Category: Uncategorized
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Engines and Fuel part two
Part One Why don’t software vendor companies make content? The best answer is that they have decided not to invest (or similarly, have not decided to invest yet). Companies are often aware of the gaps their customers complain about, and yet choose to prioritize other things. A less good answer:…
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Finding the Price
Let’s dive once more into the licensing breach! Here’s the background: What’s not covered? Well, when I wrote this post about evaluating a side business, it came close to the process for defining the price of a cost-plus service or product. That’s not a particularly hard task in theory: Of…
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Metaphors
I love words. I love to read and write. I was an English major for a reason. As I implied in that post, it’s important to know how to use language to engage emotion. However, you also need to know when to use a particular tool and when to leave…
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Product Management Reading List
Inspired by Andy Nortrup’s thorough posting, I’ve dusted off my own recommended reading list. It doesn’t have reviews or feedback, just raw links. An interesting attribute of the times is that product management is recognized as an important function, but it’s not narrowly defined. That leaves a lot of latitude…
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Do I have a product here?
Sometimes I chat with people who are interested in starting a side business, or even leaving their $dayjob. That can be a really rewarding option if you’ve got the opportunity. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with not doing it! Some people simply don’t want to run a small business along…
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Product Management Internships
An engineering internship program typically runs 6 to 12 weeks, often as a group exercise. Interns join scrums, 2-5 interns (generally 3), where there was a known deliverable on a topic of interest. They would experience the corporate version of their classes: understanding problems, sprinting to solutions, and presenting to…
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Know everything, then automate!
The concept of virtual patching has set me off on a small rant. If you’re not familiar, the concept is something like this: vulnerability scanners determine that PC42 in the CritStuff system has a nasty problem, but you can’t patch it for reasons. So instead, software magically figures out that…
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Offering Multiple License Models
I’ve written quite a bit about licensing software now, you can start here to follow the whole thread. In The Platform License Problem, I mentioned some free pricing as a hide-the-sausage technique. When there are multiple markets to find product fit for, and the vendor has a software base that…
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The Platform License Problem
In my other three posts about licensing, I discussed simple products. But what about platform companies? A platform company sells two types of products: the platform, which enables everything else, and the use cases which rely on that platform to solve specific problems. The key to the platform company definition is that…
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Scripts for Adulting
I’ve found that writing little scripts like that really helped my kids with their adulting conversations as they went through high school and into college. My daughter was very upset about the class, but it wasn’t relevant to her major so there was no point in discussing how or why…
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