Category: Uncategorized
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On Product Compromise
Product management is full of compromises, and one of the things about compromises is that they definitionally leave everyone at least a little bit unhappy. How you handle that disappointment is what distinguishes better product management from the less good. For clarity, I’m going to get more detailed about a…
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Avatar Product Management
It can be entertaining to stretch a metaphor into weird shapes… let’s do enterprise software development as Avatar: The Last Airbender. If you haven’t watched the show you should! Sure it’s for kids, but so is almost everything else made by Hollywood in the last few decades. It’s a well-made…
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CISOs’ Accountability for Product Security
There’s news going around about the Solarwinds CISO potentially being held personally accountable by the SEC for the 2020 build pipeline hack against their Orion systems management platform. Making vendors accountable for product security is probably a good idea, equivalent to food producers being accountable for their product. It’s faintly…
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How Do I Drive Remediation SLAs?
Question: I want to get my organization to patch things in a timely fashion, how? Can I just set an SLA (Service Level Agreement) of “patch the criticals in 30 days” and track that? Speaking as a vendor who’s worked with patching systems for everything from big banks and government…
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Getting a Boost from Cognitive Computing Tools
A while back in the Before Times, I was working on product market fit for a small cognitive computing company. Plans didn’t work out, but here’s some free PDF materials I’d posted to the public site. First, here’s a talk about how Cognitive Computing differs from the Machine Learning baseline…
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Using a Data Lake for Business Insight
At a former employer some of us used to joke internally that we made the world’s cheapest business intelligence tool and the world’s most expensive log search tool. Business intelligence (BI) use cases are cheap from a data platform perspective, because value and volume are inversely proportional. All the work…
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Platform Product Managers
Often your first product manager job is for a module on a platform, a single feature of a complex product, or a simple standalone product. This is because, while of course difficult, those are a lot simpler than managing a platform. When you product manage a platform, you lose a…
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Developing Content
I recently heard “you’re either writing software or selling it” as a categorizer for enterprise software employees, and I’d like to dig into why and how that’s correct and incorrect, at least descriptively. I am biased towards incorrect because I’ve worked exclusively for platform companies, but that’s just my experience.…
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Testing Product in the Field
DevOps: there is no QA, there is no infra, testing and support are everyone’s job. This works okay for unit test level work, but end to end functionality involving multiple teams breaks all the time. You can ask DevOps to take that on too, but they’ll just laugh. You can…
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Shewhart Control Charts
As a monitor writer, I want to alert when a value has changed quickly a lot in one direction or another, but i don’t want to set hard-coded thresholds because the value’s range is expected to slowly evolve. My goal is to get useful alerts and avoid false alarms. Examples:…
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