I’m sometimes pulled into difficult discussions with CEOs, where I’m trying to describe systematic product-side failures that directly conflict with how the CEO sees the world. Even after dozens of similar discussions, I have only moderate success. But it seems worth framing this leadership-level challenge from both sides.| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
(this builds on my June difficult discussions [https://www.mironov.com/difficult/] post) As good product folks, we know that customers must recognize a problem before they consider buying our solution. Companies that don’t have supply chain issues (or think they don’t) are not in the market for| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Every week, I talk with CEOs who tell me they want to speed up innovation. In fact, they want to schedule it. Recently a product leader shared with me an OKR to ship one major innovation each quarter, measured as “users will give each innovative feature a top rating.” This| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I’m part of many discussions where tech company execs try to apply Return on Investment (ROI) tools to make hard choices about what to build, or where to invest costly-and-scarce development resources. It rarely turns out to be as useful as we hoped. Where ROI is absolutely fundamental to| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
As tech product managers, we’re often pitching the need for larger development teams. There’s an implied revenue obligation, though, that we should understand. Here are some back-of-the-envelope numbers — in three steps — for a likely discussion with your CFO or General Manager. [1] R&D as a Portion of| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
This product end-of-life recipe has been hiding on my hard drive for dog’s years, but never got published. It’s the natural companion to my Customer-Side EOL post. When it’s time to retire (aka sunset aka end-of-life aka put a fork in) a commercial product or service, here’| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Our two previous posts noted that your development team will never, ever be big enough to catch up with your dreams (pushing us to The Law of Ruthless Prioritization [http://www.mironov.com/4laws1/]) and that all of the profits are in the nth copy (thus The Law of Build| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Most product companies have a few things in their roadmaps that are specifically for single customers – I call these sales one-offs. But it’s easy for B2B/enterprise companies to fall into a sales-led development model where the majority of work is for individual customers – starving the core product of| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I’ve noticed a frequent executive-level misalignment of expectations across a range of software/tech companies, particularly in B2B/Enterprise companies and where Sales/Marketing is geographically far away from Engineering/Product Management. Let’s call it the software development deli counter problem [https://twitter.com/share?url=https://www.| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
There’s a pattern I sometimes see at software companies, particularly those targeting enterprises or on the long march moving their installed base from on-premise to SaaS. The go-to-market materials present a glowing picture of well-planned products, but underneath there’s a jumble of mismatched pieces and arcane product history| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
(Or How Major Platform Migrations Really Happen) Many companies have replatforming efforts underway. Architectures get old, new kinds of partners or integrations emerge, hard-to-maintain monolithic code gets broken into microservices, acquisitions force integration of dissimilar systems, etc. This is an essential part of the software product business, but fraught with| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Post #1 noted that your development team will never, ever, ever be big enough to catch up with your dreams. – which led to The Law of Ruthless Prioritization. Here’s a second fundamental reality of software economics: All of the profits are in the nth copy or nth user. Building| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
After years of struggle, I’m advising all of my clients and product leader coachees to stop using the term “MVP”. Not to stop doing validation, discovery, prototyping or experiments they may associate that that acronym, but to remove the label from all of their docs and presentations and talks.| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Newton taught us that gravity’s not just a good idea, it’s the law. I’ve spent a lot of the last decade with one foot in the engineering organization and the other with marketing/sales. While the two sides of the business communicate poorly, I think there’s| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I’ve written a lot about the huge organizational and technical gulf between services companies and product companies. (See this and this and this and this.) At a recent workshop in Christchurch NZ, I spent several hours talking with CEOs about the challenges of changing a company from mostly services| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
In my experience, there’s usually a fundamental misalignment between two broad groups at software companies – especially B2B/enterprise companies — that I’ve been thinking/writing for a while. One group (sales, implementation/customer success, professional services, account-based marketing) is trained and paid and rewarded to focus on one customer| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes