Rich Mironov led a clinic on product management concepts for very early-stage start-ups (1 to 3 employees), hosted by Agile Entrepreneurs.
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Reducing Risk Through Agile Product Planning (webinar)
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What: “Reducing Risk through Agile Product Planning” webinar
When: June 2nd, 10:00am PST / 1:00pm EST
Speaker: Rich Mironov, Principal, Mironov Consulting
Replay the webinar here
This webinar is part of Accept’s Agile Management Series, which also includes speakers from Forrester and PRTM.
Agile development teams focus on delivering products faster and with higher quality, reducing the risk of being “late to market.” But product managers also worry about business risks including: building the wrong product, missing profitable segments, and constant roadmap changes. How can we apply agile product planning to reduce our overall business risk?
Reducing Risk through Agile Product Planning
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Where Does (Should) Strategy Live in Your Company?
Rich Mironov gave a talk at SDForum’s Marketing SIG on where/how to build strategy in (young) tech companies. 
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)
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P-Camp ‘10: Thinking Like an Agile Product Manager
At Silicon Valley P-Camp ‘10 (March 13th), Rich Mironov led a session on “How Agile Changes Waterfall PM Processes and Thinking.” This was a tall order for a 45-minute colllaborative session with 120+ attendees, so we ran a real-time exercise in creating, prioritizing and attacking a backlog of agile PM issues. The room was full of enthusiastic attendees, both agile veterans and newbies, with good insights/advice from the crowd.
Agenda:
- Handful of level-setting slides (< 15 minutes) – see the slides
- Prioritize and time-box questions / issues raised by the group, i.e. build a backlog (< 10 minutes)
- Tackle issues based on priority (20 minutes, allocated 5 minutes each for top 4 issues)
- Thumbnail retrospective (3 minutes)
Rather than just talking about agile thinking and agile processes, we did a tiny re-enactment of some key process steps. The group raised 7 issues and ranked them as follows:
1. How much should/must we document requirements? – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
2. How to prioritize a list of 100 items (tools and strategies for handling long lists) – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
3. Where does UED/UI fit? We added architecture, since that has many of the same issues. – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
4. Agile metrics – TIME-BOXED to 5 MINUTES
5. How to deal with waterfall thinkers?
6. What to do about opinionated chickens (i.e. those who are interested but not committed)
7. What about engineers who don’t like product management?
This helped remind us of the essential nature of backlogs: that we don’t get everything done in any one iteration or release, but attacking the highest priority items gets them done first. In our (very limited) 5 minutes per topic, there were good suggestions and solutions from the floor, including (by topic):
1. Attack requirements iteratively, with less detail up front and more as teams engage with specific stories and raise questions; aim for ‘just enough’ based on team’s knowledge; do enough to motivate the next discussion with Dev team.
2. Prioritize only the top portion (e.g. 30 items) of your list and leave the rest for last; use a scoring/weighting scheme spreadsheet to group and rank items; apply various tools called out by the participants
3. Rich’s strong bias that a UED framework must exist at the beginning of a project, just as a product architecture must exist if this is a complex cross-team effort, and just as a business model/customer segmentation theory must be in place before spending lots of money on development. Sketching of the “one ahead, one behind” model for designing and testing UED elements.
4. A very brief extension past team’s story velocity toward economic value metrics per story or epic.
In a whirlwind retrospective (purely for structural completeness), the collective wisdom was that next time we might actually propose solutions to the above rather than just talking briefly about them.
Some of this material was lifted from earlier discussions and presentations on product manager/product owner issues, for instance this Product Camp NYC talk.
Product Camp NYC
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)
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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.
On June 6th, a new airline called Derrie-Air started advertising fares based on total passenger weight, with the slogan “Pack Less. Weigh Less. Pay Less.” A flight from Philadelphia to Los Angeles was priced at $2.25 per pound – with each passenger paying based on body weight plus luggage. Thus a supermodel carrying only a fashion tote could get to LaLaLand for $210 while Big Uncle Ralph and his steamer trunk would be $830. Continue reading
Burning Your Boats
I spent 2006 consulting to small tech companies, including seven months as an interim executive. I also nearly co-founded a start-up. Come year-end, though, I find that I haven’t created a new company or joined a fledgling venture. This brings to mind discussions of commitment and “burning your boats.” Continue reading
Why are there Serial Entrepreneurs?
From the outside, it might seem that joining a fledgling start-up should only be about economics and the big payoff: the popular business press always has stories of farsighted technologists, instant millionaires, and thirty-somethings coping with Sudden Wealth Syndrome. And there are certainly enough folks in the Valley who have made it that most of us know one.
This strikes me as too narrow a view, though – and leaves out the important emotional aspects of start-ups. Deep into my fourth adventure, I’m less occupied by eventual exit strategies than by the day-to-day challenge of managing chaotic growth. Continue reading
Insider Thinking
Product managers and other product champions spend a lot of their time driving internal processes and decisions — the daily incremental struggle for progress on pricing, packaging, release schedules, upgrade policies and other bits of the production puzzle. This relentless motivation is indispensable, the tech equivalent of keeping the trains running on time. PMs should also be spending time with customers, refreshing their sense of needs and marketplaces. Continue reading
Early Selling: Thoroughbreds and Explorers
Start-up selling is different from selling established products. It includes navigating new product waters and locating islands of early adopters — and calls for different skills than classic quarter-driven account selling. Knowing which you need is critical. (I’ve seen organizations repeatedly hire the wrong sales force, with terrible results.)
This column divides sales teams into thoroughbreds (race horses) and explorers. Thoroughbreds outrun the competition along smooth paths by selling well-understood products. Explorers hike rough terrain to discover early customers. It’s important to know the lay of the land when picking your team. Continue reading