A live Twitter chat on DevOps and Product Management, including why DevOps should matter to product managers, and how product managers can support DevOps as part of a healthy engineering organization.
Individual product managers are focused on their individual products/services, but product leaders need to think about their organizational context: how do we get things done? What motivates each functional group and how do we align incentives? Can we get out ahead of inevitable resource conflicts?
Motivating development teams can be tricky: we can’t make developers work harder, we can only make them *want* to work harder. How do we set context, add meaning and connect teams to real users?
Rich Mironov joined SV-Forum’s Engineering Leadership SIG on August 21st to talk about tech product management, engineering symptoms that may be tied to product teams, and organizational challenges of building great products.
I spent some time this week with an executive who’s taking on a VP Products (VPP) role for the first time. We talked bout the unique challenges for a VPP, such as politely downplaying the hundred merit-worthy ideas arrive each day. He then asked what mistakes he should avoid on first arrival at his new company.
I’ve been tuning an analogy about painters for the last few months, which has become my litmus test for which companies see software strategically – and the kind of talent they attract. First the analogy, in three parts: If you want someone to paint your house, you get a few quotes from house painters. Bids focus on size of house, cost of paint, prep time and ladder time. Good references help, but your decision is mostly about price and availability. If you want someone to paint a portrait of your loving spouse, however, you might prefer a modern-day Renoir to a Cassius Coolidge, even at substantially higher cost and less convenient scheduling. The quality of the work product really matters,…
As a break from stealth start-up work, I led a discussion for SDForum’s Engineering Leadership SIG on “How Engineering Can Work Better with Product Management.” This was a VERY spirited discussion… We gathered some (good and bad) experiences from attendees about their interactions with product management, tried to define what the PM role is, and shared some thoughts on how to cooperate better for great products and organizations. Lots of questions about how to get into product management, and why people would stay in such a role!
Prof. Kumar Sarangee of Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business invited Rich Mironov to be a guest lecturer for his Product Market Planning and Strategy class. SCU’s Evening MBA program attracts some of the brightest students from the Valley, with a tradition of providing leadership back to technology companies.
Rich Mironov gave a talk at SDForum’s Marketing SIG on where/how to build strategy in (young) tech companies. What: Where Does (Should) Strategy Live in Your Company? Where: Marketing SIG @ DLA Piper, 2000 University Ave, Palo Alto When: April 12, 6:30pm – 9:00pm PDF of the slides Where does/should strategy live in your company? Technology companies tend to break strategy into functional pieces: the CTO is responsible for a technology strategy, Marketing has a lead generation strategy and a customer/segmentation strategy, product managers each have a product strategy, Sales drives a channel/partner strategy. Often there’s a disconnect between these groups and their various strategies. This is even more frequent among software companies deploying agile development practices, since Engineering often…
Rich Mironov presented a talk on “The Agile Product Manager/Product Owner Dilemma” at PMEC in San Jose. This generated some lively discussion about how Product Management is different in agile organizations (especially Scrum teams) and the challenges of Product Owners who lack Product Management support or experience. What: “The Agile Product Manager/Product Owner Dilemma” Part of: PMEC 2009, AIPMM’s Product Management Education Conference When: Tues, Nov 17th at 11:00 AM as part of a two-day event Where: The Fairmont San Jose, 170 South Market Street, San Jose, CA, www.aipmm.com Rich has championed discussions within the Agile community about the need for product strategy and business-level planning – and how it needs to wrap around the software development process. He is…