Category Archives: Organizations

Organizations, people, and how companies work

Leadership, Trust and Pronouns

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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.

dictionaryA 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 →

How Agile Changes (and Doesn't Change) What Product Managers Do

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Rich Mironov led a November 18th session on agile product management for the Norcal BMA.

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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A Journey of 1000 Miles is Still 1000 Miles Long

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ConfuciusIt’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 →

Magical Thinking and the Zero-Sum Roadmap

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Recent conversations at several clients highlight an often-repeated set of magical pull rabbit from hatthinking: 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 →

“What If Dev Doesn’t Think Prod Mgmt Represents Customers?”

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Recently, I put up a small assessment tool for product management teams.  This tool is intended to generate discussion and highlight areas for team improvement.  Several PMs had follow-up comments and questions along the lines of “what should we do if we’re scored ourselves poorly on a specific item?”

There are no generic prescriptions for improvement, especially in product management.  It’s worth drilling into an individual item or two, though, and imagining how we might analyze the situation and take corrective action.  Continue reading →

Metrics and More Metrics

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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.  Some additional thoughts of mine, along with a lightweight PM assessment tool…

Metrics About Products

For the most part, metrics track the health of products*.  We should be constantly monitoring things like: Continue reading →

Where Does (Should) Strategy Live in Your Company?

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Rich Mironov gave a talk at SDForum’s Marketing SIG on where/how to build strategy in (young) tech companies. SDForum

What:  Where Does (Should) Strategy Live in Your Company?
Where: Marketing SIG @ DLA Piper,  2000 University Ave, Palo Alto
When: April 12, 6:30pm – 9:00pm   event page
PDF of the slides

Where does/should strategy live in your company?

Technology companies tend to break strategy into functional pieces: the CTO is responsible for a technology strategy, Marketing has a lead generation strategy and a customer/segmentation strategy, product managers each have a product strategy, Sales drives a channel/partner strategy.  Often there’s a disconnect between these groups and their various strategies.  This is even more frequent among software companies deploying agile development practices, since Engineering often sets up its own customer showcases and gathers some product requirements.

So what are the necessary elements to a company/business unit strategy, and who should participate?  Some companies create strategy departments, which risk losing touch with product groups.  Others form ad hoc teams pulled from various functions.  Rich talked through some of the ingredients for good strategy, who needs to participate/collaborate, and some organizational models for making it work at start-ups and small single-product companies.

Where Should Strategy Live? (SDForum)

View more presentations from Rich Mironov.