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Joe Talks To... Rich Mironov | Transition: CPO to CEO
In this episode, Joe Leech sits down with Rich Mironov, a true veteran of Silicon Valley’s startup scene, to delve into the nitty-gritty of product management, leadership, and the intricate dance between engineering and sales. Rich brings a wealth of experience from his 40 years in the industry, having served as a Chief Product Officer and a solo consultant, helping countless teams and leaders navigate the complex landscape of product development and organizational dynamics.
They kick things off with an introduction to Rich’s background, setting the stage for a conversation filled with real-world insights and practical advice. Joe and Rich then explore the unique challenges faced by newly minted Chief Product Officers (CPOs), especially those coming from technical backgrounds. They highlight the steep learning curve and the essential skills needed to thrive in these high-stakes roles.
One of the key themes they touch upon is the communication gap between engineering and go-to-market teams. Rich shares some eye-opening anecdotes about the different priorities and languages spoken by these groups, which often lead to misunderstandings and inefficiencies. This is where the discussion on the scarcity mindset in product teams comes in, shedding light on how perpetual resource constraints can shape decision-making processes.
The tension between sales pressure and product timelines is another hot topic. Joe and Rich dive deep into this ongoing struggle, offering strategies for balancing the urgent demands of sales with the methodical pace required for quality product development. They also talk about the pivotal role of CEOs in mediating these conflicts and ensuring alignment across teams.
Rich shares a deeply personal story from his time as a CEO, highlighting the immense pressures and tough decisions that come with the territory. This segment is a powerful reminder of the importance of empathy in leadership and understanding the human side of business. Joe and Rich further explore the intense pressure cooker environment that CEOs operate in, discussing how these pressures influence decision-making and leadership styles.
One of the standout parts of the conversation is Rich’s emphasis on the “language of money” in product management. He explains why it’s crucial for product managers to translate technical issues into financial terms that resonate with sales and marketing teams. This leads to a broader discussion on the analytical mindset of engineers, who often rely heavily on data and facts, and how this mindset can clash with more intuitive, emotion-driven approaches.
The duo doesn’t shy away from discussing the common pitfalls faced by commercial leaders moving into CEO roles. They offer candid advice on how to avoid these traps and make a successful transition. Joe and Rich also talk about the danger of relying too much on the skills that got you to a senior role, stressing the need for continuous growth and adaptation.
Towards the end of the episode, they explore how leaders need to transform their management styles when they step into the CEO role, offering practical tips for making this transition smoothly. The conversation wraps up with a look at the different approaches of engineers and salespeople, focusing on the need for precision in engineering and persuasion in sales.
This episode is packed with valuable insights, personal stories, and actionable advice. Whether you're a product manager, a CEO, or aspiring to be one, you'll find plenty of wisdom t
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Hello, everybody. I am today joined by Rich Mironov. Rich, do you want to give yourself an introduction?
Rich:Sure. Thanks, Joe. I'm a 40 year veteran of Silicon Valley startups and solo consulting, and I focus on, chief product officers, having been one many, times, 15 interim head of product jobs at software startups. and, as much as anything, I help the folks I coach on the emotional and organizational issues that they face much more than the technical product. How do I do product management issues?
Joe:Interesting stuff. Great. So a bit of introduction to anybody who doesn't know me. So my name is Mr. Joe. I coach CEOs, both from startups fast growing VC backed startups through to larger enterprises. And my specialty is really with first time CEOs, which also includes folks making that leap from CPO to CEO. So let's talk about that, shall we? So CPOs can have a lot of interactions with the other folks on the C suite. What are some of the challenges that they face? So when you're a freshly minted CPO, you're expected now to be engaging a lot with other people, the CEO, CXO, whichever job title that is, what are some of the challenges those folks face? face when they first move into that role.
Rich:I think there's several, particularly for folks who've come up out of the engineering side of life. So they're former developers or designers who have turned product folks, turned chief product officer or VP or whatever the title is. There's a very process oriented view of life here where everything happens in stages and there's a lot of discussion about the details of how we do things. What's the process, right? And what I find is that the folks across the aisle on the go to market side are deeply uninterested in the how do we build things, and how did we test it, and what stage are we on, that the focus is really on when am I going to have it, and when can I start collecting money. and so for somebody who's come up in a very, collegial, argumentative, bring the facts to the table story, it's a whole different way of communicating. It's a whole different way of thinking. And there's, often a lot of misunderstandings or bad feelings because we're wasting the time of the people who just want to get to the answer.
Joe:I hear that. Yeah, definitely. And it strikes me that when I see this as well as often that the very strength of having that process and that very logical structured, experience in your career can count against you when you're at that level. Because again, you end up answering questions in a, which could be quite straightforward. when are we going to get this feature in a way that actually folks at that level don't quite. They think you're talking a different language sometimes, right? I don't care about the process, just tell me when it's going to be delivered. When am I going to get the value? And it ends up being almost counterproductive almost to, lean back on that experience you've got of speaking in terms of process and orchestration and all of those sorts of ideas. It can count against you.
Rich:Very much. And, one other thing that I see coming up almost every day is, I don't know what your experience is, but I've never found an engineering team that had idle time on its hands. Every engineering team is overbooked. Every engineering team is overcommitted. Every developer has too many things on their list. And so the product folks are working from, a vision of scarcity. Yes, of course we could do that new thing for the big customer who called up and wanted a special item by Friday, but here's what we have to not do. Here's what we have to delay. Here's what we're going to remove from the story. And that can be very off putting. To the folks who simply want to get it done, they're not interested in the busyness, and they generally have very little recollection of the last roadmap discussion or the last prioritization discussion where we argued at length for which two things we're doing and which 27 things we're not doing. So, this sort of scarcity versus hunger problem I, think is, endemic where, As, the head of sales who wants to close this really big deal with this really big customer, I just want the answer to be yes. And the, delivery date to be next Friday. And instead, these product folks keep talking at length about all the other things we've committed to.
Joe:I think what's interesting about that is often those two conversations are happening from different motivations, aren't they as well? So I'm that salesperson. I'm quite emotionally invested in that sale because my, my figures, my, Call to numbers are low, or I want to close the deal because my bonus is put on that. So everybody's almost incentivized differently as well, which can create that problem too. it's the operating from a place of emotion, almost in those sales situations. And again, there's, nothing wrong with
Rich:There's,
Joe:that. And so
Rich:And there's a timeframe issue here too. So again, I'm an enterprise guy. So I'm used to being in the place where every two weeks, some really big customer asks for a thing, which may be impossible or make no sense, right? But we as an enterprise software company have to close these four deals this quarter, or the board is going to rip somebody a new one, fire some people, and we're going to have to let everybody go. And the product horizon, the product timeline is usually much longer than a quarter. As a sales professional who needs to bring in this deal so I can save my job, get my commission and keep my team whole, I, need the answer now and I need the delivery relatively soon, but the development processes and the product management point of view rarely give us that opportunity to give a, quick yes with a quick delivery because of course everything is harder than you thought it was and it's going to take longer and that dynamic where there's tremendous pressure to close this quarter because of course the board is phoning the CEO oh probably no more than twice a week each per board member to ask how revenue is going versus plan for the quarter. The pressure is immense to just override the product engineering folks and tell them to do the thing.
Joe:What does the CEO do in that situation? So if the CEO is mediating that situation between sales and product, what do they do? How do they balance this? How do they deal with this?
Rich:I often don't see them balance it. My going in assumption is that if the CEO is formally from the sales side of the house, Then the answer is, you must do it, you must find a way, stop making excuses. and that works, let's say once a quarter, but it doesn't work four times a quarter on the four largest deals. So there's this sort of generalization problem. There's this memory problem where we've closed that deal in week three of the quarter. It's now week six and there's another deal. I've flushed all that from my brain. I've already marked the revenue on my page and it's time to move on. The other I see is that, if we've got somebody in the CEO chair who comes from the, what I call the maker side of the house. Development, design, product, all of the sort of, process driven, get things out the door, they're pushing back on the sales team really hard in general, and it's hard for them to see that this one deal actually merits the override, it merits the, the escalation, and it's uniformly no. so I think it's really hard for CEOs to find the gray area of the space where instead of always saying yes, or always saying no, we actually take it apart and see if we have one or two opportunities per quarter that really rate the pull the red handle special treatment thing. it's, too much for too little.
Joe:I see that. Yeah. I was actually having this very conversation this morning with the CEO who has come from the product world. And he talked a lot about some of the challenges that CPOs do have is they don't have that commercial experience in quite the same way. They don't have that commercial urgency. It's not in their DNA. So they don't Often have an appreciation for it, right? They just see these challenges that sales throw their way as being, last minute curve balls that are, just unsettling their ship, which they want to keep as steady as possible. So it strikes me what seems to happen in both of these situations is there's not a huge appreciation for the other side in the negotiation. And I think that certainly sounds like a place to start from the CEO is to understand, Do we actually understand really what this means if we do that? What do we, what does this actually mean on both sides? If we make this particular change, right?
Rich:and, I'm very, conscious of the tremendous pressure that CEOs are under. I didn't really understand this until the very first time I co founded a software company as the CEO and brought all of my product baggage with me. And gosh, within a month I was acting out in ways that the previous me would have been appalled at. So I was yelling at my team and I, effectively banging my shoe on the table, playing Nikita Khrushchev, saying that it had to be done and I didn't want any excuses, honestly, in a way that truly embarrassed me after the fact, because my startup investors, I had raised a bunch of angel money and whatever. They taught me some really hard lessons in those first few months. And, I have just such a deep well of empathy for CEOs that I didn't have before, because I simply didn't understand.
Joe:Yeah. completely, cause you're right. ultimately it's a bit of a cliche, but the buck does stop there, right? They're the ones who are having to make the ultimate decision in terms of what happens.
Rich:If the buck doesn't actually stop there, I was faced with having to lay off most of my team. We weren't making our numbers and I'm, I must've stayed up all night pacing the floor for about a month. Trying to get to the place that I needed to get to, ruining my health and, shattering my personal relationships for a little while because I had so internalized the angst of we're not making the numbers. It must be my fault. I need to be smarter. Where am I going to pull this next million dollars worth of revenue from?
Joe:That's a frightening place to be, isn't it? That's like you said, that's really not good for you in that situation. Wow.
Rich:It's not, and, before that I had written off CEOs as impulsive and, just not very aware and putting myself in that chair, it turns out it's so much more situational than I had understood. And so when I'm coaching product folks, I'm always trying to start with the empathy. Which is, let's understand what's going on in your CEO's head. Let's understand the pressure that person's under, what they're really asking for, and why they can't remember from week to week the last week's roadmap, cause it's not the thing they focus on.
Joe:No, you're absolutely right. It's so true. The CPO, you live and breathe that roadmap. That is really what's driving you and your department forward and how you're measured. And the reality is, you, of course, you know that intimately and expecting anybody else to do that is really challenging. And also using it as an excuse or a reason not to do something is also can cause problems else. Cause you're right. I have the, I have. What's interesting about working with CEOs is I see the other side of that, where what might seem like an impulse is always a considered choice. And there's always a lot of thought gone into It might seem like it's a decision that happens quite quickly. But the reality is, as being a CEO, you can't always make decisions out in the open in terms of the situations, you have to be as quick as you can. But these are things are always considered, they may not seem that, but that generally means because you don't have any Either the same information that the CEO has or an appreciation of the context that they're living and working within. And I think that we can see that on both sides of we've talked about here in terms of the CPO have, the product folks having more of a commercial outlook and the sales folks having more of a maker outlook to really understand what's going on the other side. So they can have that wider context to really make and know what it means when they make these demands of one or another.
Rich:Although I would say it's absolutely a requirement that the folks on the product side understand how commercial works. I would say that expecting the sales organization to care and dig into how things are made and the processes, I think that's mostly a waste of energy.
Joe:Absolutely, because they don't have, they're not made of the same, they're not cut from the same cloth. So
Rich:That's right. And, they're not really interested.
Joe:no, they're not exactly. They just don't really don't have that same level of interest in the details of things. They operate in a different place from a different angle. And so it seems again, seems like they're impulsive, but they are working in a different world. So you're right. I think certainly what I see from CPOs who make that move up to the. CEO role is they attempt to enact that kind of maker control thinking onto the organization, where they try and structure the organization, like the product organization, where it's very much in control. it's happening all of the time. You try to see in the future, you try to structure your business that way. And the reality is, when you, work in a commercial organization, you can't control the outcomes. It is impossible. You can, to a certain extent, control what you build and how you make things, but you cannot control outcomes such as sales or revenue or anything like that. Those items are not within your control. You can control the conditions for success, but you can't control the outcome.
Rich:Indeed. And, I spend a lot of my coaching time talking about what we refer to, I think, as the language of money, right? Which is, when my enterprise sales team or my sales, VP comes to me and says, we need X, right? if I respond in process terms. There's a backlog, we're agile, we have to wait, there's discovery, not only is it not useful, but it sounds like an excuse,
Joe:Yeah, it does.
Rich:It does, and so a lot of my coaching is around converting that into the money language to say, for instance, yes, of course we could, try to add that new feature in by Friday, but the thing we're going to push is version seven of our major platform, which we all agreed was worth 20 million pounds in the next three quarters. And I don't think this deal is worth 20 million pounds. And so the trade off we have to discuss is not my internal workings, but do we delay the thing that the companies bet its marketing and sales on? For an extra quarter to pick up your new piece of work, or do we set that aside because the numbers are larger? And, that form of argument is of course, how the marketing and sales side of the world works.
Joe:Absolutely. That's strategy, right? Isn't it?
Rich:That's the strategy, but it's exactly not how we argue on the engineering side, So we, there's a lot of bottom up data analysis. There's a lot of arguing to see who's smarter, right? The way you win an argument in the engineering side is you marshal facts to show that you're smarter than everyone else in the room. And then they bow down to you because you're smarter, right? And that whole model of interaction just pisses off all the folks across the aisle.
Joe:Absolutely, it does. Completely does. Yeah. And it's interesting as well, because it reminds me a lot of, with my kids, right? Working with kids, cause I used to be an elementary school teacher and it's the same deal, right? There's nobody likes the kid who is a smart guy like in the room. A certain subset of kids do, but the reality of that is it's very different and you need a set of different skills to deal with different kids in different situations. And it's the same thing in work. And if you spend too much of your time purely in the engineering, the making side of the organization, you often don't see the value of what the other folks bring or understand their perspective or where they come from in that. I
Rich:That's right. The, idea that I'm smarter than everybody on my sales and marketing team, first of all, it's wrong. It's deeply insulting. it's, it's exactly not the way to approach a conversation where we're trying to achieve goodness for the company and make good choices.
Joe:mean, totally. Yeah. I came across a CPO a few years ago who referred to the sales team as idiots, right? They're idiots. they come and they go, they're idiots. They don't know what they're doing. They react. And it's just, it was crippling for his career. Cause he was wondering again, why he was not being going further up into his career with an attitude like that. You simply aren't going to get any further in your career because you, again, you don't know the full context of those people, across the call,
Rich:And by the way, those, idiots make twice what product managers make or three times. So maybe they're a little smarter than I give them credit for.
Joe:and also they're the ones, again, bringing the money into the business. They're the very ones at the front line who are driving the business. you can still look at it from a purely CO point of view. You can see the engineering and making team as a cost center. That's not necessarily a value creator if you really look at it in those terms. And so it's, you're looking at that level. you're in a risky place if you think Being smart is the secret to your success when the reality is, as you say, it's having a strong commercial understanding is really what can drive you forward in an organization.
Rich:Sure. One, one other source of friction or conflict here that I see a lot. And it's all about whether engineering, whether the maker side is a cost center or profit center is, if you're a, Software product company, and I'm going to use the words carefully, right? The way you make money is you build a set of bits, you create a thing that you can sell many, times without any alteration to the bits, right? If you build some software that the world wants and beats a path to your door, the second copy is free to make, and the thousandth copy is free to make, and the millionth copy is free to make other than sales and marketing overhead and commissions and support. that's a really hard concept for folks who deal in this single account at a time world because engineering and product in the maker group, is trying to get uniformity in what we sell because all the money is in the nth copy that we don't have to remake. But individual sales organizations, again, particularly enterprise have all these special demands. And they're paid the same amount, whether it's a one off special piece of custom work that in the world is never going to use again, or it's the bits we've already built. And so there's a sort of natural conflict between everyone wants X and your particular customer at this very moment wants Y. And that's an economic trade off that, again, back to CEOs. CEOs really have to understand the, essential economics of, are we a product company? Or are we a professional services company? We're charging for the hours and time of our people, which case we actually don't care what they work on as long as we invoice their hours, right? And, the economic underpinning of that is so different. I can look at the org chart of a company without meeting anyone there. And in 30 seconds, tell you whether it's a product company or a services company.
Joe:And so what are the clues then? What do you see? How can you spot that from the org chart? What are some of the things, what are some of the clues to that then, to know if you're one or the other?
Rich:Sure. if you're a services business, you have teams organized and named for the customers or clients they work for and the projects they're on. And almost all the technical talent in the company is on project teams that have some end date and delivery. If you're in the product business, if you're trying to build the next stream of ERP software or dating applications or whatever it is, you've got an, a maker organization with engineering and design and DevOps and product and all these things, that's usually 30 percent of the company, right? And is named for the products that they build, not the customer, the individual customers that are asking for them. and. Also, by the way, in a services company, you don't need any product people, Whatever, they're, the appendix you could just take out because in the services business, for the most case, customers tell us what they want, they write the specs for us, or we write their specs, we do exactly what they ask or tell us to do and pay us for. And by the way, if it's useless, They still owe us the money, right? Whereas in the product business, we have to anticipate, we have to get out way ahead, and if we build something that the world doesn't want, then we've already spent our 10 million euros building it. And we have to let a bunch of folks go because we chose the wrong product to build and the world doesn't care. So it's almost transparent if you've looked for it enough times to tell the difference between we do it one. Client wants us to do, and we do what's best for a thousand customers.
Joe:It's really interesting. So I'm curious then, Other questions about CPOs becoming CEOs. Can you think of any examples of CPOs who have made a successful shift up to CEOs? And what was that, what kind of transition did they have to make? What did they have to change about themselves at that point?
Rich:And I'm going to apply NDA here and not use any company names cause that's just bad form. I think the transition, the big transition, and it's one that those folks should have made at each step of their career is to think of the company first, not the product first. And again, what's the sort of economics, what's the core driver of the company and the business, some of which falls to the product side of the house and some of which is marketing or sales or support or business development or other groups. And so I think there's a sort of thought expansion here to go from the product is the most important thing. Building great product is the way to succeed. To product is one of the most important things. And product without great sales and marketing and other functional groups turns out to be the tree falling in the forest that nobody pays for. So I think that's a big, Intellectual leap, that's a big emotional leap, and it requires that the CPO sort of set aside all of the favorite child syndrome, that product and engineering and design are the best kids and the smartest kids in ZURF to sit at the front of the class, and to really be, thoughtfully open to the points of view of all of the other functional groups. Finance is going to tell us that we have to cut six heads. And my first reaction as a CPO is to tell you to pound sand and get out of my office because I know what those six folks are doing. But there are times when you have to take unpleasant steps like that and finance is out ahead because our next round is going to be late and we don't want to run out of money and we're going to have to find five heads somewhere.
Joe:Just that strong, like you said, that strong understanding of all of the disciplines and all of the areas of the business and that holistic whole that is the business is your number one priority, not the team, the product, the sales. It's a holistic, whole. challenge
Rich:It is.And, I do, see that product folks in some sense are much better equipped than, let's say, their engineering partners. I find that the CTOs or the VPs of engineering are much less equipped to step into the engineer, into the CEO role, unless it's a very purely technical sale to very purely technical folks. they're just not. emotionally set up to deal with the chaos that comes from the go to market side of the house. They're overwhelmed, and it's a really hard fit. At least the product folks have been negotiating with all those other parties over the last Decade or two, and, pretty much know what they do.
Joe:That's very true. Cause you're right. So the skills you need to be an amazing engineer and technical architect are not the same skills you need to run a business, and they're very, different and very separate. And that can be quite a crisis point as well, especially if you're a founder and you come from the technical side
Rich:That's right.
Joe:can be quite a scary realization that you have to reinvent
Rich:seen it done. There, there's a, a, guy down in New Zealand. I know named Josh Robb, who came up on the engineering and architecture side of the house and is now a founder of a brilliant company down in New Zealand. And he's made this transition just perfectly. But, for the most part. Gosh, it's hard.
Joe:It really is. I understand that. I think what's interesting about what you've talked about there as well is understanding, again, if you're coming from a commercial side of the organization in a software, product business, and you're moving up to the CEO, you've, you then again, have your own set of challenges at that level too. So can you talk through some of them? So if I'm coming from the commercial area, which again, let's be honest, is a much more common route to the CEO than
Rich:Yes. It's, what I expect.
Joe:Much more common route. What kind of advice would you give to the Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Sales Officer, and that when they're moving up to become the CEO, what's there, what's going to be some of the traps and pitfalls they need to avoid.
Rich:Think the, biggest pitfall I see is the sort of working assumption that the engineering side, cause they don't really think about product or design, right? That the engineering side is full of mostly lazy pre Madonna's who were spending a lot of their day eating bonbons and playing Fortnite and not being productive and whatever, right? That there's this sort of, Dr. Sheldon Cooper thought that they don't do anything, but they like to lecture to us. and I think that's fundamentally wrong. I think that's fundamentally incorrect. Almost every engineering team I've worked with is full of hardworking, dedicated, introverted folks who desperately want to build things that the world is going to love and give them some positive feedback. But again, back to our language, the way they express themselves simply doesn't land in sales terms. And so if I'm moving from The Chief Revenue Officer up to CEO. and I expect to maintain any kind of relationship with the folks who build what I sell. I've got a. drink the six pints of humility here, really listen. And, actually I think the, tip here is folks on the maker side believe that if they say something once that you're going to listen and hear and understand it. there's some talking heads in here about, say something once, why say it again. whereas on the sales side, you're used to needing to repeat over and over again and push and escalate and make the points again, seven times, 50 times. And the, and there's this horrible moment where the head of engineering or the head of product says, that's not going to work. And here's why. And as a salesperson, it's not selling until I've been told no, at least three times, right? And so I'm going to engage in trying to convince you, as my engineering or product lead, that you're wrong. That in fact, there is room in the stack, that there's time, that it's not technically fraught, right? Where the person I'm talking to told me once, That it's not going to work. It's never going to work. It's going to be broken and sink the company. And I didn't hear them the first time. And so then they write me off as not a listener and I write them off as useless or intransigent, right? and it's because my assumption is that, we're going to have this extended argument and then you might win and the, folks on the other side are giving up. They're walking away.
Joe:It's really interesting, isn't it? So it strikes me that both from a commercial point of view and from a product point of view, the superpower that got you to that C suite role in the first place is actually going to hold you back when you make that leap further up, right? It can actually, because you, not that you necessarily are, but you've got one attempt and one, one way of doing business. That's either very process for engineering led or very maker led or very commercially led, just about sales and convincing and engaging and all those things. But those things don't work when you get to that CEO level, they can't work in quite the same way. They might work with part of the business, but that actually they'll actively. cause opposite problems in the other part of the business if they're not under check. So you need to, in essence, open your mind to new ways of being and thinking to deal with different elements of the business who, aren't built the same way as you, who aren't got the same set of experiences as you, and knowing that your usual tricks won't work.
Rich:That's right. And, it's easy to be dismissive. My experience is that all those engineering folks are lazy and don't want to do stuff and just want to tinker with their toys. And if you bring that forward as a CEO, it's so toxic. So, it's an emotional step back. It's a language step back to say, this is different than the kind of interaction that I was having before. And I think it's tremendously hard. I'm, a big fan of somebody who's been a CEO for the third time, because I figured that they've made all these mistakes on outings one and two.
Joe:Right. Yeah, they have. And I think that's interesting the way you talk about it there as well. It's that idea that you do have to transform the way you operate when you hit that CEO level. You can't, you have to transform. You can't carry on doing things the way you are. What got you into that chair is not going to keep you there. And that knowing that people are different and what you work is, and that's okay. That's exactly what you want. You want people in the engineering team to be amazing at making things. You don't want them to be great at meetings because all they'll do is have meetings all day and not be making things right. You want that to be the right way. You want it to be the right set of skills, the Right people in the right seats. And that requires you to be different, to deal with different types of people.
Rich:Indeed. And just to riff on that for a minute, the skills that you need to be a great software developer are very fussy, right? Code is unforgiving. It either does the thing it's supposed to do or not. And if you have to spend another 11 hours debugging it, that's what you do, right? And so the, literal written word is gold. It is the, right set of letters on the page. Whereas on the sales side, it's really about, feelings and point of view and positioning things. And, if we have a sentence that comes out of our mouths, it isn't exactly right. that's okay. We'll clean it up later. Nobody's really listening that closely. Nobody's going to install the words I say. And so I'm much less interested in the fussy bits that the engineers are all over me about because I'm trying to get the hearts and minds of my prospects. And so I'm going to keep tuning my language and my approach until I see their pupils dilate and then get excited about what I'm saying. I'm much less, concerned about the precision of the conversation.
Joe:So interesting. Absolutely. I love that. Great, Rich. Thank you so much for your time today. I've really enjoyed our conversation. I've learned so much from you. It's fantastic.
Rich:Thanks for letting me join in.
Joe:Where can people find out a bit more about you? Where can they go find you? Where's the best place to go?
Rich:Cleverly, my last name is also my domain name and has been since, the early nineties. So mirinov.com has, 24 years worth of posts and talks and writings and tools. Again, mostly focused on the product folks moving up into the C suite.
Joe:wonderful. Again, thank you very much for your time
