Category: Uncategorized
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Site Housekeeping
Migrated from blogger to wordpress, which is not exactly keeping up with the times but more like keeping slightly ahead of obsolescence. Should be nothing to see here, but if anything’s wrong, please let me know.
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Accidental Contradictory Incentives
Here’s a sad story that happens sometimes: Product: “customer research shows adjacency between use case X and Y, but they’re from different buying centers. We should investigate products for both.” Engineering: “X is a good fit for our current tech stack, but we can’t make Y scale unless we start…
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Vendor Management and the Unattainable Goal
It starts as a spreadsheet full of tickets. The customer feels that they’re not being heard, and they work with their sales team to produce a record of everything they have ever asked for. This record of course falls victim to the problems described here: 4/5ths of the responses are…
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How to Present a Product Proposal Executive Deck
I’ve been writing and presenting my entire career, so this set of learnings was definitely puzzling to acquire. But it turns out that you need a different deck for executive presentations than you do for conferences, sales, or product updates. First, a general note for technical or academic people. There’s…
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Top 40 Most Interesting
Say there’s a large data set, something like the lake under a SIEM. How do you find interesting elements from it? There’s a few different tricks, such as throwing it through a series of algorithms. One fun trick is to use a generic dashboard pattern. One I’ve played around with…
