It’s been a tough week on the technical front, with a variety of products failing to perform their core functions for me. Which prompts a somewhat emotional question for those of us who oversee products (or services) for a living:
Does your product suck? Does it #fail to do the one thing that customers buy it for?
SVPMA marked its 10-year anniversary with a panel discussion on the key role that product managers play in today’s organizations and the skills PMs need to succeed in the next decade. 120+ attended.
What: “Skills You Need to Succeed as a Product Manager in the Next Decade”
Panel: Rich Mironov (moderator), Tom Grant, Greg Cohen, Christina Noren, Ivan Chalif
When: Wednesday, December 1st, 6:30pm – 9pm
Where: TechMart, Santa Clara
This turned into a spirited discussion among the panelists and assembled PMs/PMMs with questions on their minds. 
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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 thoughtful choice between “I” and “we” and “you” is a reflection of the workplace emotional temperature: are managers and executives motivating line employees to do their best, or “throwing them under the bus?” Are we rewarding cross-functional cooperation and market impact, or angling for promotion and impressing our peers? Continue reading
Rich Mironov led a November 18th session on agile product management for the Norcal BMA.
What: “How Agile Changes (and Doesn’t Change) What Product Managers Do”
Who: Norcal BMA (Northern California Business Marketing Association)
When: Nov 18th, 830AM – 10AM
Where: Scott’s Seafood, Palo Alto CA
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The California Program for Entrepreneurship (CAPE) is an initiative of the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. The CAPE provides education and mentoring to emerging entrepreneurs to help them develop and implement business plans that will contribute to the growth and well-being of the California economy.
Leavey School, SCU
What: CAPE Business Plan Competition.
Where: Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business
When: Nov 14th, 1:00 to 5:00 pm.
Rich Mironov joins other CAPE judges to evaluate presentations from 17 teams. This is the culmination of a 3-phase/6-month program of intensive workshops and pitch prep that started in June. Prizes include a $5,000 award to the winning team.
Prof. Kumar Sarangee of Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business invited Rich Mironov to be a guest lecturer for his Product Market Planning and Strategy class. SCU’s Evening MBA program attracts some of the brightest students from the Valley, with a tradition of providing leadership back to technology companies. Continue reading
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.”
So paraphrasing Confucius, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but is still a thousand miles long. Even at twice your normal walking speed, be prepared for a very long slog.”
For context, nearly every software development team would like to be more productive, ship better product, and be innovative. Almost by definition, though, those with the biggest productivity issues are the furthest behind – with months (years) of unmet customer requirements and technical debt. Continue reading
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. Here goes…
The starting point for this conversation is the typical product roadmap: crammed full of prioritized work and heavily negotiated with the development team. Almost every optional item has been postponed, and there’s still some risk of delay. This is a product plan with no “white space,” no large chunks of unallocated engineering capacity, no slop or slush funds or hidden treasure. Continue reading
Rich Mironov presented a webinar on what agile development managers (and others) need to know about product management in general, PM in an agile context, and how this aligns with scrum’s concept of product owners.
Rich Mironov led a clinic on product management concepts for very early-stage start-ups (1 to 3 employees), hosted by Agile Entrepreneurs.