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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