Category: Uncategorized
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Steering from the Engine Room
Let’s say you’re in disagreement with the leaders of your organization. It’s not unusual, especially for a product manager. You’re hired to be independent and creative, but only up to a point. And so a new owner comes in, or a new team, or a new priority… the business wants…
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When Does Architecture Matter
I’m thinking of two orgs that did cloud by oh shit lift and shift and then rebuilt everything with more cloud-native architectures. The first org planned and executed that rebuild as a company-wide effort. They mandated, “We will all focus all our effort on doing this The Right Way (TM)”…
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Security Dependencies
It sucks that this happened. It sucks that there are wildfires too, but we’re too late to change the causes so we live and sometimes die with the results. As with smoky skies and the occasional torching of a community, so with annoying security products and the occasional loss of…
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Scripted and Off-Book Sales Engineers
I was some form of quota-carrying B2B (business to business) sales engineer for about 12 years, and have worked closely with these field engineers ever since moving into product management. There are many paths to success in the field, and I appreciate the clarity of a compensation plan: you’re either…
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The Systems Audit Sales Tool
One of my early steps along the path from English major to product manager was a role in the late nineties at a value added reseller in Emeryville, California. Now only visible as ripples in old records and the Internet Archive, PCS Networks was a fairly typical boutique consultancy. This…
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Software Bubbles
You know what I love about software? For any problem, there’s a solution that will automate doing a half-ass job on the easy parts of the problem, and a bubble based on claims that it will solve the whole problem and a couple of ancillary problems along the way. There’s…
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Book Review: Learning OpenTelemetry
Slim volume packed with good stuff, I enjoyed this book. Notably, Observability is defined more practically as the practice of knowing what’s happening instead of the black box outputs definition. There’s a good strong call out against MELT-style thinking. This is the idea that there’s three (or four, or N)…
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Beta product releases
The team has worked hard, and milestones have been hit. It’s time to release, and a decision is made: do we call this done, or do we call it beta? I’m going to bundle all the betas together here, but it’s beta if any of these labels apply to the…
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Offsites, huh
What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! Or quite a lot? No one knows! I’ve found the best offsite meetings to be the ones where field engineers and factory engineers get to spend lots of time with each other. Tanium’s TAM Weeks were an excellent example of this. I find…
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Can’t Measure, Can’t Manage
Every now and then it becomes briefly public that “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It“, is not at all what Peter Drucker or W. Edwards Deming said. Management is not a neatly solved problem of defining OKRs and managing SLIs. On the other hand, it’s also not…
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