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How Do You Measure Product Quality?
Product quality is a subjective measure, so you have to find ways to objectively track effort without creating a Goodhart’s Law problem. Since you’re not going to get an easy and accurate metric, you’re left to verifying proxy metrics. So, that’s a lot of processes and dashboards to track that they’re getting used and dashboards…
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Defusing Dramatic Conversations
Change happens. Maybe it’s a new strategic mandate, or altered priorities from customers, or realization that a technical approach won’t work. Your vendor disappears in a puff of smoke, you can’t be ready for unveiling at a conference so the deadline moves, your customer adds more requirements, your executive staff decide the feature should be…
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Product Managers get (all) the jobs done!
Sometimes in interviewing or training PMs, this question comes up: “Are we really supposed to be doing everything in this team?!” I’d love to answer with a clear “no”, but really? It depends. Product Management is a glue function. We are responsible for overall success, so we can stretch to fix some of the broken…
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Metrics and Observability
I wrote this as a Twitter thread in March of 2018, but the character constraints of Twitter at that time made it extremely cryptic. Also, it’s staged as a response to Splunk’s introduction of the metrics index… and to be honest, that’s no longer interesting to me. This is an expanded set of observations about…
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Writing a Resume
Given the surge of layoffs over the last few months, there’s a lot of people looking for new roles. Often resumes are a few years old, or perhaps misaligned for available roles. Here’s some tips on freshening yours up. Focus and Brevity I’d have written a shorter letter if I’d had the time — the…
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Security Products, Rules, and Complexity
Security products need to detect known knowns, so they build up a corpus of rule content. This corpus grows faster than it shrinks, if it’s maintained at all: new known bad is found at a rapid clip, while software is retired from use very slowly. There are two constraints on security products’ ability to use…
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Chaos, Control, and Team Bonding
Let’s do another quadrant: vertical axis is how chaotic the company is, horizontal axis is how bonded the teams are. Team bonding level is of course not a constant. The Tuckman model applies to all teams, and we human go through cyclical rhythms of togetherness and separation as we grow personally and professionally. That said,…
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Site Housekeeping
Migrated from blogger to wordpress, which is not exactly keeping up with the times but more like keeping slightly ahead of obsolescence. Should be nothing to see here, but if anything’s wrong, please let me know.
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Accidental Contradictory Incentives
Here’s a sad story that happens sometimes: And so now you have regret. Not responding to the market with a product does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. How did you get here? Misaligned incentives of course, but how did that happen? Well, it’s the same sad story as always.…
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Vendor Management and the Unattainable Goal
It starts as a spreadsheet full of tickets. The customer feels that they’re not being heard, and they work with their sales team to produce a record of everything they have ever asked for. This record of course falls victim to the problems described here: 4/5ths of the responses are some kind of redirection that…
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