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Product Management Essentials For Project Managers
Rich Mironov18 October 2016
PMI / Project Management.com
• Veteran product manager/software exec• “What do customers want (to pay for)?”• Organizing agile/lean product organizations• Smokejumper VP Products
• 6 startups, including as CEO/founder• “The Art of Product Management”
About Rich Mironov
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Disjoint Communities
ProductManagers
Project and Development Managers
Not enough overlap or shared thinking
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• What does a product manager do?• Product vs. Project/Program Management• Agile product managers and product owners• Takeaways
Agenda
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• Commercial software companies• Responsible for technical delivery AND revenue results
• Scaled-up IT organizations• At product / portfolio / strategy levels
• Usually a formal position
Our focus is on jobs-to-be-done and skills, not titles
Where Do We Find Product Managers?
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• For commercial / revenue software…• Drives delivery and market acceptance of whole products• Targets market segments, not individual customers
• For strategic internal development…• Drives funding, acceptance and adoption• Resolves inevitable competing priorities
What Does a Product Manager Do?
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market information, priorities,requirements, roadmaps, epics,
user stories, backlogs, personas, MRDs…
product bits
strategy, forecasts, commitments, roadmaps, competitive intelligence
budgets, staff,targets
Field input,Market feedback
Segmentation, messages, benefits/features, pricing,
qualification, demos…
Markets & CustomersDevelopment
Marketing& Sales
Executives
ProductManagement
What Does a Product Manager Do?
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• Engineering demand always >> supply• Exclusive-OR trade-offs, but AND demands• Facts are not sufficient
• Sales teams paid to close individual deals
• HIPPO
• Influence from market/customer knowledge
Product Management: Inherently Political
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Good product managers drive customer-relevant
decisions (choices) despiteuncertainty, resource shortages
and contradictory goals
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• Pulls into product station every day• From customers, sales, support, execs, engineers…
• Delivers hundreds of “good ideas” each day• Few are new or earthshaking
Good Idea Train
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There’s nothing more wasteful than brilliantly engineering a product that doesn’t sell, or a project that doesn’t matter.
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• What does a product manager do?• Product vs. Project / Program Management• Agile product managers and product owners• Takeaways
Agenda
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Disclaimers• No role/title consistency• Unclear division of labor• Execs create novel organizations• Every company is
uniquely dysfunctional• Good teams make things work
in spite of titles and roles
Product, Project, Program?
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• Project/Program Managers tasked with how to deliver• Not-so-secretly worry about
market success
• Product Managers tasked with what to build/buy (and sequence)• Not-so-secretly worry about delivery,
quality, completeness
One Problem, Two Viewpoints
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• Product: more outward-facing market-visible decisions• What BENEFITS/FEATURES are market segments demanding?• How are we POSITIONED and PRICED versus competitors? • WHICH must-ship feature will we DROP first? • SALES impact of slipped dates? Commitments?
• Project: more inward-facing resource allocation decisions• HOW should we get this done? WHO works on what?• WHEN will it actually ship?• Have we defined and met QUALITY goals?• What outside RESOURCES could speed things up?
In a Perfect Organization…
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Product managers sense the market by…• Helping close deals• Stacks of non-sales-cycle discussions
with customers/prospects• Sweating price/volume forecasts • Identifying novel (or terrible) user cases• Walking a mile in customer’s shoes
Living The Customer’s Reality
Source:PragmaticMarketing
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• What does a product manager do?• Product vs. Project / Program Management• Agile product managers and product owners• Takeaways
Agenda
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Product Managers, Product Owners
ProductBacklogEpics&UserStories
ReleaseBacklogEpics&UserStories
SprintBacklogUserStories
Potentiallyreleasablesoftware
Softwarerelease
Acceptedstory(“DONE”)
ReviewDemo,feedback
RetrospectiveProcessimprovement
1day
DailyStandup
Sprint:1to3weeksNochangesindurationorgoal
Releaseplanning
Sprintplanning
Charter ReleaseRetrospectiveProcessimprovement
Nsprints
productmanagerfocus
productownerfocus
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market information, priorities, epics, user stories,
backlogs, personas…
product bits
Markets & CustomersDevelopment
Marketing& Sales
Executives
ProductManagement
‘Small p’ Product Owner
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Commercial Product Failures
ProductBacklogEpics&UserStories
ReleaseBacklogEpics&UserStories
SprintBacklogUserStories
Potentiallyreleasablesoftware
Softwarerelease
Acceptedstory(“DONE”)
ReviewDemo,feedback
RetrospectiveProcessimprovement
1day
DailyStandup
Sprint:1to3weeksNochangesindurationorgoal
Releaseplanning
Sprintplanning
Charter ReleaseRetrospectiveProcessimprovement
Nsprints
Mostproductfailureshappenhere
Typical Commercial Software Company’s Development Budget
Featuresforcurrentrelease
50%
Quality(refactor,testautomation)
15%
Engineeringoverhead,10%
Bigfuturebet,5%
Salesone-offs,non-roadmap
20%
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• Hard to rank-order unlike items• Where does this bug go versus minor features?• A one-off customization versus more DevOps work?
• Instead, group similar requests• Which two features will we put into v6.5?• P0, P1, P2, P3…• We can fund one audacious, long-term program:
teleportation or synthetic petroleum
Prioritizing Within Buckets
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Product Failure Modes
Product Manager fails agile team if• Part-time, disengaged• Stale backlog, skimpy stories• Pulled in too many directions• Not buffering team interrupts• “Build what I meant”
Product Owner fails marketplace if• Weak on market realities• Disconnected from Marketing,
Sales, Support, executives• Wander from product strategy• Confuse showcase customers
with broader market
1. Product management struggles with market success, product sufficiency and inconsistent customer segments
2. Project management struggles with resources, timelines and unreasonable commitments
3. Simplistic product owner role often fails to address market complexities
4. We need to work together to ship great products!
Takeaways
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CONTACT Mironov Consulting233 Franklin St, Suite #308San Francisco, CA 94102
RichMironov
@RichMironov
Rich@Mironov.com
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