6 Lessons for Non-Development Executives at Agile Software Companies

Posted on July 31, 2009 by Rich

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. If you’re a VP of Marketing or Sales or Finance or Operations or Support at an agile software company, or one that is becoming more agile, improvements in how we build software will be shaping how you think about the software business and non-engineering departments. Here’s a short list of items that you need to consider in the face of increasing agility. Continue reading →

Product Camp NYC

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Rich

We were thrilled that the P-Camp/Product Camp movement arrived in The Big Apple on July 18th, and that Rich Mironov was able to participate:

What: Product Camp NYC
Where: Down Town Association, 60 Pine Street, New York City 10005
When: Saturday, July 18, 2009, 8:00 am to 4:30 pm
Cost: Free, more information here
Organized by: New York Product Management Association

ProductCamps are collaborative, user organized professional conference, focused on Product Management and Marketing topics. At ProductCamp, everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a discussion, showcasing a best practice, or sharing their experiences. Others help with logistics, securing sponsorships, organizing sessions, or settng up/cleaning up. This is a self-organizing collaborative event that is designed be a fun, rewarding and a unique experience.

Rich Mironov flew out to join more than 100 NY-area PMs. He gave two talks: one on Strategic Pricing for Start-Ups and one on the Agile Product Manager/Product Owner Dilemma. See the slides alongside other event materials on Brainshark or flip through the SlideShare below. It’s wonderful to see the seeds originally planted at P-Camp 2008 Silicon Valley sprouting around the country.

Strategic Pricing For Start Ups (ProdCamp NYC)

View more presentations from Rich Mironov.

Profitably Pairing Software and Professional Services

Posted on June 30, 2009 by Rich

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. Continue reading →

Agile Transformation Seminar

Posted on April 30, 2009 by Rich

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:

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)

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Rich

Rich 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)

Posted on April 25, 2009 by Rich

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

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Rich

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

Pricing 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

Posted on April 1, 2009 by Rich

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 →

Second Annual P-Camp

Posted on March 14, 2009 by Rich

Led by Rich Mironov, Enthiosys was thrilled to host and co-sponsor the second annuual P-Camp. It had twice the attendees and sessions as our first event in 2008.
See the event wiki HERE.

When: Saturday, March 14th, 2009 from 9:00AM to 4:00PM+
Where: Yahoo! Building C, 701 First Ave, Sunnyvale
Cost: FREE! and included lunch plus an event t-shirt.

pcamp title 09

Building on the first P-Camp in March-08, this year’s event brought together hundreds of product managers for industry panels, informal discussion groups, presentations, panels, personal networking, innovation, creativity, fun and food. We talked, shared, played some Innovation Games, created a schedule wall of sessions, and designed our own product boxes.

P-Camp '09 schedule wall

early morning crowd

Event Wiki

Sessions, schedules, presentations and notes are HERE. Please add your own notes, photos, links and ideas. Note that you will need to create a free user name on the SocialText website in order to edit our wiki page. Thanks!
Other attendees and presenters have already loaded up lots of great material.

Sponsors

Thanks to the following for helping make this a free event:

PDMA

Events, Panels and Talks

See the full schedule of sessions and talks HERE, which included:

Tom Grant – “Agile Changes How Technology Companies Operate”
Nancy Frishberg and Meghan Ede – Innovation Games session.
Nancy Frishberg & Daniela Busse – Agile UX.
Erin Kinikin – “Working With Analysts” – panel
Chris Sims – “Agile 101”
Joy Montgomery – “Building the Base for Better Profits: Specifications, Standards and Procedures”
Rich Mironov – “How Agile Changes The Way You Do Product Management”
Ross Mayfield -“Using Social Media and Wikis in Product Management” – panel
Mara Krieps / Linda Merrick -“Agile Product Management: The Rosetta Stone”
Catherine Connor – “Agile Product Management and CRM”
David Taber – “Design your customer before you design your product”
Luke Hohmann – “Shaping Your Products With Prune The Product Tree”
Matt Klassen – “Enterprise Agile Transformation – A Case Study from a Borland PMs View”
Sudha Jamthe – “Socializing your iphone application – A Product Managers Dream”
John Mansour – “The Requirements Value Chain”
Lane Halley – “User Interface Design for PMs”
Greg Cohen – “Recession-Proofing your Career”

Social Networking Groups

Become a Facebook PCAMP group member!
Become a LinkedIn PCAMP group member!

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Yearly Archives: 2009