Category: Uncategorized
-
Continued Improvement in Software Products
What’s more valuable to the software vendor: improving what you’ve already delivered, or building something new? At first it might seem like building a new thing will have the highest return on investment. After all, new customer growth being equal, the finished product is only going to get support, renewal,…
-
Enterprise Roshambo
Ever wish there was a simple game to explain how complex organizations make decisions? You’re in luck! Roshambo, also known as rock-paper-scissors, explains it all. There are a few productive hours in each day, and three conflicting ways to spend them. The game explains how they will be prioritized. Default…
-
Total Compensation
Career decisions are complicated, but here are a few models to work with which might help. A salaried job is more than a simple exchange of your time for their money: you will be giving it some headspace in most of your waking moments. This conversation is not relevant to…
-
Thoughts on Logging
Those two phrases are contradictory and context dependent. This is why logging has different levels. They may be expressed as numbers or words. Each more verbose level is inclusive of the less verbose levels. Sematext has a nice in-depth overview. I can’t count the number of times that initial log…
-
Product Manager to Product Ratio
How many chucks could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It depends on the structure of the organization’s tech stack. A highly structured tech stack provides a format that you can build repetitive products with. Structure makes the design obvious and lets the developers work faster, which…
-
What kind of product are you making?
First know everything, then you can automate it! Also, if you can express your problem in numbers, I can tell you if they’re going up or down. A freeform exploration product attempts to enable a customer to achieve understanding and express the problem in numbers. Features may include user-editable schema (traditional database…
-
Declaring Idea Bankruptcy
It’s obvious that your R&D team can’t do everything at once, right? It’s obvious that items lower on the backlog aren’t going to happen unless they displace something higher on the backlog, right? And yet. Lots of those items are people’s beloved ideas. Good ideas, that would make the product…
-
The regrettable features you have to do
Sometimes as a product manager you get a feature request that’s fun and challenging and moves your company forward. Then there’s demands that just make you feel like a sad clown: stuff that doesn’t fit your plan at all. It’s hard work to ignore the nay-sayers and make a new…
-
Capitalizing and Operating a Software Business
“As I have noted in the past, this is why the venture capital model that was developed to support silicon so seamlessly switched to supporting software: both entail huge up-front costs to produce zero marginal cost goods, which means capped downside and theoretically infinite upside.” That Ben Thompson quote is…
-
Event Suppression Sucks
I’ve always hated the concept of event suppression in security products. Let’s start with some definitions of suppression, and where better than product documentation? There’s two common reasons for this feature: The first: “I don’t want to see this thing in my console of actionable items because I don’t have…
Monkeynoodle.Org 