Minnesota may be late to the game, but we’re getting in it! The intial planning meeting was held last night for our own Product Camp here in the land of the frozen tundra.
For the past couple of months I have been trying to gage whether there was enough interest in holding a “pcamp” here. Why here? Simple – there isn’t another that has been hosted close enough to us for our product management community to attend.
We had 6 dedicated product leaders attend this first meeting. Before the meeting, research was done. We spoke with the organizers of other product camps to learn how they did it, what their project plan encompassed, and what suggestions they could offer. Thanks are offered to the teams from Boston, Austin, Seattle, and Atlanta. Also a thank you goes out to the the numerous individuals who have offered personal guidance (including Jim Holland and Val Workman) and this includes the Pragmatic Marketing article by John Milburn and Paul Young on best practices.
We now have one person working on a sponsor plan, one focused on the programming structure, one working on marketing and communication, a dedicated technical lead, a great logistics individual and a project manager to keep things moving. We even have set our second meeting to happen in just two weeks.
While we are waiting to hear about our preferred choice of venue, we did agree on one thing – we have a logo! Something we can share now, to help market our efforts. Announcing …. 
It may be hard to tell – but the letter o in the product is a hockey puck, and the letter t are hockey sticks. The planning committe felt that the sport of hockey represents us well here since we are known as the “State of Hockey.” We also are intentionally calling it pcamp MN, since we welcome all product folk from the midwest, not any particular city here. (And, we didn’t want to get into the Minneapolis vs. St. Paul fight.)
And, as our planning continues, I will blog about the efforts and lessons learned. You can also follow us on twitter using the #pcampmn tag.
No longer will Minnesota be on the outside looking in. We’re joining the pcamp family frenzy!
