Category: Uncategorized
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Getting Stuff Done while Growing
One of the benefits of a long career across a variety of enterprise companies is that I have seen a variety of solutions to getting stuff done. This post will mainly be about operational cadence work and incident response. The related problems of developing new software solutions are a different…
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Building Products Isn’t Linear
You know that graphic about building a car that goes through steps from skateboard to car as the Right Way to Do It? I’ve always been bugged by something in that. To wit: each of the five steps is its own fully realized engineering project. They’re arguably smaller than the…
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Festina Lente
There’s been no lack of writing about development processes and engineering practices in software development shops (which arguably is everything now). The consensus of research and punditry stands firm: festina lente, or make haste, slowly. It’s like learning a complex riff on guitar: slow is smooth, smooth is accurate, accurate…
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How To Fix Medium Sized Problems
We can’t do all the things at once. In fact, good product management requires painful prioritization: working on this now, working on that later if at all. Some of the rocks get dealt with now. Others have to be deferred. Product ideas are a relatively easy problem to prioritize, mostly.…
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Software Architecture Humble Bundle Review
Humble bundles are just a huge grab bag of roughly related stuff — which is tough to work with. They’re great for getting access to a bunch of stuff in order to find out what you’re interested in or get a quick overview of a field. Here’s short reviews of…
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Default Alive or Default Dead
Lots of people are job-hunting these days. In conversations with friends about the companies they’re talking with, there’s a useful distinction to reflect on: Is the company default alive, or default dead? In other words, if everyone stopped writing new features, would the company immediately implode, or just sort of…
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Haas Product Con 2024 Review
This was a 300 person conference put on by the Product Management Club at UC Berkeley’s MBA program. About half students, half professionals (heavy on UCB alumni). I heard of it through Rands Leadership Slack but most people that I talked with heard about it through Lenny’s PM List. I…
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GTM is like SDLC
Craft construction and factory construction are different ways to achieve the same goal. If you want a table, you can craft one by selecting lumber and using a wide variety of carpentry skills to shape and sand and varnish a table. Or you can select an item from a table…
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Small Data 2024 Review
This week I went to the Small Data conference. It was really interesting, here are some rough notes. Big Data is Not a Number Jordan Tigani, MotherDuckRuns over the history of cloud systems development: horizontal scale instead of vertical scale, tools to manage emergent complexity, frameworks to manage complex tools.…
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Entropy Gonna Get Your Data
Here’s some followup to my Norton’s Law post — Quinn Norton explained “The main thing I’d add, and I should revisit this, is that it’s an expression of not too complex information theory/physics in our current data landscape: information, in all its glorious forms, requires energy, and if it doesn’t…
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