This is probably my last post of this decade so wanted to share with you 5 Technology Favorites from this decade that significantly influenced our lives (mine atleast) in a good way.

product - anything that can be offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need.
mantra (Devanāgarī मन्त्र) - defined as a sound, syllable, word, or group of words that are considered capable of creating transformation
This is probably my last post of this decade so wanted to share with you 5 Technology Favorites from this decade that significantly influenced our lives (mine atleast) in a good way.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
2:23 PM
Just posted on my other blog CRM 2.0. Couldnt decide whether the topic was more 2.0 or product related so cross posting here as well.
I truly believe that LN is one of the most capital rich networks. In the sense that a network connection on LN is probably worth much more than connections on other networks. Maybe FB is the only other one.
One of the issues I've had with LinkedIn since its inception is its lack of ability to make a user comeback everyday and check on things. While I do swing by there every few days, ... Click here for entire post
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
3:23 PM
Had an interesting discussion yesterday about "Value" and what is high vs low value and interestingly in that discussion we settled on the term lesser value.
I'm sure other PM's get into these discussions as well and often times the closing lines for those discussions if they are external customer focused are something like " ... value is all about perception, so if the customer thinks its valuable they'll pay for it ..." or if the conversation was more internal focused then something like " .. that's obviously more valuable to us because its core ..." This prompted me into writing a post about how PM's can define value.
First lets talk about the value your product or service will deliver to customers;
The very first version of defining value (usually from a sellers perspective) is associating it with all the benefits that a product or service would provide. So for example lets list all the benefits that our product offers and then convey that as the value we provide. Looks great on datasheets and in marketing glossies.
However the moment a purchaser or buyer enters it would look like a one-way street. Cause the buyer is obviously going to pay for this product or service. So it leads to the second version of value where its the differential that you would get once you've paid the cost for getting all the benefits from a product or service. Now to create the third version of it lets invite the tangibles and intangibles. They play on both sides of the equation (Benefit and Cost), however the more tangible benefits you have in there the better the value can be conveyed. On the cost side though they play out as direct costs and indirect costs or something that's not apparent upfront but will accrue over a period of time and could include the opportunity cost as well. Some would view it as the total cost of obtaining those benefits over the life of the product or service.
So in summary I would say that the PM's should look at product value as benefits being provided at a low cost. Now its still not a slam dunk as purchasers will not always go with the lowest cost option and neither the lowest price option. They will usually go with benefits that match well do your benefits match with the needs and wants. Now is it within their budget and can they afford it is a completely different discussion.
There are many ways shareholder value can be increased. Top-line revenue growth, Bottom-line cost savings by operating better, better utilizing all your available assets I'm sure an accountant can come up with more. But from a PM's perspective I think these three are key. Each area has its own levers that need to be evaluated to identify what value a product brings to ultimately increase shareholder value.So in a long winded way I'd say that value can be identified to a large extent and PM's should use value models in making product decisions. Ultimately the two values discussed above are intertwined (some might say even the same) and as PM's one should look at how your product can provide value to customers and in turn increase shareholder value.
Top-line growth can obviously be increased through new customer growth, retaining existing customers and increasing wallet share, upselling and cross-selling. Driving product innovation and further investing in existing capabilities helps drive this.
Bottom-line can be improved by ensuring that there are streamlined, integrated processes in delivering the product, cost of selling to and servicing the customers is low. As PM's how can you do that? Look at rationalizing your product portfolio, better product quality, reusable and scalable designs, lower cost of development and most important focus on the right customer segments. Dont lose sight of this as in the larger scheme of things the CFO is looking at this and so should you.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
10:41 AM
"Why dont we consolidate all our resources and focus on one thing?"
is one of the questions that keeps coming up often in determining product priorities and resource allocations. Unless you're a startup in an early phase of product development or you're a company in dire straits and looking at one last "Hail Mary" the approach is often going to lead to disaster rather than focus.
Dont get me wrong all approaches work, its just a question of context. Applying the consolidate and focus on only one product area at a time approach in diversified or mature companies will lead to satisfaction issues and churn. Product Managers should look at their products (and others) as a portfolio and assess it like one.
Here are my Top 5 tips for making product portfolio planning happen the right way.
1. Ensure business strategy alignment - Request that the business vision and strategy be conveyed clearly. Dont be afraid to ask questions. Remember that each PM or company resource interprets vision and strategy in their own way so alignment and constant alignment is the key to successful product portfolio planning. Also business strategy should not be created in vacuum and should be supplemented with backup data or assertions. Its critical to provide execs with this data for your product lines on a regular basis to ensure right decisions are enabled.
2. Get executive buyin/sponsorship - Suffice to say that your product portfolio planning will not go very far if its not bought into by execs.
3. Take a medium to long term view - Always take the medium to long term view of things. This means that look at growth opportunities even when the team is in the foxhole trying to battle a flurry of tactical issues.
4. Always have enough bandwidth to nurture wishlists/lateral ideas - Some of the best products, enhancements, customer issue resolutions have come from lateral ideas. Always nurture them and figure out a path for executing on them. Trust me, the product team will find you the time and bandwidth if they feel the idea is right. Now this often seems contradictory to create a priority list of backlog stories and keep knocking off the highest priority ones that keep bubbling to the top of the list. We'll I've seen that in reality you can do that with the lateral (20%) ideas.
5. Drive your product strategy in person and with passion - Never rely on someone else to drive your product strategy. Nothing works better than passion for a product or enhancement so ensure that you're personally represnt the product/feature in the planning meetings. Good management recognizes this and provides individual PM's the platform to present this.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:07 AM
Recently there was a really great post by Marty Cagan on the SVPG site about The Product Scorecard.
While there are a number of posts that gloss through this topic ... this post really gets into the guts of why this is critical, very much needed and how it should happen. Its also something I always advocate and that we're currently following so its good validation of our approach :-)
Marty has posted 3 very poignant questions for S/W company CEO's
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:41 AM
One of the PM's forwarded this article "SaaS Company? Thinking of Sending Your Product Managers for Formal Product Management Training and Certification? Don't Waste Your Money." posted by someone at SaaS University.
It was brought up as a sidebar conversation one our weekly PM meeting and led to some animated conversations about how everyone's gonna be fired now ;-)
The post starts by taking some digs at PM training organizations like Pragmatic, Zigzag and AIPMM.
"If you're a SaaS company with product managers and are considering sending your PMs to one of these courses, I wouldn't bother. Save your money and spend it on some things I'll list out later in this piece."Then it refers to some 2008 Atlanta SaaS Conference comments about a very successful SaaS ERP firm running with no PM's.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
4:45 PM
Lateral Thinking is undeniably the best book I've ever read on product management and marketing.
- what do we build?
- how do we build and market the product?
- knowing what we know how do we get further down the product "todo/feature/wish" list with the scarce and competing resource demands in the organization.
Lateral Thinking Techniques
- Alternatives: Use concepts to breed new ideas
- Focus: Sharpen or change your focus to improve your creative efforts
- Challenge: Break free from the limits of accepted ways of operating
- Random Entry: Use unconnected input to open new lines of thinking
- Provocation: Move from a provocative statement to useful ideas
- Harvesting: Select the best of early ideas and shape them into useable approaches
- Treatment of Ideas: Develop ideas and shape them to fit an organization or situation
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
3:48 PM
As product managers and marketers have you ever been in situations where you're starting to draw graphs or tables, using analogies, trying to visualize something that cannot be directly seen, trying to infer patterns from data? Well chances are if you dug a little deeper on Google for what you were discussing there's most likely someone who's done a study around it and come up with a model for it. So why reinvent the wheel?
There are obviously some caveats to this,
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
12:17 AM
Recently got forwarded this link to a product management manifesto that has been drafted by Brain Lawley, CEO & Founder of the 280 Group LLC.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:21 PM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Product Management, Scrum
Having recently gone through a major Product Roadmap definition exercise I thought it would be cool to share some thoughts on product roadmaps and get feedback. While there are tons of great posts out there on how to create product roadmaps it's unbelievable how many Product Managers are developing products with no roadmaps!!
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:06 PM
Labels: Product Management, Product Roadmap
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
12:15 PM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
To me an Agile PM is quite simply an individual that understands and possesses fundamental PM skills and is aware of Agile principles, frameworks and tools and can be applied to his/her domain.
There is a very interesting conversation going on around this that I stumbled into and wanted to write a quick post about. I'll use my comments to those posts to convey my POV.
It started when I stumbled into the Enthiosys blog (which I've now bookmarked ;-)
How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) About Dramatic Changes in Technology
Randomly stumbled into this blog, so writing this comment without complete context of your other posts. I disagree with the assumptions in this post or the industrial designer, assembly lang programmer, cook analogy.
The job of an industrial engineer hasnt changed. The tools have. An industrial engineer with good fundamental skills would be just as effective in the 1950’s as today. A good cook will be just as effective regardless of the tools, cause cooking is all about understand the fundamentals of how ingredients mix/blend/cook at various temperatures rather than the hi-tech gas range and ovens.A good analogy might be an architect, has the job of an architect changed ever since man has been building wonderful structures? No, but the tools sure have.
Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That’s why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.
I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I’d take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.
So now to tie it back to your post, I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying you don’t have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.
However to me it’s a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.
Came here from a on the Enthiosys site "How To Sound Smart (But Be Really Naive) ..." Loving the conversation here. I think the job of a PM is somewhere in the middle, not as skewed towards tools/frameworks as indicated on the Enthiosys blog and not as insulated from newer tools/frameworks as this post is trying to suggest. But I do agree with the gist of this post that the core of the PM job has not really changed, the tools have.
Job skills are based on fundamentals and tools augment them. That's why education is based mostly on fundamentals and add some applied perspective with tools.
I believe the skills and tools aspect of PM should not be mixed up. I'd take a PM with good fundamental skills any day and train them to use the latest and greatest tools/frameworks rather than have someone very fast on the tools/frameworks but weak in fundamentals.
I think there are fundamental skills that a Product Manager should understand and possess and good tools/frameworks like Agile/Scrum just augment them. Don't get me wrong I'm not saying you don't have to acquire additional newer skills to learn these new tools/frameworks to make your self more efficient/effective in what you do.
However to me it's a layer that you put on top of the core skill set.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:26 AM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
Just some background. I've been doing traditional Product Mgmt and Marketing for some time now. Over the last few years I've transitioned to Agile Product Management and my posts here will mostly reflect my journey from traditional to Agile.
We are currently Scrumming, but not in its purest sense and keep hearing comments like "thats not pure Scrum".
Well from what I've seen Scrum is very contextual and a framework that leaves a lot of the details for the team to decide on how they want to do things. So there is nothing like pure Scrum.
And by the way saying that User Stories not written in the now famous Mike Cohn format of "As a type of user, I want some goal so that some reason" is not Scrum .. is ridiculous at best.
I respect Mike and his writing a lot, especially his "User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development" book that's kinda like a bible for Product Owners. However I do believe that some stories have to be contorted to meet this format and sometimes there is a lot of redundancy in this format as well. Imagine 40 stories starting with "As a Sales Rep ...". So well written user stories in any format (user stories, use cases etc) should do for Scrum. Tyner Blain has a wonderful blog posted on this that I would recommend to any team transitioning from WF to Agile.
I'd like to hear more from people who are doing "pure" Scrum .. have large product lines in the enterprise software space with legacy code, bug fixes and globally distributed teams.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:32 AM
Labels: Agile, Enterprise, Scrum
Hello and welcome to this blog. This is my attempt that sharing thoughts, having conversations and reflecting on all things that are product related.
Posted by
Darayush Mistry
at
11:00 AM