Category: Uncategorized
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Growing the Company
Recent conversations on going public have reminded me that some assume taking a company public is inherently, completely good, necessary to being Important in the Industry. Here’s a few reasons why that is not always true, noting that I am not a financial professional. Posit that the natural course of…
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DURSLEy and CAPS
Monitoring and metrics! Theoretically any system that a human cares about could be monitored with these three patterns: LETS USE RED I’m hardly the first to notice there’s overlap… here’s a good starting point to read from. I haven’t seen these compressed to a single metric set yet, probably from not…
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Licensing thoughts, round two
License Models Suck got a lot of interesting conversations started (and there’s a roundup page), time to revisit from the customer’s perspective. Let’s also be clear, this is enterprise sales with account reps and engineers: self-service models are for another day. As a vendor, the options I describe seem clearly…
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Phases of Data Modeling
Phase 1 – it works for me Phase 2 – it works for my team Phase 3 – it works for my role in other teams Say that you want to use some data to answer a question. You’ve got a firewall, it’s emitting logs, and you make a dashboard…
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Weekly Status
People are creatures of habit, and effective work is produced by grooming useful habits. Here’s a quick write up of a useful habit: the weekly status report. I haven’t always written these, and I haven’t always worked for people who’ve wanted to receive them, but I’ve been at my most…
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Community
So you’re a software company, and you want to have a community. What next? “Why community” is a great place to start: the stated reasons and budget are often somewhere in marketing, but the community is equally important for customer support. Community is where soft guidelines are communicated, FAQs are…
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Security Logging
Security logging is interesting. Detecting security and compliance issues means uncovering nasty little leakages of unintentional or surprising information all over. When you add a powerful security tool to the environment, it starts to shine light into dark corners. No one expects that temporary file of sensitive data or the…
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Disrupting Ourselves
Let’s talk about some received wisdom: “disrupt your own market before someone else does it to you”. Sensible advice: complacency can kill. Except disruption is generally a pioneering activity, and the survival rate for pioneers is lower than for copycats. Corporate blindspots being what they are, this style of transition…
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Engines and fuel – who writes quality content?
In software, everyone wants to build engines, and no one wants to make fuel. A platform for executing content has high potential leverage and lots of vendors make those. The expected community of fuel makers rarely materializes. Content for software engines breaks down along two axes: simplicity versus complexity and…
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Line Product Management Process
I have some issues with the concept of “automating” or “scaling” product management, which I went into in this blog post — what I haven’t written up is what I do use. This is the process for directly running a product or multiple products; leading a team that runs products has…
