Monkeynoodle.Org

Tag: Products

  • 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…

  • Developing Content

    Developing Content

    I recently heard “you’re either writing software or selling it” as a categorizer for enterprise software employees, and I’d like to dig into why and how that’s correct and incorrect, at least descriptively. I am biased towards incorrect because I’ve worked exclusively for platform companies, but that’s just my experience. First, where would this thought…

  • Centralization or federation

    Centralization or federation

    What’s better, a centralized system or a federated one? As per usual in systems architecture, that depends on what values you’re optimizing for. Centralized is good for ease of use: there is one entity to configure, one system to learn. Decentralized is harder, but enables experimentation and discovery: there are many entities with different economic…

  • 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…

  • Get the developer out of the way!

    Get the developer out of the way!

    I’d be so much more productive if I could get rid of this other person who keeps asking hard questions about exactly what I mean and exactly what I expect! Just make the spaceship go to Mars, okay?! Remember when the thing that was going to dis-intermediate software developers was visual IDEs? With XML data…

  • Systems Programming and AI

    Systems Programming and AI

    Thinking about how SALAMI like CoPilot is supposed to make systems programming cheap and easy, in light of my challenge this week… The general problem statement: as a security analyst I want to know as much about an IP address as possible so I can make an informed decision, write rules, &c. The specific feature…

  • How to Make Useful Charts and Reports

    How to Make Useful Charts and Reports

    There is a wealth of charting and reporting tools to use, but in my experience there is also a lot of struggle to build charts that effectively communicate. Since you typically need to put some reports into products and certainly need to use them internally, it’s important to build competence here. Building a general purpose…

  • Heisenberg’s World of Uncertainty

    Heisenberg’s World of Uncertainty

    Security analysts can’t ever be certain of what they’re seeing and not seeing. See something, do something My entire career has been in some form of “see what’s important, then do something about it.” It’s Heisenberg’s world though. Collecting and moving data has impact and cost, which can be hard to continue justifying. That often…

  • VMBlog Post on Decentralization

     linking to this piece I wrote for VMblog  Why Decentralized Work Calls for Decentralized Data

  • Does ChatGPT have a product in it?

    Does ChatGPT have a product in it?

    I think not. I discussed why there’s low value to be captured by modeling data in Where’s the Product in AI?. Using a Large Language Model approach to ask questions or frame answers does not alter that analysis. There’s been a dream of talking with computers since the first movie director to consider one realized…