Finding Joy in What We Do with Rich Mironov - Productized 24 TalkInTen

We’re thrilled to bring you more exclusive insights from Productized 2024, our third major event of the year! This series continues our engaging TalkInTen format, where we explore concise, high-impact conversations with industry leaders pushing the boundaries of product management and business agility. Each episode delivers fresh perspectives, practical strategies, and real-world examples designed to help teams and organisations adapt, grow, and succeed in today’s fast-paced environment.

In this episode, we’re joined by Rich Mironov, a renowned product management expert and author of The Art of Product Management. Rich takes us on a thoughtful journey into the often-underappreciated emotional side of product management. He discusses how product leaders can rediscover joy in their roles, tackle the challenges of imposter syndrome, and find purpose in supporting their teams and products. Rich’s insights are a must-hear for anyone looking to balance the emotional demands of product leadership with the fulfilment that comes from creating impactful, user-centred products.

Rich on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/

Key Takeaways from Rich's Talk:

• Understanding the emotional rollercoaster of product management and why it’s important to embrace it.
• Strategies for finding joy and satisfaction in your work, even when the road gets tough.
• How to support your team and products with empathy, while leaving ego at the door.

Here is the synopsis of Rich's Talk:

Product management is hard.  Almost no one else in our organization understands how we add value. Most of us suffer from imposter syndrome.  And we spent lots of energy arguing with each other about exactly what should – and should not – be part of our jobs. So it’s important to remember *WHY* we do what we do – and to find some joy in it.  We love our products, are passionate about our end users, and are deeply empathetic as well as analytical.

If you enjoy the show, please leave a review and stay tuned for more great episodes from the Product Agility Podcast!

Use code PROD24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.

Sheev - https://www.sheev.co.uk

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!

Ben Maynard

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

🐦 https://x.com/BenWMaynard

💻 https://sheev.co.uk/

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/

💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/

🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility

Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes

• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0lkwAYJzVSuk5zfJ1vIDZq?si=4c691fb12f124a56
• iTunes - https://apple.co/3YvTX8p

Want to come on the podcast?

Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to a very special series of episodes of the Product Agility Podcast, broadcasting for two days, direct from Lisbon Portugal and product ties 2024. This year, we're bringing you more exclusive bite-sized wisdom with our Talks in 10 format, where we can be diving into actionable insights from some of the best and brightest minds in product leadership. And attendees this year are being spoiled with talks and workshops from the likes of Radakadot, creator of radical product thinking and Rich Morinov, author of the Art of Product Management. Having us all find some joy in what we do, but it would be a pretty shitty conference if it was just two people. There are so many more people here, and they'll be getting as many of them as possible on here to share their talks in 10. Now before we begin, a huge thank you to our sponsors Sheev Limited, Sheev is the company which has bankrupted this podcast pretty much since day one. I want to take an opportunity just to share with you and make you aware we do some awesome stuff. Whether it's training your product teams or coaching your product teams with clarity and alignment, or you know just a simple thing of actually making OKRs work in organisations, these are all things that we are very good at. So do head over to www.sheev.co.uk, see what we do and get in contact with us. Also check out the show notes for a tasty little discount code over any of our courses. Grab a notebook because the next 10 minutes are going to be packed with action tips from the best in the business. And here begins a talk in 10. It is a great honour to welcome Rich Miranov. Thank you so much. On to the Procter-Gency podcast. Excellent to have you here. You are closing this wonderful conference. I'm always inclined to call this more of a festival. I always, for it feels more like a festival than a converse. For me it's three days it might as well be a festival. Yeah, it'll be a festival, yeah, but just less debauchery perhaps. Who knows when? I don't get involved in many of the evening activities. I love to let me know. However, in a departure from the type of thing that you would normally talk about at these conferences, you're going to be closing the conference on the topic of joy. And say what would be great is to one, let the audience know a little bit about you if they haven't heard of you before. And also give us an insight into what your talk is going to be about. Sure, love to and thanks. So I've been doing product management since the 1980s in case anybody thought it was a new thing. That was about six years before electricity was discovered. So seeing a lot of tech in my day, these days I'm an independent consultant and coach, done 15 interim chief product officer jobs at software companies. Mostly enterprise B2B, so I'm not a consumer guy. And usually I parachute in because there's some fundamental missing thing in the product organization. For instance, it doesn't exist. Or the last two or three heads of product quit and no one knows why. So I'm really coming in as the firefighter at the sea level to hire my replacement and stabilize what's going on. Fantastic. How often when you join those organizations as an interim is the missing piece of the puzzle joy? Almost never. So usually the missing piece is that sales and marketing is often one direction. Engineering is often another direction. And there's no one playing the product role in the middle. Or there's no one who's ever done the product role before because how hard could it be? So someone's been tapped on the shoulder, field promotion, how about you be the head of product? And often they've not only never been in that job, they can't spell product unless you spot them all of the consonants. So not a good plan for pulling all sides of the company together into a common purpose, common business model, focus on an individual segment. What do we need to do to succeed? So that's the hard nose to MBA, clear out the the debris and stabilize it to hire my replacement. And that's not what you're going to be talking about today? Not at all. And I'm thrilled to not be talking about that. So to close the conference, we need something a little more uplifting, a little more emotional. So the talk I have is about how we find joy or fulfillment in the product work we do. Because it's really, really hard and it's emotionally punishing. And there's an infinite number of stakeholders. And often we're working for some founder CEO who blows up the roadmap every five to seven days or even more frequently. There's a tremendous amount of responsibility with no authority. One asks oneself whether this is a mental illness or a career. I've been doing it for 35 years so clearly I haven't learned my lesson yet. But how do we find the joy, find the love, find the emotional stability so that we can come in and do this again tomorrow? So what is the secret in finding that joy? So for me, I think of this the same way I think of raising children, which is, and the analogy I'm going to grab before the talk is there's some, you know, nine, 10, 12-year-old kid up on stage in some major concert hall playing the violin. And that's the product. That's not me, the product manager. I, as the product manager, am standing in the very back of the auditorium in the dark where no one can see me and no one knows my name. But gosh, my heart is pounding out of my chest because that's my product on stage. And the auditorium is full of happy users and investors and maybe somebody from the gartner side of the world who's going to say something nice. It's all about this sort of deferred gratification of I'm going to have to raise this product up from version one, which is never going to be any good, to the next three, four, five, 12 releases of this product so that it becomes great, grows up to be big and strong, earns lots of revenue, earns lots of kudos. And I have to be excited by the fact that it's not about me. I left my ego at the door. It's about my product and we're birthing and launching and protecting these products until they're good enough to survive in the world. And so I would claim that great product management often requires that we find our joy in our happy users and our happy products instead of our personal grantees. Yeah, and that's what I find interesting what you're saying is the role of ego. That's right. Actually, the level of humility you need to be the person behind the curtain. That's right. If ego is a real issue, you should probably be on the sales side. So, but when it comes to ego, I suppose for some people, they do get joy from that kind of self congrats to a tree. And that's great. I just, my observation, particularly in the B2B enterprise space where we are not the most important people in the room, even at the sea level, is if you're really looking for congratulations as self-grandizement, maybe this isn't the best role for you. Usually a company has only got two or three percent of their folks in product. There's a lot of other things to do where you've got more visibility, where the company calls you up on the front of the stage when we beat quota or whatever. Not every job is a fit for everyone. Product management is a pretty narrow, specialized odd thing we do. And if it's not a good fit for how you're going to get up in the morning and find excitement and fulfillment, then gosh, life is too long. Yeah. So is it fair to say that for, and it's not right to say, maybe true joy, but for real joy as you would define it. And I think that maybe how George and I would also define joy, that it takes certain character in the product world to kind of to really be able to get, find that joy and persist that joy and still have the success. So what is it that the characteristics of a successful product person who's able to kind of build and maintain joy? I think it's that you see your products like you see your children as your work, right? As your life, as the thing that you're building. And it's the wonderful happy people who tell you it was good and pay for it. And it's the quality of the design and engineering that you didn't do because designers and engineers did it. And it's the coordinating and aligning of all the folks so that we can launch great products, we can keep great products, we can grow them over time, and they get the adulation, right? There's one other slice here too, which is, since I've been a product leader of managing product managers for the last two or three decades, I'm even one further step back, which is it's not my product, it's my product manager's product. And so I have to find some of that same film in our joy in growing product managers, in helping folks with their careers, in pushing ahead the work that we do. Again, on the assumption that it's not about me and most people won't thank me, but every once in a while, I get a call or a note from somebody that I helped along or gave a good piece of advice or landed in a job eight years ago who says, you may have forgotten, but you had this lunch with me on day X nine years ago, and you told me this thing, or you landed this interview, or you helped me with a problem, and that's made a real difference to me, right? And gosh, one of those makes my day, makes my month. Now, it's lovely when you get that feedback. It is. It's so nice. And it's so I have to find it's when you go to leave somewhere. It's an everyone, people come up to the woodwork and say, do you know what? It's not going to be the same about you? Because you remember? And it's like, Oh, wow, that's, uh, I did not expect that. And, and, and often, you know, I'll have some bunch of folks on my team, and there's somebody who is really ready for advancement and their next adventure. And this company doesn't have a space for them. And, and we have this funny conversation where I offer to help them their next find their next thing at some other company, because it's going to be the right thing for them, even though I'm going to miss them in their great member of my team. And again, you know, how do how do we have ownership and joy in growing the folks on our team who won't be working for us in three years or 10 years. But I think it's one of the key characteristics I see missing in more junior people in organizations is that it's the understanding that you can be great and get a lot of joy from building the team around you and ultimately making sure that you you have an exit path because there's going to be someone better than you at some point. And I think that's something that's often missed. I think the junior maybe, particularly me and my more junior year, organizations, I thought it was about me. And I think that's okay, because as a more junior product person, you're working on your craft, you're working on getting the things done, learning how to do it. I think later on, we grow into something bigger. So we are nearly at time. Unfortunately, like you see, people have finished listening to someone, I'm not sure who they were listening to. But before we wrap up, it's been really nice to have you on the podcast. I was a bit disappointed that you didn't carry on the Barry White voice because I was kind of really looking forward to it. Always could do that if we need to. Thank you very much. That's not being edited out by the way, George. So just to see you now. Thank you so much for coming on. If there is something joyful, you want to leave a listener's with, what would you share? Here's the thing I'm going to ask the entire audience to do at the end of my talk, which is to think about and write down the name of someone who has been important to their career, that they haven't talked to in a year, or they haven't thanked in a long time, and to ask everybody to reach out with a note or whatever format it is, and send a thank you to someone who is important to their growth and their advancement, because it's going to make everybody feel better and it reminds us that we're all paying it forward. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. If people want to learn more about you, if they Google you, how many different users are they going to find? Well, I'm the only person with my last name is my domain name. I'm rich at Miranov.com. I'm really easy to find. And there's 23 years worth of blog posts and talks on my website because some of us started a little earlier than others. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much everyone. Thank you for listening. Been an awesome, awesome conversation. And yeah, I'm hoping, actually, I might actually get to see your talk later because I think my work might be done. So, fingers crossed. Thank you very much. And as always, let us know what you enjoyed about that episode with Rich. There's so many lovely little nuggets of information asking us to find some joy in what we do. So, like, let us know on social media and what gives you joy in your role. And maybe how can you spread a bit of joy? Maybe don't do that. Maybe just write that note of appreciation to someone in your previous career and to let them know how much of an impact they had on you. So, thank you very much for listening. And again, Rich, thank you very much for coming along.