I’m thrilled to have hosted Rich Mironov, a Product Leader and author of “The Art of Product Management” as guest speaker at our ProductX event. Rich spoke to us about ‘Reducing Product Waste (And Still Achieving Great Outcomes)’.
What is Product waste? According to Rich, Product waste is building something that the world doesn't need, or won't pay for. In our chat we covered key questions such as - How do we do better at deciding WHAT to build, and extracting more customer value out of the same engineering effort? And how do we balance the broad needs of our overall customer base against internal stakeholders who each have different priorities?
The key takeaways from Rich’s presentation are:
- Product Management delivers value through investment in discovery, focus and making hard choices. Not from velocity, throughput and development tuning.
- Product waste happens early, before the first line of code is written. Try to get ahead of it and figure out if something is going to work taking the most cost effective approach.
- Conduct discovery with real end users (vs. stakeholders). We respect and listen to our stakeholders but conversations with real life customers who will use our Product is essential.
- Stakeholders are not focused on the process. We need to share insights we have gained through discovery and together we will get to the right outcomes. We gain respect and humility by WHAT we have learned, not by HOW we have learned it.
Thank you for all of your insights and wonderful stories at ProductX Rich. We’re thrilled that you were able to join us!
#productmanagement #woolworths
Absolute pleasure Petra Gross