Tag: Product Management
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Competing with the Microsoft Bundle
Something must be done! Here’s something… The vast majority of my career has been in competition with Microsoft’s bundled solutions. I do not think that you win by doing what they do, but more expensively. And yet, this happened. When Microsoft really comes at you, they do it with EEE:…
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Who the Tech Is Meant For
I’m pretty fascinated by the effect of social code matching in product design. In order to market and sell products you have to fit them to the buyer: language, use cases, pricing, packaging, sales motion, and more. In large and small ways, a company’s go to market or an open…
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On Product Compromise
Product management is full of compromises, and one of the things about compromises is that they definitionally leave everyone at least a little bit unhappy. How you handle that disappointment is what distinguishes better product management from the less good. For clarity, I’m going to get more detailed about a…
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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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CISOs’ Accountability for Product Security
There’s news going around about the Solarwinds CISO potentially being held personally accountable by the SEC for the 2020 build pipeline hack against their Orion systems management platform. Making vendors accountable for product security is probably a good idea, equivalent to food producers being accountable for their product. It’s faintly…
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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…
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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…
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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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