Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Strategic product thinking for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Product management work is much easier when the product team is well-respected: when stakeholders believe that we’re smart and hard-working and good at product stuff. So an under-appreciated skill of product leaders is merchandizing good product work and good outcomes from our teams.
What does that look like?
While development (or maker) teams don’t formally report to product management, there are things we can do to get more value out of the team. And some things that we can’t or shouldn’t…
Software is intangible: it doesn’t have weight or size or per-unit manufacturing costs. But if we’re in the software business, we have to assign units and prices that reflect our value to customers. And we should be mapping out pricing strategy before we start development, not the day before product launch.
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.
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.
For those who missed this year’s Agile Alliance conference in Atlanta (July 25-29), Rich gave talks on “Intro to Agile Product Innovation” and “Intro to Agile Product Management.” Both were for general agile audiences, geared to those working on (or coaching) agile development teams, and emphasizing the revenue-generating market side of the software business. LeanUX / Lean Startup practitioners will recognize many of the themes.
How do we understand value from the customer’s point of view, not just the vendor? How do we choose pricing units, what portion of value can we capture, and why do we have to do the math/thinking in advance for customers?
