Tag: Products
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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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Getting a Boost from Cognitive Computing Tools
A while back in the Before Times, I was working on product market fit for a small cognitive computing company. Plans didn’t work out, but here’s some free PDF materials I’d posted to the public site. First, here’s a talk about how Cognitive Computing differs from the Machine Learning baseline…
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Using a Data Lake for Business Insight
At a former employer some of us used to joke internally that we made the world’s cheapest business intelligence tool and the world’s most expensive log search tool. Business intelligence (BI) use cases are cheap from a data platform perspective, because value and volume are inversely proportional. All the work…
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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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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.…
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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…
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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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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…
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