After years of struggle, I’m advising all of my clients and product leader coachees to stop using the term “MVP”. Not to stop doing validation, discovery, prototyping or experiments they may associate that that acronym, but to remove the label from all of their docs and presentations and talks. To delete the letters MVP from roadmaps and product charters…
I was thrilled to join Marcus Blankenship for this episode of his podcast. Marcus is a long-time coach and champion of software engineering managers with an emphasis on processes / culture / leadership. We talked at length about the adjacencies and differences between developers and product managers… Topics: Differences in design principles between product and engineering management (1:35) Understanding the conflict between makers and marketers (6:22) How Rich helps marketers/sales develop a more useful frame for engineering (10:01) The “Innovation” Misconception (15:36) The culture gap between sales and development/product teams (21:46) Where does product management fit between sales and development? (26:31) Helping clients make effective organizational change (32:48) Read more here about Marcus’s writing, podcasts and videos.
Before we start crunching business case numbers, we should think about the underlying money story: who it’s for, how it generates money, and what similar money stories we are considering.
A wide-ranging conversation about product leadership, stakeholders, understanding our different audiences.
I’ve been following Nandini Jammi’s truth-affirming work at Sleeping Giants for the last four years, which is suddenly now in the mainstream with support of like-minded social action organizations and a rebellion of Facebook advertisers. She and co-founder Claire Atkin have just launched a for-profit company called Check My Ads…
I don’t think that product managers should lie to customers or prospects. In enterprise selling cycles, though, there is a lot of gray space around what’s true enough. Can we draw some hazy lines?
As product leaders, most of us have spent the first few weeks of the COVID-19 crisis focused on (worried about) our people and teams. But we’re now shifting attention to how this changes priorities and product plans…
Sending an expensive B2B sales team out to discover what we should build isn’t a great strategy. We should do less expensive, unemotional, non-commissioned validation and learning before scaling up our selling effort.
There are no generic or universal KPIs, since every business has unique aspects. So if we want KPIs for a B2B/enterprise company, where would we start? And how do we avoid committing to improvements in metrics/KPIs before understanding our current scores (or situation)?
As product folks, we should be responsible for reasonably anticipating misuses of our products, as well as harm that flows from fundamental product/economic goals. It’s not clear how we step up to this, though.