I have known Rich Mironov for more than two decades through numerous product management positions across the tech universe. His new book is “Money Stories: Communicating the Value of Product Work” and it is a great guidebook to what he calls members of the maker set and how they can talk to the other part of the company that doesn’t make anything but money (whom he collectively calls go-to-market execs), and hopefully profits to pay for all the fancy product stuff.

Money stories are good for providing the basis of why a company should build a product, creating a shared vocabulary that both makers and marketing execs can understand each other, and help rank development priorities and set strategies. And that is a good name for them, because making money is fundamental to a business (sometimes makers forget this), and decisions on knowing what to do something and when are often based on magical thinking, or emotions, or anything but money. These stories fall into six general patterns, such as upselling, boosting volume, reducing churn, acquiring new customers, entering a new market, or saving operational costs. For each pattern, he provides sample narratives, walks the reader through the underlying math, and calls out mistakes to avoid.

Mironov has seen it all, having been part of six Silicon Valley startups and consulted for hundreds of private clients. He now lives in Portugal, which I documented in that post. Money Stories is a fast read, but filled with lots of his wisdom. While the book is less than 90 pages, it is chock full of useful and actionable information. For example, “It’s much more productive to have a strategic portfolio-level argument about R&D resources and focus, rather than dragging executives through a 900-row spreadsheet.” And, “It is more important to agree on one simple calculation than throw punches,” presumably at the non-makers in the room.

One metric worth repeating is that “products need to earn six times their direct maker-team costs to fund the rest of the company.” That is the ultimate money story. “Either a product is earning its keep, or it is subject to summary execution.” Plain and simple. This is because the maker group has a heavy lift, and needs to support a constellation of services and specialities such as sales, marketing, finance, HR and so forth.

Much of his full-time experience has been with tech companies in the B2B space, where he is familiar with lengthy sales cycles, multiple people involved in purchase decisions, inability to quickly adapt pricing to market changes, or other sins. You would think this would harden a weaker person, but Mironov goes about his day with plenty of ironic humor (such as this post he wrote more than 20 years ago) and a can-do attitude that shows how he has survived and thrived in the product space.

Throughout the book are very handy “generic money story” diagrams that use simple math to calculate from three factors whether a new feature or product is going to worth the effort. It is important that this calculation is expressed as a range, to emphasize that we can’t accurately forecast the future (absent a working time machine, he hastens to add). “Money stories are communication tools, so should help drive a lot of conversations and raise interesting issues.” His last chapter reviews how to put these stories into practice, and some words on how AI fits into his worldview.