product bytes
Since 2002, Rich Mironov has been writing the Product Bytes newsletter on product management, technology, start-ups and getting things done. With his move to Enthiosys, it is again a monthly column. Here you’ll see all of the latest issues along with reposts of selected favorites. some of which have been collected in “The Art of Product Management.”
- Leadership, Trust and Pronouns
I’m struck by the words people choose, and by how their pronouns reflect their management style. In particular, I’m working with a team that’s been hungry for leadership and trust – and is now blossoming. This provides me with an excuse to recap what we all (should) know about leadership, trust, and how the words we use shape the behavior of our organizations...
- A Journey of 1000 Miles is Still 1000 Miles Long
It’s easy to confuse actual progress with intentions to make progress. Why point out the obvious? I’ve just come out of another agile conversation where prospective clients confused “we want to build better software faster” with “we hope that some new processes will instantly catch us up on years of slipped deadlines and missing features...
- Magical Thinking and the Zero-Sum Roadmap
{a post by Rich Mironov} Recent conversations at several clients highlight an often-repeated set of magical thinking: beliefs by internal clients that development resources are infinite, and beliefs by product managers that prioritization can convince anyone otherwise. Both are wrong, but seductive...
- Metrics and More Metrics
{A post by Rich Mironov} Continuing a discussion that was raised in Tom Grant’s recent conference call with Saeed Khan, they (we) made a distinction between metrics about products that Product Managers use to monitor the world, and metrics about Product Managers for promotions and salary reviews...
- Market Facts, Judgment, Fallibility and Ownership (or how I learned to stop worrying and love market uncertainty)
Every few weeks, I find myself itching to play the product management “heavy.” This is the moment when I want to yell ”...because I’m the product manager and I said so!” Not an ideal strategy for PMs or parents. Here’s a more productive approach, with input from many other PMs...
- Site Licenses and Other Real-World Intrusions
The Enthiosys team just finished up a major pricing exercise with a start-up in the enterprise software space: tuning up their prices, improving their upgrade model, and looking at alternative pricing metrics (i.e. what to meter when quantifying the customer’s usage). A great opportunity to match quantitative models against actual customer behaviors...
- Agile 2009: Product Management/Ownership and Business Agility
Now that I’m unpacked from Agile 2009 in Chicago, I wanted to share a few highlights from the conference: [1] Product Manager/Product Owner track. Enthiosys was proud to chair a new track this year for product manager/product owner topics and speakers, co-chaired by Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing with able help from Scott Sehlhorst, Laureen Knudsen and Jennifer Fawcett...
- EOL from the Customer’s POV
As seasoned product managers, most of us eventually have to phase out old versions and completely eliminate old products. This is called End of Life (EOL) or End of Service (EOS), and is important weed-clearing...
- 6 Lessons for Non-Dev Executives at Agile Software Companies
In many conversations over the last few months, I’ve see executive teams grappling with the positive effects of agile software development on their non-development processes and organizations...
- Profitably Pairing Software and Professional Services
Wearing our software product management hats, it’s easy to think that all problems should be solved with software. (To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Software PMs need to be looking for opportunities to combine professional services with software – because services can be highly profitable, meet customer needs more quickly, and market-test ideas for future products...
- Company-Wide Business Agility and the Soviets
Until recently, most of the discussion around Agile has been strictly limited to software development teams. We focused on building and testing and shipping software more effectively, with PMs/POs managing backlogs and user stories. As software companies mature in their adoption of agile, though, it’s becoming clear that agile uncovers inefficiencies throughout the company...
- Social Animals in Lone Wolf Roles
Part of P-Camp’s excitement was gathering so many product managers together in person – twice last year’s attendees – for sharing and informal networking. Putting physical faces to our online personas. This prompts some thoughts about product managers being socially isolated within their technical organizations...
- Adding Outbound to Cross-Functional Teams
Lately, there’s been lots of discussion about whether Agile is strictly a software development methodology, without major impact on the outbound parts of a software company, or whether it’s driving broad changes in how companies deliver value to their markets...
- Chefs and Agile Restauranteurs
As more of our clients have moved to agile software development, we’ve seen a growing need for business agility: getting non-engineering functions involved earlier and more collaboratively, so that companies deliver better revenue results as well as better software. Let’s make this more concrete by mapping it to the restaurant business...
- How Well Can You Predict The Future?
It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue...
- Understanding the Opportunities of Buy-Side Economics
As CEOs of our products, we product managers have a lot to do. Traditionally, this has included “build-versus-buy” decisions. The debate often hinged on whether technical tasks were “core” or just “context”...
- “Art of Product Management” now available on Amazon
Published in November 2008, The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator collects Rich Mironov’s most popular Product Bytes columns from 2002-2008 with forewords by Prof Henry Chesbrough and David Strom. You can now order it on Amazon! The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader...
- Why Did You Become a Product Manager?
Most product managers didn’t originally plan on it. (“Mommy, I want to be a product manager when I grow up!”) Since we’re a team that lives and breathes (and writes about and promotes) product management, we’d love to hear your story about how you got here. We’ll look for trends and qualitative results to publish back to the community...
- So When Do I Need a Product Owner?
{this post continues a lively discussion we started with “Revenue products need Product Managers, not Product Owners” and continues with “How Do We Define Product Owners?” Comments and emails are flying furiously on this, so please post a comment below or link back to your own blog...
- How Are We Defining Product Owners?
{My last post “Revenue Products need Product Managers, not Product Owners” generated a lot of comments and emails about the product owner role. In particular, I appreciate some energetic observations from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, which led to this follow-on thought. A third part of the discussion is “When Do I Need a Product Owner...
- Revenue Products need Product Managers, not Product Owners
{This has kicked off a lively discussion and two follow-on posts: So When Do I Need a Product Owner? and How Are We Defining Product Owners? Enjoy! – Rich Mironov} Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just the delivery of software...
- Agile 2008 Attendees Collaborate to Create New Products
On Tuesday and Wednesday (Aug 5-6) at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, hundreds of attendees joined Enthiosys, the Agile Product Management consulting company, in a real-time collaborative exercise to design a new product. These Agilists collaborated with Enthiosys to define, prioritize, schedule and price a new generation of “Internet Sunglasses”. See a short video on YouTube...
- Disruptive Pricing Units
During a miserable week of domestic air travel during June, I noticed new fees suddenly appearing for checked baggage and in-flight soft drinks. That caused an announcement about a new airline to catch my eye – an airline offering a radically different approach to pricing. It re-raised a topic that we explore with many clients: shifting the basis of competition by changing pricing units...
- Agile Portfolio Planning and Excited CFOs
At Enthiosys, we look at how Agile Product Management changes the broader organization and strategic planning processes – well beyond Engineering. We’re thinking more about how Agile alters one of the most celebrated annual corporate ceremonies: Portfolio Planning and budget allocation...
- Infrastructure Field of Dreams
We work with lots of clients on internal infrastructure and shared architecture projects – both from a product management/requirements and evaluating the software architecture itself...