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 Review for "Art of Product Management" Oct 22, 2009
I would like to congratulate Rich Monrov on his new book the "Art of Product Management." I just finished reading it and would like to share some of my thoughts on this book:
* This book sounds like a "local lad around the block" for product managers who have lived through startups groomed in the silicon valley. The book clearly focuses on challenges faced in startups (and primarily for emerging technology products) and why these breeds of product managers are repetitively willing to take on this challenge.
* The book has a human aspect to it. Rather than advocating product management as a science, it approaches it as an art, as the title suggests. Rich sticks to this philosophy where he compares PM's to parents and products/companies to their children and advocates how PM's need to be passionate and emotionally attached to their products.
* The book is divided in small chapters, and has many metaphors, which bring out the distinct message of each chapter. The ones which stand out are:
o Grocers and Chefs : Software Services model
o Shark's, Pilot Fish and the Product Food Chain
o Roadmap Less Traveled
The Pragmatic Marketing Framework defines a product manager as a culmination of four distinct disciplines: Business, Technical, Strategic and Tactical.
Though Rich has not divided the book in these disciplines, I thought the content covered all these disciplines and can be grossly arranged across these for e.g
* Business/ Philosophical
o Section 1: Falling In Love
o Section 2: Organizing your Organization
Gives a good overview of how PM's should be committed ( Burning the boats), should be willing to change the course, owning the gap is very insightful, which you will find more than often that organizational incentives are not aligned to make the product a success. Defensive process is another good example of constructive process. Crowding Out Tech Support is another very important insight, we mostly tend to neglect Tech support.
* Technical
o Section 3: The Almost New-New Things
Gives a very good overview of some of the emerging delivery and development models like SAAS and Agile respectively. "So your product wants to be a service and Null Service" provide a good checkpoint and product platform thinking respectively
* Strategic
o Section 4: Getting Into Customer's Head
This is my favorite section. In simple words it help you formulate a very compelling business and product strategy, right from understanding requirements, to target markets to competitive and launch strategy.
* Sales
o Section 5: What should Things Cost
This is my second favorite section. Again in very simple terms Rich ends up preaching a lot, right from market segmentation packaging to price lists
* Call to Action
o All-in-All a Very Good Book, which can be used from time to time to guide you through your product management journey. This book makes the journey enjoyable, insightful and focused.
 A great reference material for a Product Manager Jun 07, 2009
This book is a very useful collection of articles on various topics of interest to PLMs. The author is very knowledgable and takes great interest in ensuring the knowledge is conveyed completely but in length that suits people with very little free time. The topics covered can be read at your own leasure as they are not necessarily connected to each other. I specially liked author's ability to compare the problem being discussed to a well known story/ situation/ environment so that the reader is able to graps the concept easily.
This book has a place in a PLM's must-have reference books.
Great collection of practical thoughts from an experienced Product Manager May 12, 2009
Unlike other books that take a more academically theoretical approach, Rich's book is based on solid experience and proven success. As someone who has managed many products and Product Management teams, I wish I had found this book earlier, and it will now be mandatory for my teams. And as well as product managers this book is ideal for executives in all areas - sales, engineering and marketing to get their heads around what makes a product successful.
I like the way this book is organized as a collection of thoughts, rather than a lengthy tome that needs to be read carefully in order to gain any benefit. You can open this book to almost any chapter and get great advice and thoughts - on topics from pricing, to sales, packaging, and politics. The use of multiple analogies makes the concepts and lessons easier to understand.
Successful Product Management is not well understood, and Rich has made a great contribution to really defining what is important.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Read this book! Apr 06, 2009
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!
8 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Not a book, but a blog posts collection. Good content though. Mar 12, 2009
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.
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