ProductCamp Boston, April 2011 ********* Ten years ago during the Internet boom years I was invited by the business school I had graduated from over a decade earlier to be part of a marketing career panel with other alumni. In trying to explain the role of product marketing/product management to the MBA students (it is not really taught in b school), I used a volleyball analogy that seemed to help. I'd like to present that as well as lessons learned from 20 years in product marketing/product management... ********************** Armed with an engineering degree from Northeastern and a shiny new MBA from Harvard, I was unleashed upon the software industry 25 years ago. Since then, it has been a "never a dull moment" existence in the murky world between engineering and sales at startups and emerging growth companies in the greater Boston area: business cases, product launches, competitive battlecards, sales guides, acquisitions, an IPO, etc.