Here’s the breakdown of the sessions:

Location:  NYU/Poly Incubator 160 Varick St., NY, NY

Session 1: Overview – 3/24

Talk 1: Understanding the responsibilities and limitations of a product manager: What are you supposed to own?
Tark 2: Good product management vs bad product management, and customer centric vs. market centric

Session 2: New Product Development – 4/7

Talk 1: Roadmapping: Scoping out requirements and priorities, minimum viable product. Limiting what you’re building and when to fill in the gaps.
Talk 2: Wireframes, specs, project management and brainstorming tools

Session 3: In mid-stride – 4/21

Talk 1: Building a product focused culture: Taking over PM for existing products and being a PM when there wasn’t one before
Talk 2: New features vs better features: how to balance improving what you have versus adding more

Session 4: Analytics – 5/5

Talk 1: Collecting data from users – interviewing, listening labs, customer development
Talk 2: Stats, funnels, graphs, A/B tests: What numbers should I pay attention to and how?

Session 5: Ups and downs – 5/19

Talk 1:  How to figure out when things aren’t working and how to pivot
Talk 2:  Product management when driving revenue is the goal: turning users into dollars

This is definitely easier said than done.  It’s so painful …  I’m in the middle of it.  It’s a lot of self exploration,  a lot of feeling inadequate and lots of ‘What the hell am I going to do with my life if this doesn’t work?’.    I feel your pain.  One mental trick that I use on myself to keep me in the game is thinking that the closer I get to 8 failures, the likelihood of success becomes higher .  So I keep trying things… I keep failing… toward the hope that just one will succeed.

If anyone else has thoughts on increasing their success %, I’d love to hear it!

dedicated server – this is what you traditionally expect with hosting.  a service provider allocates you physical hardware in their data center that is dedicated to your website, and your website alone.  Pros:  You can do whatever you want on that machine, because you are leasing it.  Cons:  If you get a sudden burst of traffic because you got on the Digg homepage, you’ll most likely crash the server.  Also, you need to have someone highly technical to administer the machine.

a cloud server – a cloud server is a virtual server that runs on a shared massive computing infrastructure – such as the Amazon EC2 setup, or the Rackspace Cloud Server setup.  Pros:  They are in essence, dedicated servers, so you can do whatever you want on each of the virtual servers.  If you know what you’re doing, you can typically startup new machines to handle unexpected load/traffic.  Cons:  You’ll need an even more technical person to understand how to create virtual machines and administer them.

shared hosting – shared hosting is a setup where you and several other clients of the hosting company share a dedicated/cloud server.  Pros:  All administration should be handled by the service provider, including email setup, security, and website setup (but not maintenance).  Cons:  You don’t have admin access and you can’t install anything you may need on the server itself.  Sometimes you may not even have access to the machine, except through FTP.

shared cloud hosting - shared cloud hosting is similar to shared hosting, except that everything is stored on an administered cloud infrastructure.  Examples of this type of service are: Rackspace cloud sites, Microsoft Azure, and Google Apps.  Pros:  All administration is handled by the service provider.  Generally if your site gets slammed with traffic, the shared cloud site can handle all the additional traffic.  Cons:  No control of the environment that you’re in.  If you have a highly customized server that requires add-ons that aren’t in a standard package, then you probably need to go with a cloud server or dedicated server.

Ok, hope this helps.  If you have any questions of thoughts shoot me an email.

Also, if anyone suffers social anxiety like I do, email me, and we can start a non-stressful dialogue, and head to one of these things together.

For a little background, Jason Calcanis learned that certain groups of angels were charging entrepreneurs to present.  He made a huge stink about it on his show This Week In Startups and even got some of the groups to stop charging.  In addition, in opposition to the idea of charging (and to the people), he started Open Angel Forum to show that he didn’t have to charge entrepreneurs to give them a chance to present to angels.

Apply here.