If you don’t have a Head of Product you may suffer from: narrow focus on engineer/development productivity; underpowered product management teams; customer benefits misaligned with actual features; and lack of a realistic product strategy.

But it’s hard to hire a Head of Product. We don’t know what product leaders do, and disagree about what’s most important in a new one. We write wildly aspirational job descriptions for candidates and we confuse subject/market expertise with product management/leadership experience to name just a few errors.

Rich Mironov wrote The Art of Product Management and is a voice for the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us. In this talk from BoS USA Online, he looks at the important aspects of product leaders:

Organizing the product organization.
Cross-functional leadership.
Building what users actually need.

Recorded at Business of Software Conference USA Online 2020.

For more great videos from BoS, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Ep 98 Positioning Jujitsu (with April Dunford)

Business of Software PodcastBy Business of SoftwareFeb 01, 2022