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Pushing Back on a Strategy
Let’s say you’ve been told to make a change and you’ve taken it to the team, and after everyone’s calmed down and thought about it, you are personally convinced it’s the wrong move. You now have a conflict, potentially serious, with the organization’s direction. What then? Are you going to push back, or let it…
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Communicating the Plan
I wrote about communication tactics before, but that set of tips is more about status updates. Communicating a strategy is the next level up. Communication of the plan is not completed until the recipient is telling you the plan in their own words. Repetition is the key to this process. If you don’t feel like…
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Systems Programming and AI
Thinking about how SALAMI like CoPilot is supposed to make systems programming cheap and easy, in light of my challenge this week… The general problem statement: as a security analyst I want to know as much about an IP address as possible so I can make an informed decision, write rules, &c. The specific feature…
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How to Make Useful Charts and Reports
There is a wealth of charting and reporting tools to use, but in my experience there is also a lot of struggle to build charts that effectively communicate. Since you typically need to put some reports into products and certainly need to use them internally, it’s important to build competence here. Building a general purpose…
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Heisenberg’s World of Uncertainty
Security analysts can’t ever be certain of what they’re seeing and not seeing. See something, do something My entire career has been in some form of “see what’s important, then do something about it.” It’s Heisenberg’s world though. Collecting and moving data has impact and cost, which can be hard to continue justifying. That often…
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VMBlog Post on Decentralization
linking to this piece I wrote for VMblog Why Decentralized Work Calls for Decentralized Data
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Does ChatGPT have a product in it?
I think not. I discussed why there’s low value to be captured by modeling data in Where’s the Product in AI?. Using a Large Language Model approach to ask questions or frame answers does not alter that analysis. There’s been a dream of talking with computers since the first movie director to consider one realized…
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Why Get Product Feedback?
It sounds like a silly question when you phrase it like that, doesn’t it? But really, let’s all look back to the last time that you as a user were asked your opinion of any of the consumer products that you might enjoy / suffer through. Consumer facing apps rarely ask for user feedback, unless…
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QA and Product Development Fashion
I think there’s a lot of survivor’s bias in judgment of what works or doesn’t work in product development. Either you made something the customers needed, in which case whatever path was taken is lauded as the right one, or you didn’t, and whatever path was taken is held unaccountable because it doesn’t matter any…
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How Technical Should a Product Manager Be
It’s a common struggle for product managers, especially when they’re new to the problem area of this company. It can be articulated in several ways: Why do these questions come up? Because they’re causing friction. The product manager is being asked for input and can’t provide it, which causes self-doubt and fails to assist the…