Product Description

The Art of Product Management takes us inside the head of a product management thought leader. With color and humor, Rich Mironov gives us a taste of Silicon Valley's tireless pursuit of great technology and its creation of new products. He provides strategic advice to product managers and tech professionals about start-ups, big organizations, how to think like a customer, and what things should cost. He also reminds us to love our products and our teams. The Art of Product Management brings together the best insights from more than seven years of Product Bytes, Rich Mironov's long-running series on product strategy, technology companies, and how the two interact. This collection is for everyone who builds or markets the next new thing. This is more a how to think about products book than how to templates. Product managers (and others who are deeply committed to great products) will recognize themselves and their daily process struggles. How do I think about customers and solutions? Why does my organization behave the way it does? Can I help others to think long-term, or do I need to think for them? This book captures the inner life of product champions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125308 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-21
• Released on: 2008-11-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 230 pages

Review

About the Author
Rich Mironov CMO of Enthiosys, a software product strategist, and veteran of four high-tech startups. He is an expert on software product management and marketing. At Enthiosys, he provides strategic consulting to more than a dozen technology clients as well as overseeing marketing. His consulting focus is on business models, product strategy, and Agile adoption. Rich has spent more than two decades at technology companies. Starting in software development at Hewlett-Packard, he was a product manager at Tandem Computers and Sybase. Rich then spent almost a decade at Silicon Valley startups: Wayfarer, iPass, Slam Dunk Networks (VP of marketing) and AirMagnet (VP of marketing/product mgmt). The Art of Product Management grows out of his popular Product Bytes newsletter on technology product strategy (http://tinyurl.com/3kmboy ). Rich is a frequent speaker and lecturer, on the faculty of the Executive Development Center at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He has served on boards of Norcal PDMA and SVPMA. Rich has an M.B.A. from Stanford University and a B.S. degree in physics from Yale University (with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories).

Customer Reviews

Not a book, but a blog posts collection. Good content though.
The book is actually a collection of blog posts. This gives an appropriate impression - a number of loosely collected essays, not a real book in sense that Charles Petzold defines the real book: "the type that have traditionally been read sequentially in stretches of an hour or multiple hours without frequent interruptions" [...]. This kind of book implies that "the author has spent a lot of time arranging the material in the book into a coherent progression and logic",
which is not exactly the case here.

Some blog posts, included into the book, are pretty outdated, like articles from 2002 (in the SaaS part) - this is usually the case with books, compiled out of blogs. Problem is that blog is inherently a diary-like thing, so some posts are older then the others. And publisher require certain amount of pages ...


Some important items (like project management or requirements management systems) are missing in the relevant sections. This is another problem with books, derived from blogs: blog posts are usually written 'under influence' of the moment, so we tend to talk about things that are important to us today, not about all impotant things.

When you forget that this collection of essays takes the 'form' of the book, everything else is actully pretty fine. Essays are organized by topic and are pretty much independent of each other.

Interesting moments (extremely subjective):
-pretty good generic discussion of the place of product manager in the organization and "owning the gaps"
-nice argument about the balancing position of the product manager between engineering and sales
-good explanation of the differences between various roadmaps for various audiences
-book emphasizes the importance of what I call "necessary amount of beuracracy" or what the author calls "defensive processes"

BOTTOM LINE: A fair collection of essays. Probably nothing new for a veteran product manager. Maybe used, but not really, for a complete rookie,simply because of the fact that it's not a book, hence lack of coherence and flow. Definitely useful reading for a mid-start product manager.

[...]

Lessons that WORK from a seasoned pro
Product management has become a key differentiator in today's competitive landscape, especially in terms of speed to market and product adoption rates. Mironov describes the essential elements to handling this process effectively and responsibly. His stories and lessons from startup to tech titans bring a human element to this book. If you're looking for a high ROI and quick payback on your time, get this book. In fact, get "The Art of Product Management," for your team and begin delivering better products based on tested principals today. Highly recommended!

Read this book!
I just finished reading "The Art of Product Management" by Rich Mironov. This book is a compilation of some of Rich's "Sound Bytes" (monthly column on Product Management) organized into the following sections:

Falling in Love
Organizing your Organization
The Almost-New-New Things
Getting into Customers' Heads
What Should Things Cost

You can definitely see Rich's extensive experience with start-ups shine through the pages of this book. The entire first section talks about start-ups and things Products Managers should keep in mind when part of a start-up. Being in management, I thoroughly enjoyed the second chapter on organization. It's amazing how many places Product Management lives. I feel fortunate to work at a company where Product Management is its own department. The third chapter discusses "new" concepts such as SaaS and Agile. Rich has some very simple, yet powerful insights into the transition into both of these worlds. In chapter four, the author gets to one of the core concepts of Product Management. How do you get into your customers' heads and deliver solutions that solve their problems? This chapter includes some great reminders about why it is bad to stick around the office all the time. If you want to succeed in Product Management, you have to get out there and listen to your potential customers. The book concludes with a helpful chapter on pricing strategies. If you came from a technical background, like I did, this is probably not something you learned at school. Rich provides great tips for how to think about pricing and emphasizes that there is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

In conclusion: I wish this book had been around when I started dabbling in Product Management. If you are new to Product Management or even if you've been in the profession for some time, this book is a gem. Read it!