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  • Young Mr Incredible is frustrated that the world keeps getting in jeopardy after he saves it

    Product Managers get (all) the jobs done!

    Sometimes in interviewing or training PMs, this question comes up: “Are we really supposed to be doing everything in this team?!” I’d love to answer with a clear “no”, but really? It depends. Product Management is a glue function. We are responsible for overall success, so we can stretch to fix some of the broken…

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  • Sweating hero decision meme

    Metrics and Observability

    I wrote this as a Twitter thread in March of 2018, but the character constraints of Twitter at that time made it extremely cryptic. Also, it’s staged as a response to Splunk’s introduction of the metrics index… and to be honest, that’s no longer interesting to me. This is an expanded set of observations about…

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  • NES64 wrestling A Winner Is You graphic

    Writing a Resume

    Given the surge of layoffs over the last few months, there’s a lot of people looking for new roles. Often resumes are a few years old, or perhaps misaligned for available roles. Here’s some tips on freshening yours up. Focus and Brevity I’d have written a shorter letter if I’d had the time — the…

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  • Fox Mulder from the X-Files is asking a black cat if it's a UFO

    Security Products, Rules, and Complexity

    Security products need to detect known knowns, so they build up a corpus of rule content. This corpus grows faster than it shrinks, if it’s maintained at all: new known bad is found at a rapid clip, while software is retired from use very slowly. There are two constraints on security products’ ability to use…

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  • Quadrant comparing high and low chaos and team bonding

    Chaos, Control, and Team Bonding

    Let’s do another quadrant: vertical axis is how chaotic the company is, horizontal axis is how bonded the teams are. Team bonding level is of course not a constant. The Tuckman model applies to all teams, and we human go through cyclical rhythms of togetherness and separation as we grow personally and professionally. That said,…

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