DISQUS

Here's my best analogy. Think about how you drive a car.

How much of your attention do you focus on looking at the horizon? On what's around you? On the rear-view mirror? On the radio? On the other passengers? On the barking sounds in your head? (OK, that last one is just me).

The reality is you're dividing your time up based on the needs of the moment, but regardless of those needs, you can't *not* look in the rear-view mirror as much as you can't *not* look far ahead.

A well-integrated organization has specialists who are good at what's next, at what's now, and at what's behind. It's the job of leaders to make sure none of those specialists think they can drive the car on their own, or that their inputs are the most important. It's the integrated view that distinguishes the habitually from the occasionally successful.

Roger, I'm going to bow out of any discussion of relative value in lieu of acknowledging that any feedback is good feedback, the same way that any pizza is good pizza.

So if the only difference between a "regular" PM and the "agile" PM is the feedback interval, that means there is no difference. Feedback is feedback - in agile you are just doing more of it than you would for a more traditional waterfall turn. Yes there is a difference in mindset - and also a real impact on what else the PM can accomplish. I'll throw some gas on the fire and suggest a PM who is that embedded in the Agile process with developers is not a PM, but a business analyst attached to development.

Agile is for developers. Saying you are an "Agile PM" is a little like saying you are a Free Safety Ballerina.

Knowing what the basic problem you're looking to address is one third of the challenge.

I am consistently appalled how many companies start with "I want to build a product that solves the following problem" as opposed to "I want to build a product that solves the following problem that is pervasive [lots of people have the problem], urgent [the problem is causing meaningful, measurable and motivating pain] and which people are willing to spend $ to solve [as opposed to fixing it themselves or waiting it out or fixing a related problem]."

The latter is often masked by the fact that there is a buyer for the most niche-y of products. . . but the fact that there is some small amount of buyers does not necessarily equal that there is a sustainable market for that product. Remember, there is only one thing worse than having no customers for your product: having one customer for your product.

Not all opportunities should be acted on, even if it means solving a meaningful problem for someone. The other two elements of the calculus must be met. The PM who groks the problem but who does not nail the other two is going to fail, even with the best product.

There will always be technology fetishists who want to build what they want to build - and believe they can force the marketplace to acknowledge the brilliance of whatever it is that they've built. That's swell. It's inside-out, when more success can be had from taking an outside-in perspective on development.

I am so flattered to be referred to as one of "the usual places". Really!

http://acknak.blogspot.com/2008/01/hmm-what-can...

I think very few traditional software manufacturers do wide-release open betas correctly or well (two different things). One reason? They have no idea how much the software is being used by users, what modules are being used, whether those modules work as expected, etc. So these betas turn a sort of "work release program" for under-baked software.

Is it because instrumenting the software is hard? Because it kills performance? Because it can't be done comprehensively? Because the software hasn't been built in a way that would allow for utilization reporting at a system/sub-system level?

You can't manage what you can't measure. Web 2.0 has it easy - web-hosted apps throw off more data than cats throw off fleas. So-called "traditional" software (whether commercial or not) isn't so lucky.

There has to be a solution out there for this - someone has to have figured out how to make it easy to get software to throw off data that can actually be used for good, instead of just landing in a pile.

Twitter was founded by technologists. Product releases were user-driven and architecture-driven (to keep up with scalability and robustness issues). They've achieved a certain critical mass in the marketplace - a prerequisite to any meaningful monetization scheme.

So I'm not surprised they didn't need a PM until now - because the PM would have told them what they already knew:

1. Keep users happy
2. Keep the system on-line
3. Get more users
4. Repeat

I think they have ideas about how to make money - they wouldn't have started Twitter unless they did. But they didn't need an additional expensive headcount sitting around for two years telling them "you need a few million happy users and a stable infrastructure - when those happen we can talk about monetization schemes."

Kudos to Twitter for managing their headcount properly. If I were running the place I would have made the same call. They knew what they had to do, and they did it.

I'm as much of a fan of the product manager as anyone, but I know when and where they add value. We have to give executives credit for knowing how to run their businesses. Sometimes.

Rats, he got to that title before I did. Looks like I'm back to "The Tao of Product Management"

Comments are a good thing. Making the process of capturing them, responding to them and displaying them over-complicated is a bad thing. Just because a technology can be built does not mean it should be - especially if doing so opens my content to a third-party to monetize without delivering real value to me.

All that said, my friend and PM co-conspirator Adam Bullied uses Disqus - a strong endorsement - so I could be wrong.

If you're going to be a hit, you have to believe - really, truly believe - that what your audience needs is you.

Your personality, your dedication, your humor, your sensitivity, your smarts.

There is nothing wrong with embedding the very best of you in a product. Unless, of course, you're lacking in personality, dedication, humor, sensitivity or intelligence, in which case no one would have given you the keys to the product.

This is how Jobs works, after all.

I've got a book in me. What I need is some help refining what my "angle" is.

Great post, BTW. PMs of the world unite, tovarich.

Getting to Why is one sure defense against feature creep - and you sound smart when you ask. Double bonus!

Adam, as much as it pains me to disagree, I'd argue he is the best technology-focused founder ever, not the best PM.

1. He has control over budgets - PMs don't.
2. He can take the company in a wacky new direction without approval - PMs can't.
3. He can create and implement new technologies on his own - PMs shouldn't.

All that being said, I'm a huge Iron Man / Tony Stark / Robert Downey Jr. fan, and I'll agree that his passion for excellence is a wonderful trait. It's when passion turns into obsession that I worry, because obsession isn't reasonable.

Ain't it great being a fanboy? Wowzers.

This is a very challenging topic, Adam, but you capture the secret key to it when you say "the other thing you can do is communicate early and often".

Changes in product direction that are required by shifts in strategy are best accomplished when (pardon my analogy):

You call attention to the fact that the wind has changed. . .

THEN you tell them you need to turn the wheel. . .

THEN you tell them what things will be like when you're on the new heading. . .

THEN you give them fair warning about when you're going to turn it so they can hodl on to their drinks. . .

THEN turn the wheel. . .

THEN tell them that you've turned the whell. . .

THEN report on your progress now that you've turned the wheel compared to earlier.

No one likes surprises, and no one likes to be confused. Changes in product direction that anticipate both of these feelings in your target audiences (internal and external) are better received, even if they don't get the job done. You're more likely to get permission to tweak them again if folks know you'll be transparent about it.

Good luck, man - I sense you wrote this because you're living it, and it's one adventure I know can test you. Courage.

True story - when we were in Hawaii years ago, we came to believe that "mahalo" actually meant "that'll be twenty dollars". Damned expensive place, Hawaii is.

Which type of leather did you choose? It seems a lot darker than mine...

(And thank you for the link!)

bob

Being able to discern between gain and loss ("value") in all things is difficult - so much depends on your perspective, which is always subject to change.

Try and replace the word "value" with "joy", and see what that changes. Joy doesn't always spring from value (a relative function) or even happiness (a transient state). Being a father (like me) you know what joy is - now see how that translates into work product, specifically software. It's astounding to me how joyful the best products/services truly are, and how that translates into communities that *create*. Maybe that's what was bumming you out about some of the comments you were seeing.

Good luck with the shift. It's an important world-view mod.

I think it's wonderful that he has a basement full of stuff in his basement. It would be another thing entirely if he had a basement full of stuff in his attic.

That said, I've got a small VO booth in mine.

Good lord. Has everyone forgotten Sturgeon's Law?

"90% of everything is crud."

This includes user-created content, corporate content, all content. Unless it's your crud, in which case you love it, of course. One could extend this to CEOs I bet. And folks who leave comments on popular geek blogs. Hmm.

Who's Scoble?

In other news from inside MSFT, a "Microsoft insider" has revealed that there is a great bloody altar in the basement of building 4 where kittens and puppies are being sacrificed around the clock in a frantic attempt to appease the Dark Gods of QA to reduce their threshhold for quality from "60% needs to be re-written" to "10% needs to be re-written".

Hey, if they'll buy the first story, they'll buy this one too.

I could tell that you were experiencing a moment of crisis when you wrote "It's time to rethink everything". Climb into that sensation and look around. It all begins to open up for you when you start to question your assumptions - what the *&$&@ are we doing with software, and why, and who cares?

Ovid has something to say about this, curiously.