Podcast… “The Rich Mironov Hypothesis: Great Product Leadership is Both Subtle and Slow to Pay Off”

H2R Product Science‘s Holly Hester-Reilly produces a Product Science Podcast which covers a range of topics around product experiments, teams and scalable organizations. She invited me to join for this episode called The Rich Mironov Hypothesis: Great Product Leadership is Both Subtle and Slow to Pay Off .  Give it a listen.

Topics we touched:

• What makes for a good product manager, and why are good developers, tech support folks, and salespeople not necessarily a good fit?
• What makes the difference when product is done well, and do most CEOs know the difference?
• How is medical and veterinary software a good example of bad software and systems design and what can we learn from them?

A few quotable bits:

• “I see a tremendous number of companies around the world that leaned into some other department, grabbed the name tag that said ‘product manager’, tapped somebody on the shoulder and sent them into battle to fail and quit.”
• “The really good product work is both subtle and slow to pay off. Almost everybody starts with the assumption that our problem isn’t a product problem, our problem is an engineering problem.  It’s not a throughput problem, it’s a strategy and validation and priority problem, where most of what we are building is useless or worthless or getting in the way or not helping.”
• “My strongest recommendation is to slice products horizontally. I want to have a real end-to-end product manager who is responsible both for adoption and use and successful outcomes on one end, and working with one or at most two development teams at the other end, two if they’re very senior and experienced.”
• “Almost all product leaders have all the same issues around organizations and leadership and authority and proving the value of doing real product work. So, try not to eat yourself alive, or stay awake all night wondering why you’re not good enough.”