Category: Uncategorized
-
What does a Director of Product Management do?
I’ve written up some thoughts for the regular work of product managers and product management interns, but have not yet written about the next level up. What’s day to day like when you’re not just helping one team? What makes a director level product manager? Just like the definition of…
-
The Innovation Team
A successful company grows. In growing from dozens to hundreds of employees, the company forms a culture of innovation that attracts an extremely capable individual: generalists who also have great depth, potential entrepreneurs, geniuses who can Get Shit Done. They build content, they build sales motions, they turbocharge they company’s…
-
Why I Don’t Like the Squad Model
Development teams have a fondness for trying new models… for better or for worse. I’m not a fan of the current excitement around the squad model. What is it Spotify is the purest example, but the model owes a deal to Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams, as well as a…
-
Purge Outlook Emails
Ever have to convert from an email system that encourages keeping everything to one with limitations? Well, here’s a way to encourage Inbox Zero. I looked at a few different scripts to start from, but this one was the most helpful. Note that this only works with “old” Outlook, new…
-
Penny Wise Hardware
Thesis: Organizations will continue to squeeze their highly paid people into the worst possible computing environments in order to block any accidental efficiency that might evolve in their organizations. Evidence to support that thesis: Five year desktop hardware refresh cycles for workstations (that’s on service plans of a year or…
-
Easygoing, Right, Wrong, and Difficult
This post is an expansion of the concept in Valuable Jerks. Also, Nadyne Richmond. Say your team has a project that needs execution. Launching a new product? Trying to land a customer? Trying a new process improvement? If it’s at all interesting, then it’s not obvious what to do and…
-
Communication in Teams
Question: how should your team ensure that other teams know everything you’re doing so the organization is more efficient? Answer: Use all of these tools. Push regular broadcasts of information (note that everyone will complain that the format sucks, the medium sucks, and the information that you provide is both…
-
Proving a Negative
Proving a negative is a tautological impossibility right? That’s the security business. Prove that you haven’t been hacked. Of course, many vendors realize this is impossible. Fact is, it would require the customer to understand everything they do in total detail so they could call out what was bad behavior.…
-
Conference Giveaways
Remember going to conferences? When I was a young sales engineer and going to my first conferences, it was clear that an attempt to attract visitors with a freebie or a lottery for a big thing was a strategy. Maybe not a great strategy, but there it is. Notable factors:…
-
Consulting’s Bad Rap
Naming no names… but there’s a type of management consulting shop with an unsavory reputation among middle managers and individual contributors. Let’s look at how the reputation is earned: by training to a model that produces failure as often as not, but always successfully deflects blame. It’s easy to find…
