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Platform Product Managers
Often your first product manager job is for a module on a platform, a single feature of a complex product, or a simple standalone product. This is because, while of course difficult, those are a lot simpler than managing a platform. When you product manage a platform, you lose a lot of the simple answers…
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Developing Content
I recently heard “you’re either writing software or selling it” as a categorizer for enterprise software employees, and I’d like to dig into why and how that’s correct and incorrect, at least descriptively. I am biased towards incorrect because I’ve worked exclusively for platform companies, but that’s just my experience. First, where would this thought…
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Testing Product in the Field
DevOps: there is no QA, there is no infra, testing and support are everyone’s job. This works okay for unit test level work, but end to end functionality involving multiple teams breaks all the time. You can ask DevOps to take that on too, but they’ll just laugh. You can ship without doing any, and…
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Shewhart Control Charts
As a monitor writer, I want to alert when a value has changed quickly a lot in one direction or another, but i don’t want to set hard-coded thresholds because the value’s range is expected to slowly evolve. My goal is to get useful alerts and avoid false alarms. Examples: What It Doesn’t Do It’s…
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Centralization or federation
What’s better, a centralized system or a federated one? As per usual in systems architecture, that depends on what values you’re optimizing for. Centralized is good for ease of use: there is one entity to configure, one system to learn. Decentralized is harder, but enables experimentation and discovery: there are many entities with different economic…
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Towing mines as strategy
Finding product market fit is notoriously difficult, am I right? Also, water is wet, and pricing is hard. Anyway, I’ve written a bit on the problems of founding a new product, differentiating features from products, and iterating a product until it works. It’s hard when you’re with a team or working on your own. But…
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Get the developer out of the way!
I’d be so much more productive if I could get rid of this other person who keeps asking hard questions about exactly what I mean and exactly what I expect! Just make the spaceship go to Mars, okay?! Remember when the thing that was going to dis-intermediate software developers was visual IDEs? With XML data…
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Uptime nines aren’t equally distributed
Once upon a time, I worked at a hosting company… sadly, after a hardware upgrade gone wrong, the database server behind a customer’s website was sitting open on a data center floor with a cracked motherboard during their launch event. We provided an overall yearly uptime better than three nines (99.9%, or 52 and half…
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You’re a CISO? That’s rough, buddy
I had the opportunity to speak candidly with several CISOs (Chief Information Security Officer) and CSOs (CISO plus physical security) at RSA this year. I heard lots about challenges, and it’s not surprising that the tenure is so short. There’s a lot to unpack in the data behind those articles, but this is a product…
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Why Not Measure Product Performance?
I’ve written about metrics a number of times, since a lot of my career has been in tools to help people measure things. DURSLEy and CAPS talks about operational and business metrics, Product Sales Metrics is about measuring if your product is moving. There’s posts about measuring product quality, presenting metrics to leadership, building good…
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