In this episode of the Augusto Digital Insights podcast, Brian Anderson interviews Rich Mironov, a 35-year Silicon Valley veteran—of mostly B2B enterprise software.

He published a book called The Art of Product Management, Lessons from a Silicon Valley Innovator and has 19 years’ worth of blog posts on his website about trends in product management.

Brian and Rich sat down to explore more about Rich’s career, and the insights he’s gained. Today, Rich primarily does two things: serves as the interim head of product or coach product executives on how to do their job better. He considers it a matter of pride that he never gives advice he wouldn’t take himself.

Rich describes the product mindset as a mix between the customer-facing and engineering-facing parts of the job. He notes that he expects both his product managers and himself to spend half their time with real users, discovering what’s important, needed, and going to move the needle. The other half is inward facing, communicating with development and engineering teams to collectively figure out how to fix the problem.

He goes on to explain the importance in having multiple people from different perspectives at the table when beginning a project—at minimum, a product person, a designer, and a developer—so they can notice unique issues, fallacies, and solutions.

Rich continues to highlight the importance of meeting with real users, providing an example of a company that makes cancer therapy machines. Each year, the organization brings in cancer survivors to share their stories and, according to Rich, “You’ve never seen a bunch of software specialists and physicists work harder for the next three months than when they’re coming to work to save lives.”

We thank Rich for his time on the Augusto Podcast and wish him the best of luck in all his future roles!