DevOpsChat Special Guest: Rich Mironov
For this DevOpsChat we are thrilled to have Rich Mironov joining us to discuss the relationship between DevOps and Product Management. You can see the questions for this chat below.
Rich coaches product executives, product management teams and agile development organizations. He also parachutes into software companies as interim VP Product/CPO to fix company-level product/market/engineering/revenue issues. A seasoned tech executive and serial entrepreneur, Rich has been the product guy at six start-ups including as CEO and VP Products. He is a relentless blogger, speaker, teacher and mentor on software strategy, product management, and aligning what-we-can-build with what-markets-will-pay-for.
Rich has consulted to more than 90 tech companies on:
- Organizing the product organization. How do we find, grow and mentor great product teams? What about division of labor among product managers, product owners and product marketers? How are Director/VP Product roles different, and what skills/techniques do they need?
- Being agile, being lean. As development teams go scrum or Kanban, how do we serve Engineering better and still keep an eye on the market? Once we’ve applied good LeanUX/Lean Startup techniques, how do we move into the productization process and get the whole company behind us?
- Scaling up. Larger companies face product/portfolio issues more complex than single-product market validation. How do we balance competing interests and technology roadmaps?
Unofficially, Rich is a sounding board for various CPOs/VPs of Product. On the side, he mentors a few up-and-coming product folks.
Product Bytes is his long-running series on software, start-ups, product strategies, Silicon Valley, and the inner life of product managers. It predates the first blogs, and goes out in newsletter format as well as social media. Rich’s 2008 book, The Art of Product Management captures the best of Product Bytes from 2001 to 2008, and represents the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us.
Since 2001, Rich also has been an interim executive, consultant or adviser to dozens of early-stage companies and larger technology firms including Yahoo, Cisco, Wealthfront, WhiteHat Security, Varian and VeriSign.
Rich has a BS Physics from Yale with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories, and an MBA from Stanford.
Video Interview
In this video Rich shared with us his views on why Product Managers should care about DevOps and how Product Managers can support a DevOps approach. He also provides advice and tips for improving they way Product Management operates within an organisation.
Questions for this DevOpsChat
- Does Product Management play an important role in software development and, if so, why?
- How much does a Product Manager need to know about how a software product is developed, deployed and maintained?
- Should a Product Manager care about DevOps?
- If you’re using a DevOps approach, how will the Product Manager be involved?
- What is the biggest thing a Product Manager can do to support a transition to DevOps?
- What is the biggest benefit of DevOps for a Product Manager?
My thought on Q5 is “space” – If we have to transition to DevOps that we need to either give space to achieve this or perhaps create in Scrum terms create DevOps outcomes as User Stories to be delivered as part of a standard sprint process so that it get Done within the standard development cycle and not as an overtime task.
Q6 – this has to be weekends with sleep & getting on helping delighted customers succeed rather than scrabbling to repair for grumpy customers