SVPMA Monthly Event - Who Cares? Guiding Products to Greatness with Kimberly Wiefling, Wiefling Consulting April 7, 2010

Organization: SVPMA - Silicon Valley Product Management Association
Topic: Who Cares? Guiding Products to Greatness Through the Eyes of Your Stakeholders
Speaker: Kimberly Wiefling, founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC
Date: Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
Time: 6:30pm - 9pm
Location: Network Meeting Center at the TechMart - 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara
Cost: Free for Members. $30 for pre-registered Non-Members. $40 at the door.
More info: http://www.svpma.org/meetings.html

Presentation Summary:
Now more than ever, product managers are under the gun to deliver results with fewer resources in a shorter time to market. In spite of today’s challenging business lanscape, working teams often fail to achieve their goals. Failure to manage stakeholder expectations is one example of a predictable and avoidable pitfall that plagues many otherwise high-potential product development projects.

Stakeholders can be defined as anyone who can impact getting a profitable product to market successfully. Product managers can often fail to identify key stakeholders who could dramatically accelerate or undermine their success.

What you will get out of this event:
* Clarity about the complexity and importance of stakeholder analysis to product management
* An easy-to-use tool for analyzing stakeholders perspectives and interdependencies
* Insights into how to apply these concepts to your real world to improve your product management results

Speaker:
Kimberly Wiefling is a proven expert in enabling people to achieve what seems impossible, but is merely difficult. The founder of Wiefling Consulting, LLC, she currently spends about half of her time working with high-potential leaders in Japanese companies, facilitating leadership, innovation and execution excellence workshops to enable Japanese companies to solve global problems profitably. When she’s not globe-trotting, she consults with Silicon Valley companies on practical and reproducible approachs to generating breakthrough results.

She is the author of one of the top project management books in the US, “Scrappy Project Management - The 12 Predictable and Avoidable Pitfalls Every Project Faces”, a big hit in Japanese as well as English.

A physicist by education, and a successful business leadership and project management consultant for the past 8 years, she began her career with 10 years at HP in product development, project management, and engineering leadership. She spent 5 years in Silicon Valley startups, including a Xerox Parc spinoff where she was the VP of Program Management.

Official Website: http://www.svpma.org