Tag: Corporate Life
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Book review: the Practice of Practice
The Practice of Practice by trumpeter Jonathan Harnum presents a lot of quality advice for getting things done. The book is written in bite sized nibbles with a lot of puns. It’s also full of QR codes to URL-shortened links to videos and apps, which I didn’t use. I’ve been…
-
Post-job whiplash
Most salary jobs in tech come with large amounts of pressure: team sizes are designed to be small, roles are “flexible” in that everyone has more than one, and the migration to SaaS adds on-call responsibilities to roles that didn’t have them before. Companies pivot, they reorganize their teams into…
-
Managing Situations
I’ve written a bit about managing situations in corporate life. Whether managing up, down, or all around, everyone in the corporate machine has to face changes, renegotiate their responsibilities, make a plan, and act. For some this is as natural as breathing, for others it is a huge and recurrent…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Monkeynoodle.Org 