Category: Uncategorized
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Unified Product Operations Process
Process is what people do, not what they say. In other words, what we say is aspirational, what we do is factual. If you describe what the people are doing now, you’ll be very successful in establishing a process for new hires to follow. But what if some teams don’t…
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Infrastructure as Code Sucks
Tasks to be done with a product can be thought of as points on a circular graph. That graph is a series of concentric bands, where each band is constituted of the people who can (have the ability and the permission to) do the task for the product. At the…
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Making Product Features to Order
As product managers, what do we do about the demand for large language model features? The problem: our discipline has coalesced on a concept of creatively solving real customer needs. Our textbooks call out Build Traps, Jobs to Be Done, and even Empowered and Inspired Transformation. We prefer doing lean…
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Help Net Security Observability video
How Security Observability can help you fight cyber attacks
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Certifications of Quality
A certification is a third party statement that you know something about something. There’s positive and negative value to that. Certifications are relatively rare and powerless in the information technology sphere; compared to medicine or engineering. You won’t find a lot of self-taught pharmacists, but learning security engineering on the…
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Pick Your Poison
In theory you “need” to pick between dependency hell or bloated monoliths, but in practice you don’t actually have to pick and so everyone uses a mixture of both and then complains about the problem set they’re feeling most acutely right now: Microservices Same goes for opinionated user experience versus…
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Why aren’t we doing better?
As a software leader or middle management cat herder, one is often driven to attempt a process improvement. The things, they’re happening too slowly, or without enough quality, or the wrong people are doing them. And so we propose a new process or a new tool. Maybe a miracle happens…
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Sorting Events by Time
I’ve been reviewing the APIs of a number of software vendors lately, looking at how you pull data that they don’t support pushing. It’s producing a bit of flashback to working with ugly things from the old days. Here’s a fun fact, apropos of nothing specific to any current project…
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Maintenance Windows and Breakage
Lorin Hochstein recently wrote about normal incidents, “a result of normal work, when everyone whose actions contributed to the incident was actually exercising reasonable judgment at the time they committed those actions.” Instead of an accident or an error, it is an incident which is the outcome of proper behavior.…
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Competing with the Microsoft Bundle
Something must be done! Here’s something… The vast majority of my career has been in competition with Microsoft’s bundled solutions. I do not think that you win by doing what they do, but more expensively. And yet, this happened. When Microsoft really comes at you, they do it with EEE:…
