Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators
Chad McAllister, PhD
300 episodes
1 week ago
Welcome to Product Mastery Now, where you learn the 7 knowledge areas for product mastery. We teach the product management practices that elevate your influence and create products your customers love as you move toward product mastery. To learn about all seven areas and assess your strengths in product mastery, go to my website -- https://productmasterynow.com -- and click the Podcast button at the top of the page. Hosted by Chad McAllister, product management professor and practitioner.
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Welcome to Product Mastery Now, where you learn the 7 knowledge areas for product mastery. We teach the product management practices that elevate your influence and create products your customers love as you move toward product mastery. To learn about all seven areas and assess your strengths in product mastery, go to my website -- https://productmasterynow.com -- and click the Podcast button at the top of the page. Hosted by Chad McAllister, product management professor and practitioner.
559: Building influence as a product leader – with Rich Mironov
Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators
18 minutes 43 seconds
1 month ago
559: Building influence as a product leader – with Rich Mironov
Top challenges product leaders face and how to overcome them
Watch on YouTube
TLDR
Product leadership expert Rich Mironov discusses three core challenges CPOs and product VPs face: effectively communicating value in business terms rather than process terminology, building trust through merchandising wins before gaining decision-making authority, and reducing product waste by making better decisions about what to build. Executives don’t care how product gets made; they care about revenue impact. Success requires translating product outcomes into financial language and proving value through small wins before requesting broader organizational changes.
Introduction
We’re talking about the top challenges CPOs and Product VPs face. Navigating them well can cause your career to excel and result in valuable products. Navigating them poorly has career-limiting consequences. This discussion will help you avoid the latter by giving you approaches to address common product leadership challenges.
Our guest has mentored more product leaders and executives than anyone else I know over his 40-year career in product roles. He has served as interim CPO for 15 companies, founded the first Product Camp, consulted to hundreds of tech companies, and wrote the book The Art of Product Management. His blog, “Product Bytes,” is widely read by product leaders. From that description, you likely already know who our guest is—Rich Mironov.
Rich has seen every product leadership disaster imaginable and knows how to fix them. Let’s learn how to address and even avoid such challenges.
Summary of Concepts Discussed for Product Managers
First Principles for Product Leaders:Rich outlines three areas product leaders must champion:
* Real end users
* Extended teams (product managers, designers, engineers, DevOps, technical writers)
* Overall business health (long-term value)
Speaking the Executive Language:
* Executives are not interested in hearing you talk about product processes and methodologies
* They want to know when money will arrive and how much
* Product leaders must translate improvements into financial impact
* Example: “Reducing churn by 2% equals $45-50 million more revenue and IPO one year earlier”
Reducing Product Waste:Rich distinguishes between two types of waste:
* Engineering waste (late delivery, quality issues) – the minority
* Product waste (building the wrong things) – the majority of failures
* Focus on reducing products that “land like a dead thud in the market”
The Trust-Building Problem:
* Moving to product-led decision making requires taking authority away from sales and marketing
* This creates resistance unless product teams prove they make better decisions
* Solution: Build trust through showing value before requesting organizational changes
The Merchandising Strategy:Weekly practices for building influence by recording and communicating added value:
* Document and communicate product team wins in financial terms
* Ask your team members for names of people outside product management who did something good in the last week and ...
Product Mastery Now for Product Managers, Leaders, and Innovators
Welcome to Product Mastery Now, where you learn the 7 knowledge areas for product mastery. We teach the product management practices that elevate your influence and create products your customers love as you move toward product mastery. To learn about all seven areas and assess your strengths in product mastery, go to my website -- https://productmasterynow.com -- and click the Podcast button at the top of the page. Hosted by Chad McAllister, product management professor and practitioner.
