Monkeynoodle.Org

Tag: Product Management

  • Platform Product Managers

    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 lot of the simple answers…

  • Testing Product in the Field

    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 ship without doing any, and…

  • Towing mines as strategy

    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 working on your own. But…

  • You’re a CISO? That’s rough, buddy

    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, but this is a product…

  • Why Not Measure Product Performance?

    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 metrics to leadership, building good…

  • Pushing Back on a Strategy

    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…

  • Why Get Product Feedback?

    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…

  • QA and Product Development Fashion

    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…

  • How Technical Should a Product Manager Be

    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…

  • How Do You Measure Product Quality?

    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…