Our tribute to RYMA Technology Solutions …
As our followers know, this blog is devoted to helping product managers and product team members become more effective by sharing thoughts, tips, tactics, and tools to help enhance your effectiveness. However, this week we want to pay our respects to one of our business partners RYMA Technology Solutions.
Members of the product management community this week witnessed the passing of RYMA Technology Solutions. For those of you who may not be familiar with RYMA they were a principle market player in automating many of the aspects of a product manager’s job.
Here is how RYMA described it’s offering…
“Our vision at Ryma is to provide every Product Manager with a platform where they can maintain all the latest and relevant information, align all the stakeholders across the company, facilitate collaboration between teams, and help individuals execute to the best of their abilities. By automating or eliminating repetitive tasks, we help them focus on driving innovation. By facilitating collaboration and access to information, we improve the communication channels and overall efficiency. By assisting in the process of developing a product, we ultimately help Product Managers optimize the quality of execution – which is much needed to deliver better products to market in a shorter timeframe. We want to touch the lives of all Product Managers and give them the tools that will allow them to develop innovative and great products.”
But RYMA was more than just their product offerings, they were professionals who understood product management and were doing their best to not only grow their company but help expand the reach of the market and enable product management’s success. Their Grandview program provided a forum for product managers to voice their opinions and to share their ideas. So RYMA was clearly more than the sum of their products.
Additionally, they worked closely with many product management training and consulting organizations as this snippet from their last press release on June 8th demonstrates “Ryma’s Affiliate Partner Program features some of the most prominent names in product management consulting, including the 280 Group, Lucrum Marketing, Hawthorn Consulting Group, Brainmates and Actuation Consulting.”
The first public message that we saw indicating that they were closing was from Kenneth Kunin entitled “The End of RYMA” on the Grandview message board. It was quickly followed by a slew of other comments from a variety of individuals commenting on the value of their offering, alternative market solutions that exist, and lamenting RYMA’s passing.
Shortly after this discussion began a tweet went out from RYMA’s CEO Michel Besner. It was short and to the point, “I guess 6 months was not enough to turn the company around…”. https://twitter.com/michelbesner/status/212894165846065153
I have had the privilege of getting to know several of the members of the RYMA team and I want to wish them the best as they move to the next phase of their careers. Particularly Mike Gero who I’ve come to both like and respect. And I’m sure that I’m not alone.
The true import of this change is that the entire product management community has lost not only a friend and vendor – but the ecosystem has shrunk as well. From our vantage point, we would have liked to see RYMA continue to be a robust market player in order to help ensure that the profession continues to expand.
I would like to thank our partners at RYMA for their past contributions to making the product management ecosystem a richer place.
You’ll be missed…
Greg Geracie is a recognized thought leader in the field of product management and the President of Actuation Consulting, a global provider of product management consulting, training, and advisory services to some of the world’s most well-known organizations. Greg is also the author of the global best seller Take Charge Product Management. He is also an adjunct professor at DePaul University’s College of Computing and Digital Media where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on high-tech and digital product management.