Date: Wednesday January 7th
Time: 6:30PM - 9:00PM
Speaker: Ross Mayfield, President & Co-Founder, SocialText
Topic: Social Software: Improved Group Collaboration for Effective Product Management

Location:
Network Meeting Center at the TechMart [Map]
5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, California 95054
www.networkmeetingcenter.com/location

Agenda
6:30 pm - Registration, Networking and Refreshments
7:30 pm - Presentation
9:00 pm - Wrap-up/networking
Registration
SVPMA Members: Free
Non-SVPMA Members: $25 pre-registered, $35 at the door.
**Cash/check only if paying at the door

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Session Overview:

Being an information hub is the largest role of a Product Manager. Today, most of this collaboration happens through email. Documents get emailed back and forth with numerous edits and versions being saved. Comments get posted in reply to all emails which become hard to follow with each new reply. Business best practice is broken down because your team is drowning in hundreds of emails a day from multiple projects. Enterprise 2.0 lets us shift things from documents and emails because not only in many cases it's easier, but better.

Ross Mayfield will show how utilizing Social Software-based client collaboration is different, and can help to streamline all phases of product management. The most important context includes people to make it social. As we have seen this largely already happened with the web, the enterprise is next.

Through the creation of private wiki workspaces, shared directly with their clients, and micro-blogging messaging tools, teams have a single, easy-to-manage place where they can put all the materials related to a project or client (letters of proposal, PowerPoint documents, product designs, to-do lists, meeting notes, etc). Because the access is shared within the collaboration space, the team can easily access the latest version of materials, and offer comments, questions, and feedback right in the workspace

About the speaker:

Ross Mayfield is Chairman, President & Co-founder of Socialtext, the first wiki company and leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions. A noted blogger and industry expert, he is a serial and social entrepreneur. Mayfield has grown Socialtext to over 4,000 customers with Software-as-a-Service, Appliance and Open Source solutions. Mayfield partnered with Dan Bricklin, the creator of the first spreadsheet visiCalc, to co-develop and distribute SocialCalc. Socialtext is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, SAP Ventures and Omidyar Network.

Previously, Mayfield served as VP of Marketing for a Fujitsu spinout and CEO of an enterprise risk management software company. Mayfield co-founded and served as president of RateXchange (AMEX:RTX), the leading B2B commodity exchange for telecom. Mayfield served as the marketing director of the largest privately held telecommunications group in Eastern Europe and was the internal lead manager of their Initial Public Offering. He also founded an ISP, a web-design company, and has served on a number of Advisory Boards of high tech startups.

Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business. He resides in his hometown of Palo Alto with his wife and two children. He blogs at http://ross.typepad.com