Monthly Archives: April 2009

Agile Transformation Seminar

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Rich Mironov keynoted a one-day seminar on Agile Transformation, hosted by IBM, entitled “Mitigating Risk with Agile Development: Great Software, Great Business Results

Where: IBM Innovation Center, 2929 Campus Drive, Suite 275/2nd floor, San Mateo, CA
When: Thursday, April 30, 9:30 – 3:30
Presenters:  Rich Mironov (CMO, Enthiosys); Johnny Scarborough (VP Product Engineering, GlobalLogic); Damon Poole (CTO, AccuRev) and Bill Leech (agile practitioner, CNET).

This one-day session included detailed presentations, interactive exercises and open discussion on:

  • Agile development approaches including distributed agile methods, the history of agile, and agile manifesto
  • A detailed walk-through of Scrum, one agile approach
  • The organizational changes required for successful agile adoption: executive commitment, cross-functional teams, and coaching
  • Hear first-hand from one of your peers about how to bring about agile adoption and improved results
  • Roadmaps, releases, iterations and the iron triangle
  • Business drivers, business value and customer collaboration approaches
  • How to evaluate technologies when adopting agile

This seminar was intended for CTOs, Vice Presidents and Directors of:

  • Software Development or Engineering
  • Product Management
  • Business Units

Co-sponsors:

IBM AccuRev GlobalLogic Rally

All attendees received free copies of two new books:

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell
The Art of Product Management by Rich Mironov

Presenter Bios:

Rich Mironov, Enthiosys, CMO

Rich Mironov is CMO of Enthiosys, an agile product management consulting firm. A Silicon Valley veteran, he works with clients on product and technology strategies, pricing/business models, agile adoption, and market requirements. He is the author of The Art of Product Management , stage producer for the Agile 2009 product management track, and is on the Executive Development faculty of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Rich has an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.S Physics from Yale University.

Johnny Scarborough, Area VP – Product Engineering, GlobalLogic

With over 20 years of start-up and established technology company experience, Johnny leads GlobalLogic’s efforts to establish common processes, platform, tools, and components that can be used to further accelerate software product development and test. He works closely with technology clients and prospects to advise them on how to maximize their success, helping them transition as appropriate to GlobalLogic Velocity™, the company’s InfoWorld award-winning Agile platform supporting global product development.

Damon Poole, CTO and Founder, AccuRev, Inc.

Damon Poole has over eighteen years of software development methodology and process improvement experience gained through hands-on development and consultation at hundreds of companies doing both co-located and geographically distributed development. Damon also consults on Agile techniques which scale to large distributed teams collaborating on multiple releases in parallel. Read Damon’s Agile Development blog.

Bill Leech, Agile Practitioner

Bill Leech has utilized Agile since 2005, when he was certified as a Scrum Master and Product Owner, and since then has been applying Agile methods to projects of growing size and complexity. He introduced Scrum to CNET Networks (recently acquired by CBS Interactive). Last year, CNET.com completed an enterprise effort to rebuild and redesign their major websites, which was managed using the Agile/Scrum methodology.

Roadmapping (Haas Executive Education)

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Haas BerkeleyRich Mironov returned to the Haas School’s Product Management Executive Education series, “Product Management: Translating Market Opportunities into Profitability,” for a lecture on product roadmaps and the role of product management.  In a program primarily taught by Haas’ distinguished faculty,  Rich is the one of the few active product management practitioners on the program’s teaching staff.

Where: Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA

 

When: Tuesday, April 28, 2009

 

Who: open only to session registrants, not open to the public

Program and sign-up information

The Berkeley Center for Executive Development draws on the rich resources, talent and perspectives of top-level business educators and researchers from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and elsewhere to provide top-level executive education courses and custom programs to executives and companies around the world. This includes specific programs in Leadership, Finance, Marketing, and General Management – including Product Management. The 2008 Product Management program draws on The Haas School’s own professors as well as expert practitioners in the field. Rich Mironov is honored to be part of this distinguished group.

Pricing, Business Models, and What Things are Worth (Workshop)

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Rich Mironov led a workshop for SVPMA on “Pricing, Business Models, and What Things are Worth: How to make money in difficult times. “

When: Saturday, April 25th, 9AM – Noon

Where: TechMart, 5201 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara

Registration: http://svpma.org/workshops.html

Cost:  SVPMA Members $25, Non- Members $40.  ($10 additional on day of event)
This half-day workshop covered the essentials of pricing, business models and profit engines: how we make money from our products, and how we can make more?  We focused less on specific prices (how much is it) than on matching prices to customer-perceived value and on pricing units (per seat, per photo, per share of stock sold).  We also talked about getting value from later product releases, where customers see value in Release 3 and 4 and 5 and 6.

This was a fun, interactive morning.  Team exercises included pricing a never-before-shipped service for a hot-hot (but imaginary) tech start-up and ideas on pricing product management consulting services.

Take-aways:

  • Understand pricing as part of the overall product strategy mix
  • Hands-on team exercise pricing an entirely new product
  • Strategic model for finding and capturing long-term value
  • Ideas for disruptive pricing units
  • Appreciation for sales reps faced with conflicting, complex pricing models

As a member of SVPMA’s board, Rich was excited to have this opportunity to share with the broader Silicon Valley community.

Pricing, Business Models, and What Things are Worth

View more presentations from Enthiosys.

About the SVPMA

The Silicon Valley Product Management Association (SVPMA) was founded to address the needs of Product Managers, Product Marketing Managers and other professionals working within the Product Management field.  The goal of the SVPMA Workshop Series is to provide our members hands-on, interactive product management training delivered by leading consulting and professional services companies, lecturers and trainers.

Strategic Pricing for Start-Ups and New Products

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Rich Mironov led a discussion for SDForum’s Marketing SIG and Start-up SIG

What: “Strategic Pricing for Start-ups, New Products and Innovations”
When: April 20th, 630PM – 9PM
Where: Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, 1100 Marsh Road, Menlo Park
Event Page
Cost:  No charge for SDForum members,  $15 at the door for non-members

SDForumPricing is hard, and most companies don’t spend much time thinking about it.  Often, it’s decided late in the development cycle, tactically, and copied from competitors that we hope did their homework.  Startups and companies with innovative new products may not have an existing competitor to copy the wrong answers from.  Instead, they have an opportunity to define the right business model and pricing to tilt the marketplace in their favor.

Using some real-world examples plus an imaginary product, we’ll explore:
* how would customer value your product (or service)?
* what is the right pricing unit? (by the month, by the seat, by the download, stock trade, answer, GB of storage, movie, social connection…)
* will this support your business model?
* how will you keep making money over time?

SDForum Strategic Pricing For Start Ups

View more presentations from Rich Mironov.

Company-Wide Business Agility and the Soviets

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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. It also creates opportunities for executives to drive improvement in market-facing groups such as Support, Marketing, Professional Services, and Channel Sales. Continue reading →