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. Your thoughts and comments are appreciated! You can reach him at RMironov (at) Enthiosys (dot) com.
- 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/...
- avoiding the post-course correction
As early as 1961, Soviet and American space scientists planned for mid-course corrections: those tiny bursts of rocket power designed to keep spacecraft on their trajectories to the Moon, Mars and beyond. With such long voyages, mid-course corrections are crucial to keeping space flights on track with the minimum of effort – and reserving fuel for later adjustments...
- owning the gap
Product managers are usually the people who “own the gap” for their specific products: identifying all of the missing or incomplete features and services and supporting processes that customers need for a successfully experience...
- defensive processes
New ventures begin with an entirely empty slate: no products, no customers, no desks, no organization charts, no established procedures for creating value. Only blank pages and empty office space. This is part of the exhilaration, the chance to do things better and more simply than the last time. Of course, your founding team has lots of experience: ideas about how things get done...
- Girls Getting a Head Start(-Up)
Most founders of VC-backed start-ups tend toward technical degrees, MBAs and forty-something gray hair – with a strong male bias. Here in the heart of Silicon Valley, though, there’s a group of seventh-grade girls who are doing it all: writing business plans, raising venture capital, manufacturing products, and running their own profitable companies...
- sharks, pilot fish, and the product food chain
When you’re launching a new venture, one of your hungry competitor earliest considerations is how your innovation might fit into the existing technical environment: should it replace some dominant species or improve the overall market climate? In ecological terms, is your new company going to produce fish food or fight the largest carnivores for survival...
- Product Management is Inherently Political
Recently, I had lunch with a bright young product manager trying to perfect the process for deciding which features to include in his next product release...
- Risk-Sharing and Customer-Perceived Value
Whenever customers buy your product or service, there’s a leap of faith that they will get value from you. An alternative is to offer your solution in return for some of the savings — and to measure this in the customer’s own business units. Even if you fall back on traditional pricing, it will help the customer assign real value to what you deliver...
- Why are there Serial Entrepreneurs?
From the outside, it might seem that joining a fledgling start-up should only be about economics and the big payoff: the popular business press always has stories of farsighted technologists, instant millionaires, and thirty-somethings coping with Sudden Wealth Syndrome. And there are certainly enough folks in the Valley who have made it that most of us know one...
- sales-friendly price lists
Price lists are never quite current enough, sufficiently detailed, or cover enough of the awkward special situations that customers raise. So, there’s a tendency for HQ product and pricing folks to do a lot of tinkering on the margins with their price lists...