Rich will join the SCU/Leavey faculty on Sept 9th as part of their new Certificate in Productizing Innovation program. He will cover core product management and tech innovation topics.
How does enterprise product management differ from mass-market consumer product management? We’ll look at organizations, politics and experiments… and why “experiments” mean very different things in B2C and enterprise/B2B.
Rich Mironov keynoted the ISPMA’s Software Product Summit in Frankfurt, with a talk on “Product Leadership Success: Lessons from Silicon Valley.” Themes were the continuing dominance of software; critical need for product managers to do real market validation; and a focus on paying customers (rather than internal stakeholders).
Product Tank Dublin hosted Rich Mironov’s talk on internal stakeholders, their competing goals, and what they look for in your roadmaps.
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?
Product Management Auckland hosted this take on internal stakeholders, their competing goals, and what they really look for in a product roadmap. Slides included.
I joined Shane Hastie’s InfoQ podcast for a high-speed talk about building the right things; how engineering teams worldwide are similar; and the importance of bringing development teams into close contact with real customers.
Your different audiences have different (often opposing) goals and incentives, which means they probably want different product decisions and therefore different roadmaps. You need to understand and anticipate their agendas.
What are the questions that various groups really want to ask, and how does that shape our roadmap conversations?
Enterprise (B2B) sales teams deal with the world one account at a time; product managers deal with whole customer segments. This naturally creates some friction, which good companies anticipate and manage.
There are some fundamental laws of tech product economics (especially software) that should drive executive-level decisions about business and product strategies. It’s easy to forget them, or decide they don’t apply to our special situation. We’ll unpack a few while we share some war stories.