Five years after the first PCamp, it’s thrilling to see Product Camps become a global phenomenon. Over the next few months, we’ll see events in Austin, Vancouver, St. Louis, Washington and Boston. Last year’s far-flung camps included London, Amsterdam, Bangalore and Melbourne. The world’s biggest Product Camp, of course, is here in Silicon Valley on March 24th. A sell-out crowd of 600+ is assured.
My last two posts were about getting into product management and the climb to Director. This third post asks how Vice Presidents of Product Management (VP PMs) are different from Directors, why they are so rare, and where else Directors can look for organizational advancement.
Product groups vary widely and are not rationally designed. (Sorry.) So let’s imagine a pure VP PM position generalized from my own tours of duty plus a half-dozen interim/acting VP PM roles. Your organizational mileage may vary. Continue reading
I had a chance to spend a week with some of Dublin’s software thought leaders, including two days teaching in a Postgraduate Diploma Program in Product Management offered by the Dublin Institute of Technology and Software Skillnet. In addition, the Irish Software Association generously hosted a workshop and lecture, where we talked about technology management, agile, and building commercially successful products. Continue reading
In the second of three posts about the product management hierarchy, we’ll focus on technology product managers (PMs) who’ve been in their jobs long enough to consider what comes next. (User story: “As a Senior Product Manager, I want to be promoted to Director so that I get more money and respect and glory.”)
Let’s break this problem into a few parts: likely candidates for promotion; how the Director job differs from line Product Management; and ways to show that you’re ready for a bigger role. Continue reading
Looking over dozens of discussions, presentations and Quora threads from the last few months, a frequent question has been “How do I get a job in technical product management?” Here is the first of three posts split along job levels:
John Peltier is a seasoned product manager out of Atlanta, and does a periodic 
webcast with guest product folks posted on his Product Owner Vision blog. He generously included me in an interview posted on12 December. We recorded a half hour discussion covering:
Listen to the entire session here.
IEEE Technology Management Council hosted a talk by Rich Mironov, primarily for program and project managers as an introduction to product management.
“ProDUCT management is a murky role: poorly understood and inconsistently practiced across tech companies. It’s often confused with proGRAM management and proJECT management. Yet done well, product management is often a driver of 
market success and effective development.” This session helped define the basics of product management, contrasted them with project/program management, and identified ways for all of us to work more effectively together. An interesting, very energetic discussion followed, bridging various organizational gaps.
Continue reading
Prof. Kumar Sarangee of Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business invited Rich Mironov for a guest lecture on Product Market Planning and Strategy class. This talk included a quick overview of what product managers are (what they do), how this fits into the overall business of creating technology, and how to think about pricing software and roadmapping. Continue reading
As a break from stealth start-up work, I led a discussion for SDForum’s Engineering Leadership SIG on “How Engineering Can Work Better with Product Management.” This was a VERY spirited discussion…
We gathered some (good and bad) experiences from attendees about their interactions with product management, tried to define what the PM role is, and shared some thoughts on how to cooperate better for great products and organizations. Lots of questions about how to get into product management, and why people would stay in such a role! Continue reading
This year’s Silicon Valley Product Camp (the fourth!) drew the largest crowd ever of product managers and product marketers to share, network, learn and have fun! Estimated at almost 600 and hosted at eBay’s Paypal/San Jose location, it pulled attendees from around the continent for nearly 40 sessions. It also included a job fair with a dozen local companies. I was honored to be emcee and event coordinator emeritus, having passed PCamp management to new leadership.
I ran a session on Understanding the Next Job Up and Getting Promoted…
