
Taking a day off for tourism during my Brainmates/Australia tour, I had a chance to see the power of “free” in a non-tech entrepreneurial setting. Following along the business model literally and figuratively…

Conway’s Law is an old but useful idea: the organizational structure of software teams shows in their code. The technical architecture grows to look like the org chart. In broader terms, how we group people and delineate teams has a real impact on the products we produce. How does this apply to product management teams?

There are thousands of open product management jobs: suddenly product management seems sexy. Optimism and Pessimist argue about whether product management’s value shifts with the fashion.

I was honored to keynote Tolpagorni’s annual Market Insights conference in Stockholm. We talked about Silicon Valley’s strong network effect for tech companies and workshopped early validation of product ideas, waterfall Lean, Innovation Games and ways to get actionable insights ahead of full development commitment.

I was excited give this keynote at Product Camp Seattle on “Good, Better and Best Product Management” and to meet members of our far-flung product tribe in person who I’d only reached digitally.

Oct 23rd talk for “Products That Count”: Very early stage startups don’t have dedicated product managers / product owners. But once they get to 30 people or have a few big-revenue customers, lack of product management can be disastrous. We will talk about symptoms, what product managers/owners really do, and tips for scaling up.

As mentors, we should be demonstrating context, judgment and decision-making models – not just sharing templates. Our mentees should be demanding that we give them the big picture.

I was thrilled to speak at this year’s Product Management Festival in Zürich, Sept 17-18. My short talk included excerpts of recent material on scaling agile product organizations, and the organizers graciously included me in panel discussions on the future of product management and scaling up PM teams

If you’re already a product manager and stepping in to take over an existing product (or parachuting in as a consultant), you need to find your feet quickly. Here’s my checklist for that first week, and the first month.

Rich Mironov joined SV-Forum’s Engineering Leadership SIG on August 21st to talk about tech product management, engineering symptoms that may be tied to product teams, and organizational challenges of building great products.