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Continued Improvement in Software Products
What’s more valuable to the software vendor: improving what you’ve already delivered, or building something new? At first it might seem like building a new thing will have the highest return on investment. After all, new customer growth being equal, the finished product is only going to get support, renewal, and expansion dollars from existing…
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Enterprise Roshambo
Ever wish there was a simple game to explain how complex organizations make decisions? You’re in luck! Roshambo, also known as rock-paper-scissors, explains it all. There are a few productive hours in each day, and three conflicting ways to spend them. The game explains how they will be prioritized. Default rules: in enterprise roshambo, Compliance…
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Thoughts on Logging
Those two phrases are contradictory and context dependent. This is why logging has different levels. They may be expressed as numbers or words. Each more verbose level is inclusive of the less verbose levels. Sematext has a nice in-depth overview. I can’t count the number of times that initial log collection didn’t uncover the root…
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Product Manager to Product Ratio
How many chucks could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? It depends on the structure of the organization’s tech stack. A highly structured tech stack provides a format that you can build repetitive products with. Structure makes the design obvious and lets the developers work faster, which means more gets done easier. …
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What kind of product are you making?
First know everything, then you can automate it! Also, if you can express your problem in numbers, I can tell you if they’re going up or down. A freeform exploration product attempts to enable a customer to achieve understanding and express the problem in numbers. Features may include user-editable schema (traditional database and ETL products) or schema…
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The regrettable features you have to do
Sometimes as a product manager you get a feature request that’s fun and challenging and moves your company forward. Then there’s requests that just make you feel like a sad clown: stuff that doesn’t fit your plan at all. It’s hard work to ignore the nay-sayers and make a new thing. The product team and…
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Event Suppression Sucks
I’ve always hated the concept of event suppression in security products. Let’s start with some definitions of suppression, and where better than product documentation? There’s two common reasons for this feature: The first: “I don’t want to see this thing in my console of actionable items because I don’t have the time, knowledge, perspective, or…
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What Should Go Into a CMDB
It’s not every day that information technology work leads you into philosophy, but designing a configuration management database will do it. Spend a little while thinking about what is known or even knowable about the services you’re trying to provide and the entities that compose them, maybe you’ll end up asking “what does existence even…
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Using a Technical Edge in Products
“Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.” — Howard Aiken Innovative technologies are different than what came before. Product buying patterns are based on what has come before. If you have an innovative technology you will need to bend your customer’s stated needs…
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Two Types of Questioning
Answers to questions can easily fit into two flavors: operationalized and free-form. Classify the use cases: there’s the questions you know how to ask, and the questions you don’t know to ask yet. A question that you know how to ask is operationalized. You’re looking for yes, no, or broken, or perhaps a count. The…
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