Interview with Rich Mironov, Founder, Mironov Consulting

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Rich Mironov is a serial entrepreneur, including as founder/CEO, VP Product Management and VP Marketing, as well as go-to-market strategist and agile “product guy”. Rich is a veteran of six tech start-ups and dozens of consulting engagements. Since 2006, he’s provided full-time and interim consulting/mentoring to large and small technology companies.

This interview series provides one-on-one mentorship sessions with top executives in the Product world. You’ll learn how they got to be where they are today, important lessons from their career, what they look for in a Product Manager, and more.

#1 Rich, thank you so much for taking the time. Please tell me about yourself.

I’ve been at Silicon Valley tech companies since the early ‘80s, initially as a software developer and pausing briefly for an MBA. I got my first product management role (Tandem) with no training or mentor or map or clue. Jumped into the cold PM water and didn’t drown. Moved up as Dir/VP/CEO through 6 startups: iPass, AirMagnet, Enthiosys and 3 “character-building experiences.”

Along the way, I ran the first Product Camp and co-chaired the first product manager/owner tracks at the annual Agile conference.

#2 Tell me about Mironov Consulting and about your role in the company.

I’m a solo consultant, so the staff meetings are very short. I split my time between large software companies that need executive-level product help (interim VP Product Management, big agile transformations, departmental assessments and repairs) and giving start-ups their first product training wheels (target markets, pricing, agile basics, coaching their first full-time product manager).

I’m honored to do occasional teaching (Ireland’s Dublin Institute of Technology) and lots of industry/MBA talks. Any chance to wave the flag and promote product management as a discipline. Plus a fair amount of pay-it-forward mentoring and PM career counseling.

#3 In your experience, what are the biggest Product Management challenges that Tech companies face today? How do these challenges differ based on the size or maturity of the company?

At so many big companies, I see product management left out of the strategy and customer discovery loops: relegated to transactional activities (requirements, pricing, beta, launch, deal support) but not driving the core decisions about why any product make sense – why customers/segments want it, why the company can profitably sell it, and whether Engineering can build it.

I see many huge efforts underway because “the executive team decided this was a good idea, so product management has to drive delivery.” These sometimes end up in disaster because no one did the hard work of actually validating market fit/customer need BEFORE spinning up a big engineering effort. Some executives don’t understand product management, don’t delegate meaningful decisions, and product managers don’t know how to prove their strategic value.

The best small companies understand that product success is a live-or-die effort. So they are willing to make changes and listen more closely to customers.

I’m often with very small startups (12-35 people) who have outgrown very informal processes and need their first full-time product person. With 6 or 8 people at a company, everyone hears the same phone calls and information sharing is effortless. At 15 or 20 people, though, they’ve created a “VP of Engineering” role and moved the development team into its own corner; started engaging with dozens of customers; made assorted promised to investors and prospects; have fifty #1 priorities; etc. Suddenly, someone has to be the official keeper of product commitments and manager of trade-offs.

Committees and executive staff meetings can’t do what a full-time product manager (regardless of actual title) has to do. So IMHO the biggest challenge of a growing startup is to add “just enough product process” to stay alive.

#4 What are the top skills you look for in Product Managers?

I’m very vocal that we only learn product management by doing it. So I’m always looking for someone who’s done it once (or twice or thrice) and can generalize about what she’s learned. A copy of “Lean Startup” or a certificate or good coding experience doesn’t make you a product manager. Also, since this is a very odd position – with no authority but plenty of responsibility – a lot of folks discover that they don’t really like it.

Top skills/characteristics of great product folks:

Able to work with/communicate with a wide range of personality types and styles. Your 10 AM meeting may be with test automation engineers, your 11 AM with disgruntled customers, and your Noon lunch with your company’s enterprise sales reps. You MUST be able to smoothly switch context, tone, level of detail and timeframe without sweating.
Passionate about the product. You have to come in every day and do battle on behalf of your product and your customers. Passion drives enthusiasm, deep affection for your customer segment, and willingness to disregard organizational niceties sometimes.
Smart problem-solver on a wide range of topics. You need to know enough, and be creative enough, to help Support unwind some wonky product licensing issue and then dive into FY2015 financial projections. And then mollify a sulking software architect. And then kick around strategic messaging. Think on your feet, be undogmatic, figure it out.
Technical enough to minimally satisfy the development team. Even though you may be on a less-techy product, developers will cut you dead if you can’t relate to them on a technical level.
And I’m completely turned off by interviewees who talk trash about their previous companies. Not someone I want on my team. I’d rather hear about lessons learned and a savvy organizational analysis about why good folks did wrong things.

#5 What are the key trends that Product Managers need to be aware of? And where do you see the Product Management profession in 10 years?

I love what I’m seeing in the Lean movement, which reminds me of the early Agile days. Applying better analytical tools, faster validation and finding the real value in the customer value chain. Product managers can be more data-driven than a decade ago.

There’s a de-skilling flavor to this, though. Underneath some of the build-measure-learn material is an unspoken assumption that process replaces experience. That anyone who follows a good process will build a successful product. That product stuff isn’t so hard for smart folks. That enterprise sales strategies can be A/B tested just like website changes. I think we need to make the case that product managers bring real skills, real experience and real market insights to multi-disciplinary problems.

If (for instance) you’ve worked on a few two-sided market offerings, you may have special insight and experience for a team that is building such a thing. (And who may not know what a two-sided market is.) We need to use the best methodologies AND bring our broad market/business/customer perspective to the party.

#6 How can a Product Manager, new to a particular industry, gain domain knowledge?

I’d emphasize activities/research that are far outside the engineering cycle, in order to balance a natural bias that code = product. (Nope, code is only one small part of successful products.) You might:

Find out how your product is sold (direct sales, website, channel partners) and talk with the folks whose commission depends on closing individual sales. What do they know/care about the product, and what are their concerns?
Look at the home pages of 3-4 major competitors (not the detailed feature/function pages!) and figure out how they position their companies and products. What are their top-line messages?
Think about your product’s target segment. Large corporate finance departments? Single location full service restaurants? Gen-X mobile app users? You’ll need to weigh incoming requests/demands based on whether they matter to YOUR audience, since everyone on the planet believes they are being helpful by sharing unscrubbed self-survey-of-one opinions.
Find a half-dozen folks in your segment, buy each lunch, and ask lots of “how” and “why” questions about what they do.
Compare pricing (first) and feature lists (second). Is it trivial for a non-engineer to understand the pricing model? Can a non-engineer pick the right size/version/edition in under 90 seconds? As engineers, we imagine that customers are “like” us, will understand and appreciate every row of the product matrix, have infinite time to compute costs, and care about specs. (Mostly not, not, not and not).

IMHO, your first big challenge is to start thinking like a typical customer (sometimes) and a member of your sales/marketing team (sometimes) to balance your deep internal product/technical knowledge. We know that the “best” products based solely on objective feature criteria don’t necessarily win. “

#7 If you were to write a new edition of your very popular book: The Art of Product Management, Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator, what new lessons would you add?

My last book was early in the evaluation of Agile, and ahead of Lean. It also didn’t address the unique challenges of really big organizations.

#8 What do you think are some additional must-reads (books, blogs, etc) for every Product Manager?

I’m finding more fresh ideas in blogs than books lately:

Teresa Torres
Tristen Kromer
Steve Johnson
Ellen Chisa
Jeff Lash - (also, read his Product Mentorship Series interview)
Shardul Mehta
Bruce McCarthy
Janna Bastow
Roman Pichler
Brian de Haaff
Kristin Runyan
… and of course I deeply miss CrankyPM.

#9 If a Product Manager walked up to you asking for your advice and you only had a few minutes to give ‘em your best tip, what would it be?

Don’t let your stack of deliverables (stories, price lists, competitive matrices, emails to sales reps, web product copy) distract you from your product’s essence: what (specific) problem does it solve, and why should customers pay to solve it?

We can spend all day pushing random bits of paperwork, but it has to be coherent to make any difference.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your network or leave a comment below with your thoughts. And don’t forget to explore other interviews in the Series.

Don’t miss the next mentorship session featuring Greg Westrick, VP of Enterprise Sales at Volusion.