Product Leaders Forum is an annual conference for Product Management professionals which happens in Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore. This event is by , of and for the people who are passionate about Product Management. This year it happened in Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore. Pune PLF was on 18th Aug 2017 while Hyderabad PLF was on 4th Aug 2017.
I was lucky enough to volunteer for Bangalore PLF which happened on 15th September at Aloft, Cessna Business Park, Bangalore.
There were talks to be given on 4 tracks namely Deep Tech, Growth and Scaling, India Opportunity and Product Market Fit. There was also time set for CXOs Panel Discussion and CTO Panel Discussion and keynote address.
Apart from talks, the event gave us lot of networking opportunities to meet and great people who had been doing phenomenal work in the product management space in the country.
PLF chair was Naveen Asrani, Director Startups, Microsoft. Other notable people who had led the volunteer team to included Ajit Talluri, Gautham Bhatt, Madhurima Saha who had given directions to the volunteers based on the prior experience they had with the organizing the event earlier.
Some of the volunteers were interested in helping in Sales and Marketing of even tickets. This included my friends Suvrajit Sardar , Ravi Beshatty, Mahakali Ramakrishna, Brahmaiyya Reddy, Kishan Rao.
I had taken the responsibility to be the Lead Session Manager. Nirmaladevi Dhanaesekar, Subashree Krishnan, Sudhir Kumar, Irshad Ahmed, Hemanth Kempanna were helping for Session Management. We started to work on organizing PLF conference around 2 weeks before. That gave us limited time to pull of an event of this scale. We created a whatsapp group for continuous communication and started having daily night calls. These calls were moderated by Naveen Asrani and Ajit Talluri.
Opportunity to help for session management gave opportunity to work with some more people who had similar interest in volunteering for PLF for session management. This included Manjunath, Subashree, Hemant.
We had proposed some speakers whom we knew could come and speak. Naveen Asrani and Ajit Talluri with more experience, could connect with more speakers and very soon we had lined up a set of good speakers. We could organize the topics of their talks amongst the 4 themes which were identified for PLF.
Soon schedule was drawn and speakers and their talks were slotted. Some speakers had some suggestions regarding the times at which they can deliver talks. Schedule was changed accordingly as per their convenience.
Session management team was working on a checklist so that we do not miss out any important step between and during the talks.
Sales and Marketing volunteers were pushing the sales of tickets by several means. They were promoting the event on LinkedIn, Facebook, talking to colleagues, reaching out to HR and Learning and development folks in their companies. Few days before the event Kishan Rao used his creativity to create an awesome video to promote the event. All of us shared this video on our LinkedIn and Facebook pages which created lot of awareness about the event.
While Session management and Sales/Marketing volunteers were busy, Gautam Bhatt coordinated with the hotel staff to ensure that we get all the required assistance from the hotel and no stone is left unturned for the smooth execution of the event. Sukhendu Roy took the initiative of visiting the venue 3 days in advance and helped us in our planning. He helped in further coordinating with the hotel.
Our plan was to do a dry run before the event in the conference halls. We got to know that the hotel would be made available to us on 14th Sep 11pm. That left hardly any opportunity for us to do any dry run. That night once the Conference Hall was made available to us, Sukhendu Roy, coordinated with the A&V Team for the setup. This ensured that when once we reached the hall in the morning, everything was setup.
Meanwhile we had crossed sales of 120 tickets. This was a good number considering we had started preparation in last 2 weeks.
Volunteers who were helping in sales and marketing handled the on spot registrations and helped all the delegates when they started to arrive at the help desk. Once the talks started, volunteers who were helping at the front desk took positions in the halls to help in the session management.
We had a long day with many interesting talks. The most talked ones included Building for Bharat by Sharad Sharma, BHIM case study by Nikhil Kumar.
We had very interesting CXO Panel discussion on Adapting to the new world order. Amit Dayal, Bala Girisballa, Rishi Srivastava and Hari Vasudev gave many relevant insights.
In the 2nd half we got to listen to CTO Panel discussion in which Atul Batra, Guru Bhat, Pravanjan Choudhary shared their thoughts.
Another highlight of the day was a Panel Discussion between Women business leaders between Subashree Krishnan, Irina Ghose, Dr Sujitha Karnad, Lalitha Ramani, Pallavi Srinivas and Seema Joshi.
Closing event was Ravi Gururaj talking to Shradha Sharma and Anurag Jain. It was a very interesting session in which Shradha Sharma spoke about her journey with YourStory.
In the awards section, awards were given to some delegates in the categories such as most interesting questions asked, most participation. We had some laughs when one of the winner’s name was announced to be Arvind Kejriwal. This delegate was not the Chief Minister of Delhi.
After Awards, all the volunteers posed for a customery group snap.
That is how we ended very enriching experience called Product Leadership Forum 2017.
Waiting eagerly for 2018 Edition.
I might have missed to mention many of the volunteers who had dedicated their time and effort for this cause.You can read about all the Speakers, Volunteers at this link
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