Category: Uncategorized
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Sorting Alerts
Ah, the new year! February begins the new fiscal for many organizations, and it’s a fine time for resolutions and spring cleaning. You know, fun stuff like dumping recurring meetings, washing the windows, tech debt hackathons, or rearranging the living room. Here’s a fun spring cleaning activity to consider: review,…
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The Monthly Progress Meeting
Prioritizing hurts. It’s not just ordering a list, it’s picking the ideas that will live. But there’s a strange difference between doing it, and communicating it. Prioritize by yourself on a Saturday afternoon with a clear head. Communicate on Monday morning to questions and challenges from everyone involved. Then every…
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Where do Product Managers Come From?
Product management is a relatively recent discipline, young enough that the definition is still a bit shaky and we see occasional reactionary questions. (“What would you say you do here?” was directed at a PM after all.) When my PM career started the only formal training was Practical or SVPG;…
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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…
