This year’s Mind The Product San Francisco (#mtpcon) event included a day of focused workshops. I was excited to offer one of these.
What: Product Leadership with Rich Mironov
Where: Mission Bay Conference Center, 1675 Owens Street, SF
When: Tues, May 3rd
Most product management writing and sessions are about managing individual products/services or feature-level lean/design thinking. This workshop was for those managing teams of product managers, designers and engineers. We tailored an agenda plus group exercises based on attendee’s specific issues and concerns, such as:
- What do Directors or VPs of Product do?
- Conway’s Law: different ways to divide up/assign work within your team, and the predictable problems that result
- Portfolio thinking across products and within products
- Internal feedback biases and how we reward sales teams
- Pressures toward one-off custom software
Even if we assume a team of individually great product managers (and developers and designers and marketing/sales/GoToMarket folks), organizations are complex. Getting things done is hard. Bringing product leaders together lets us share experiences, recognize patterns among companies team, and give names to apparently-unique issues