique method taught in many design schools to create several concepts for a website. In addition, I'll share some pointers on how to introduce this technique into your organization--and some pitfalls to avoid (e.g., design by committee).

Not artistic? If you can draw a box, you have the tools you need to communicate your design ideas effectively. Don't let fear of embarrassment stand between you and innovation.

This session explores proven secrets that energize the sales force in selling more of your product, at higher price points, with faster sales cycles. We'll focus not only on creating a compelling market position, but on ensuring that sales channels are messaging effectively to the right audiences. The content will be especially useful for product leaders operating in organizations with multiple product lines, who compete for the attention of sellers.
Some of the interactive topics addressed include:

* key questions sales needs answered (hint: they're simple questions)
* top mistakes product marketers make (hint: the sales force is a market of its own)
* putting segmentation to use in the field (hint: marketing is sales in the aggregate with a longer horizon)