Occasionally building something unique and small for a single customer makes sense. But enterprise software companies can easily fall into the habit of including custom work in too many of their major deals… with disastrous results. This (long) post lays out root issues and possible solutions.
Eric Boduch hosts Pendo’s Product Love podcast. In this episode, we discussed enterprise vs consumer; roadmaps; organizations; chasing competitor features; DevOps; the need for product leaders to “merchandize” what product folks do; and being students of human behavior.
Rich Mironov joins Business of Software Conference in Boston on Oct 1-3 for “What To Do About Your Audience’s Real Roadmap Questions.” Other speakers include Jared Spool, Tania Katan, Peldi Guilizzoni, Claire Suellentrop, David Cancel and Bruce McCarthy.
Rich will give a talk on “Product Managers, Product Owners, and the need for Real End User Validation” at Agile Summit Greece, 21 Sept 2018.
Callaghan Innovation’s conference on “Scaling Your SaaS Business Faster” is for NZ business/technical leaders, especially software entrepreneurs. Rich Mironov’s keynote is on product/market fit and product management, followed by workshops on early validation techniques.
Product leaders need to push their teams toward regular direct user/customer feedback, unmediated by sales or marketing or support. I’m suggesting one live user interview per week. But how can we find time for that, and make it important enough to compete with other urgent work?
Product Plan is hosting a webinar on successfully managing rapid product growth. Panelists are Daniel Elizalde, Rich Mironov, and Jim Semick. Attendees can submit questions in advance for on-air responses.
Many infrastructure development teams don’t have a product manager. That forces an architect or senior developer to manage a range of responsibilities they are not best equipped to handle: settling conflicting business priorities; internally “selling” the value of architecture; tying technical decisions to business metrics; making connections between software and end user joy.
Daniel Elizalde’s IoT podcast covers product leadership, tools, and strategy. I joined this episode to map my 4 Laws of Software Economics to IoT and mixed software/hardware. We also talked about listening directly to customers/ users/ prospects and distinguishing segments from individual accounts.
Visual notes from Rich’s keynotes at Pitney Bowes Product Management Summit. Talks were on “Common SAAS Pitfalls, and How to Avoid Them” and “Building Better Business Cases.”