It’s easy for CEOs to think that they personally are the best-informed people within their companies about what customers need and what markets want. In reality, product and design teams have the time, focus, expertise, and large numbers of non-selling interviews to do more objective validation of product ideas.
My year-end survey of 120 product leaders about their top issues: building the right thing, portfolio trade-offs, training/mentoring, capturing authority, and others – including getting products built and to market.
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.
For Product Tank Auckland, we’ll replace traditional front-of-room presentations theory with live exercises and group experiences borrowed from Rich private product management workshops. Some fun and (we hope) fresh insights.
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?
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.”
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.
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).
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.