product bytes
Since 2002, Rich Mironov has been writing the Product Bytes newsletter on product management, technology, start-ups and getting things done. With his move to Enthiosys, it is again a monthly column. Here you’ll see all of the latest issues along with reposts of selected favorites. some of which have been collected in “The Art of Product Management.”
- Profitably Pairing Software and Professional Services
Wearing our software product management hats, it’s easy to think that all problems should be solved with software. (To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.) Software PMs need to be looking for opportunities to combine professional services with software – because services can be highly profitable, meet customer needs more quickly, and market-test ideas for future products...
- Company-Wide Business Agility and the Soviets
Until recently, most of the discussion around Agile has been strictly limited to software development teams. We focused on building and testing and shipping software more effectively, with PMs/POs managing backlogs and user stories. As software companies mature in their adoption of agile, though, it’s becoming clear that agile uncovers inefficiencies throughout the company...
- Social Animals in Lone Wolf Roles
Part of P-Camp’s excitement was gathering so many product managers together in person – twice last year’s attendees – for sharing and informal networking. Putting physical faces to our online personas. This prompts some thoughts about product managers being socially isolated within their technical organizations...
- Adding Outbound to Cross-Functional Teams
Lately, there’s been lots of discussion about whether Agile is strictly a software development methodology, without major impact on the outbound parts of a software company, or whether it’s driving broad changes in how companies deliver value to their markets...
- Chefs and Agile Restauranteurs
As more of our clients have moved to agile software development, we’ve seen a growing need for business agility: getting non-engineering functions involved earlier and more collaboratively, so that companies deliver better revenue results as well as better software. Let’s make this more concrete by mapping it to the restaurant business...
- How Well Can You Predict The Future?
It’s been a very tough quarter for economic forecasters, quota-carrying sales teams and CEOs. The sudden downturn even caught GE’s legendary planners by surprise. If you’re an executive at a technology company, you may already have started an FY09 planning process to re-examine staffing, product investments and revenue...
- Understanding the Opportunities of Buy-Side Economics
As CEOs of our products, we product managers have a lot to do. Traditionally, this has included “build-versus-buy” decisions. The debate often hinged on whether technical tasks were “core” or just “context”...
- “Art of Product Management” now available on Amazon
Just published, The Art of Product Management: Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator collects Rich Mironov’s most popular Product Bytes columns from 2002-2008 with forewords by Prof Henry Chesbrough and David Strom. You can now order it on Amazon! The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader...
- Why Did You Become a Product Manager?
Most product managers didn’t originally plan on it. (“Mommy, I want to be a product manager when I grow up!”) Since we’re a team that lives and breathes (and writes about and promotes) product management, we’d love to hear your story about how you got here. We’ll look for trends and qualitative results to publish back to the community...
- So When Do I Need a Product Owner?
{this post continues a lively discussion we started with “Revenue products need Product Managers, not Product Owners” and continues with “How Do We Define Product Owners?” Comments and emails are flying furiously on this, so please post a comment below or link back to your own blog...
- How Are We Defining Product Owners?
{My last post “Revenue Products need Product Managers, not Product Owners” generated a lot of comments and emails about the product owner role. In particular, I appreciate some energetic observations from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, which led to this follow-on thought. A third part of the discussion is “When Do I Need a Product Owner...
- Revenue Products need Product Managers, not Product Owners
{This has kicked off a lively discussion and two follow-on posts: So When Do I Need a Product Owner? and How Are We Defining Product Owners? Enjoy! – Rich Mironov} Product Managers are responsible for the overall market success of their products, not just the delivery of software...
- Agile 2008 Attendees Collaborate to Create New Products
On Tuesday and Wednesday (Aug 5-6) at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto, hundreds of attendees joined Enthiosys, the Agile Product Management consulting company, in a real-time collaborative exercise to design a new product. These Agilists collaborated with Enthiosys to define, prioritize, schedule and price a new generation of “Internet Sunglasses”. See a short video on YouTube...
- Disruptive Pricing Units
During a miserable week of domestic air travel during June, I noticed new fees suddenly appearing for checked baggage and in-flight soft drinks. That caused an announcement about a new airline to catch my eye – an airline offering a radically different approach to pricing. It re-raised a topic that we explore with many clients: shifting the basis of competition by changing pricing units...
- Agile Portfolio Planning and Excited CFOs
At Enthiosys, we look at how Agile Product Management changes the broader organization and strategic planning processes – well beyond Engineering. We’re thinking more about how Agile alters one of the most celebrated annual corporate ceremonies: Portfolio Planning and budget allocation...
- Infrastructure Field of Dreams
We work with lots of clients on internal infrastructure and shared architecture projects – both from a product management/requirements and evaluating the software architecture itself...
- The Accidental Agilist
Over the last few months, we’ve repeatedly heard about product managers who come back from customer visits or vacations to discover that their engineering teams have “gone agile” without telling them. After which, the PMs scramble to figure out how their roles and deliverables are different under a new development model...
- Technical Advantage and Competitive Strategy
Products with true technical advantage are rare – and fleeting. Most offerings are lightly differentiated, or not at all. When I hear product folks touting their unbeatable technical superiority, I stop to listen for the footsteps of competitors...
- A Planetary View of Agile Product Management
We at Enthiosys are often asked how the shift to Agile changes product management. We normally see PM at the center of everything, so it’s natural to think about other functional organizations as planets in product-centric orbits – and what happens when we move to Agile. Product management is involved with most internal groups, but not equally and not all at the same time...
- Who’s Calling Customer Support?
At most software companies, incoming calls to Tech Support don’t match up against customer databases. We’ve worked on this with several clients to identify causes and jointly design solutions. It provides a great case study for how product managers should think: segmenting issues and balancing competing interests as the “CEOs of their products...
- burning through Product Managers
Agile software development methods are rapidly being adopted by companies across a wide variety of industries and company sizes because it’s a better way to build software. At several Enthiosys clients, however, we’re seeing product managers (“PMs”) struggle as the product management role becomes more intensely collaborative within an agile development process...
- grocers and chefs: software service models
This is based on an April SVPMA talk. I’m talking with more and more with companies considering a shift from traditional licensing models to hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). It’s important to recognize the radical changes such a move may force within your entire company...
- service revenue and upsell marketing
Much of my consulting lately involves on-demand services (aka software-as-a-service, or “SaaS”). I’m seeing ever-growing interest from business customers in subscription pricing and online services, especially since they pay much less “up front” versus software licensing...
- Burning Your Boats
I spent 2006 consulting to small tech companies, including seven months as an interim executive. I also nearly co-founded a start-up. Come year-end, though, I find that I haven’t created a new company or joined a fledgling venture. This brings to mind discussions of commitment and “burning your boats...
- Crowding Out Tech Support
{This column was co-written with Marcia Kadanoff, customer marketing expert at Firewhite}. This week, there’s been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere and popular press about ”crowdsourcing” — empowering crowds of amateurs to do tasks previously filled by professionals. (See Jeff Howe’s Wired story and blog at http://crowdsourcing.com/...