Market Thinking – Rich Mironov's Product Bytes

Product Management Helps Us Build the RIGHT Things

Product Management Helps Us Build the RIGHT Things:
Strong product managers spent up to half of their time talking directly with customers, buyers, and partners. And the other half of their time with their teams: framing problems, collaborating on solutions, translating features into benefits and vice versa. Making sure that we’re building the RIGHT things as validated directly by users and buyers so that we deliver customer-defined value as well as increased velocity. That’s different from the narrow scrum definition of product owner, which is mostly internal-facing.

September 15, 2021

Selling Problems (and Then Solutions) Instead of Philosophy

We know that external customers must recognize a problem before they consider buying our solution. But I often see product managers / product leaders forget this when dealing with internal stakeholders and executives. We push for product-side practices and processes without clearly framing the underlying problems. I think of this as ‘selling philosophy.’

September 8, 2021

Podcast: What Do You Do With a HiPPO?

Rachel Obstler, VP Product at Heap, invited me in for a two-part conversation on her Product Therapy podcast. This is the second portion, where we talked about: Can we schedule innovation? No, but start with hypotheses… Insights are in the heads of our users: we have to discover things that they don’t already know What

August 24, 2021

Podcast: Building and Managing a World Class Product Management Discipline

Steve Divitkos’ In The Trenches podcast series is for entrepreneurs and CEOs running small/medium-sized businesses. I joined him for an episode about the importance of product management at the executive level.

August 19, 2021

Podcast: Why Finding Insights is So Painful

Rachel Obstler, VP Product at Heap, invited me in for a two-part conversation on her Product Therapy podcast. This is the first portion about why finding insights is so painful – and what you can do about it. We had a free-wheeling chat about common analytics pain points for product teams and how digital experience

August 10, 2021

How Weak Analogies About Software Can Lead Us Astray

Company leaders who aren’t steeped in how software is designed and built can apply less-than-useful analogies for how software products are built. These analogies tend to highlight predictability, scheduling and cost management… but may not be that useful. This post unpacks a few of them.

July 31, 2021