Tag: Corporate Life
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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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The Rainfinity Demo
It’s easy to dismiss novelty, the new thing is often just the old thing with some small tweaks. But small tweaks add up, and eventually there is real change. Here’s what it was like to demonstrate virtual IP based network redundancy in the year 2000, over twenty years ago. The…
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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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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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Towing mines as strategy
Finding product market fit is notoriously difficult, am I right? Also, water is wet, and pricing is hard. Anyway, I’ve written a bit on the problems of founding a new product, differentiating features from products, and iterating a product until it works. It’s hard when you’re with a team or…
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You’re a CISO? That’s rough, buddy
I had the opportunity to speak candidly with several CISOs (Chief Information Security Officer) and CSOs (CISO plus physical security) at RSA this year. I heard lots about challenges, and it’s not surprising that the tenure is so short. There’s a lot to unpack in the data behind those articles,…
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Why Not Measure Product Performance?
I’ve written about metrics a number of times, since a lot of my career has been in tools to help people measure things. DURSLEy and CAPS talks about operational and business metrics, Product Sales Metrics is about measuring if your product is moving. There’s posts about measuring product quality, presenting…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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