Requirements – 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

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

Business Cases Are Stories About Money

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.

August 17, 2020

Product Management Tips for Data Science Projects

Product managers working with data science teams on production applications have more challenges than with more deterministic (traditional) applications. These include providing more business/user context, not assuming that data will be predictive, and discussing accuracy requirements at the very start of a project.

September 15, 2019

Athens: The Need for Real End User Validation

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.

September 21, 2018

Talking Directly with (Real) Customers

Product managers need to talk — often — with actual end users and buyers. We need to listen, interview, understand and empathize with paying customers. Unmediated by marketing, sales or researchers. What organizational barriers block this essential work, and can we remove some of them?

April 7, 2018

Let’s Abandon Customers and Users

Talking generically about ‘customers’ or ‘users’ can generate lots of confusion, especially in B2B or B2B2C situations. We can be more precise by saying doctors, or shoppers, or data analysts, or whatever we really mean.

August 8, 2017

Podcast: Mastering Business Analysis

In this “Mastering Business Analysis” podcast, Rich shares thoughts on product manager versus product owner; output versus outcome; getting out of our cubes to learn from lots of real users; and building the right thing (not just building things right) to deliver measurable value.

December 13, 2016

The DIY Illusion

It’s easy to believe that broadly available commercial products don’t give us exactly what we want, but that our internal team can quickly whip up precisely the right thing. This ignores some fundamental economics of software commercialization.

July 5, 2016

Four Laws Of Software Economics (Part 4)

There are a lot of inputs to product strategy including advisory boards, customer forums, sales teams and ROI prioritization algorithms. None are sufficient on their own: we have to develop and apply strategic judgment, and test that in the marketplace.

November 13, 2015

Category: Requirements