For a long time, I've been asserting that most* B2B revenue-side executives can't hear anything we say unless it includes a currency symbol. Sentences lacking a $ or € or £ are inaudible. That includes explanations about how we build things: roadmaps full of boxes and project names; agile methodologies; analytics that show| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Thrilled to share a wide-ranging recent conversation with Marc Baselga & Ben Erez on their Supra Insider podcast! We went deep on the evolving role of product leadership in today’s AI-driven landscape: * Why building has never been easier—but judgment, focus, and customer insight matter more than ever * The vanishing| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
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
Strategic product thinking for scrappy companies of all sizes| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
At a recent Product Weekend gathering of CPOs, we talked about product leadership values and what lifts our hearts. That turned into a conversation about what we fight for: broad principles and concrete actions that earn us our place as product leaders. Here was my take: * We fight for the| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I'm still somewhat of a skeptic about "replace our developers and product managers with AI" discussions (see my AI-washing from 2023), but want to take the other side of the argument for a moment. And to start by thinking about bottlenecks (aka system constraints, longest tent poles, or rate-limiting steps)| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
In most of my CPO coaching engagements, we eventually come around to the problem of “politics,” usually framed as frustration with C-level peers doing unexpected or unreasonable or department-centric things. My default response is that we call it “politics” when we’re not good at it, or when it’s| 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
Mark Stiving has been a thought leader on software pricing nearly forever. He generously invited me onto his Impact Pricing podcast for a rollicking discussion about "How to Stop Undervaluing Your Product—And Start Getting Paid What It’s Worth." We talked about how product managers need to (vaguely, roughly)| 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
Murray Robinson & Donna Spencer let me join their No Nonsense Leadership podcast for an extended discussion of corporate organizations, politics, how executives think/behave, servant leadership, and making change by *showing* rather than telling. Part of this was finding the gray space between extremes: e.g. not all companies have| 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
I’ve written a lot about how we (as product folks) love to talk about how our teams build things: releases and sprints and backlog ranking models and product operating systems. (Oh, my!) But many of our colleagues and audiences are deeply uninterested in what happens in the kitchen. Another| 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 funny bit of split thinking that I often run into, and which came up in a recent CPO coaching discussion. It’s when we confuse delivering a new (or re-architected) platform and pushing the very last customer off the old version to free up| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I'm thrilled to join the Productized team for their Lisbon conference on Oct 2-4. And to widen my Portuguese product circle! Agenda includes: Weds, Oct 2nd: Leadership Day with discussions and talks from veteran product leaders Thu, Oct 3rd: Workshop Day with morning and afternoon intensive half-day sessions| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
There’s a pattern that I’ve seen at most B2B/enterprise software companies – and some B2C/mass consumer companies – that doesn’t seem to have a name or much recognition. It’s a (subtle) trade-off between closing major deals now and| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I joined Sheev co-founder Ben Maynard at Lisbon's Productized Conference for a podcast episode about my keynote talk "Finding Joy in What We Do." In a quick ten minutes, we touched on: Embracing the Emotional Rollercoaster, and how accepting the ups and downs of product management| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
I joined an International all-star group of speakers and workshop leaders for Product at Heart in Hamburg on Sept 11-13. Here's my talk called "Business Cases Are Stories about Money" This was a great 3-day event with a half-day product leadership forum, workshops, and : main conference| 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
I’ve coached scores of product leaders over the last few decades, and mentored hundreds of product managers… initial conversations are typically around how to get things done; how to understand and work complex organizations; ways to structure teams and boost collaboration; processes for improving the odds of| 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
Building on a post from last July about Incompatible Worldviews… Almost every Go-to-Market-side enterprise stakeholder I interview tells me that their product team is unresponsive: that folks rarely get anything back after submitting an (urgent, strategic, well-considered) ticket through the company’s agreed-upon enhancement request process. That the occasional response| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Almost every week, I have a conversation with executives at B2B software companies who don’t see a bright-line distinction between software license revenue and customization/implementation revenue. Or why this distinction is essential to their investors. But when I do product due diligence for SaaS-focused PE/VC firms, it's| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
An essential role of CPOs and other product leaders that’s never listed in the job description is giving organizational 'air cover' to product managers to postpone almost all new requests — so that their teams can finish work already underway. Lately, I’m calling this permission to stay focused. Some| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Expanding on a recent post (Revenue Goals are Not Company Strategies), I’ve been seeing lots of maker teams (product, engineering, design) struggling to form product strategies without a company strategy to hang them on. This is a recipe for failure: there are no generic product strategies or corporate strategies,| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
In the heat of an enterprise deal moment, it’s easy to think very short-term about the long-term costs of one-off specials and “small requirements.” There’s tremendous pressure to maximize the importance of a feature tweak to close this quarter’s big deal, and similar pressure to minimize both| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
We’re in the Silly Season: companies of all sizes are doing annual planning — intending to lock down 12 months of iron-clad commitments, non-negotiable delivery dates, major organizational changes, and accurate predictions of revenue. In my experience, this is mostly ineffective if it’s done only once a year — especially| Rich Mironov's Product Bytes
Product and engineering leaders tend to be analytical, and we think of prioritization as an algorithmic problem. Unfortunately, other execs see a different kind of problem...| 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
