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Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
izzy's playlists!
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Cosmic Funnies
trying on a metaphor
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will byers stan first human second
i don't do bad sauce passes
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@thepmdude
The Facebook Whistleblower - Product Management thoughts
When you follow product management on Twitter, or some of the luminary influencer blogs, you begin to get this belief that most product managers are rock stars, selling out stadiums, doing TED talks, and curing cancer in their side hustle. But that isn’t reality. This post is about the silent majority who just do their jobs. Meet the Competent Product Manager (CPM). They work behind the scenes,…
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Product Management Types: The Quiet, Competent Sort
When you follow product management on Twitter, or some of the luminary influencer blogs, you begin to get this belief that most product managers are rock stars, selling out stadiums, doing TED talks, and curing cancer in their side hustle. But that isn’t reality. This post is about the silent majority who just do their jobs. Meet the Competent Product Manager (CPM). They work behind the scenes,…
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Replicable Business Models
The Dude watches the trajectory of some of the disruptors in the business space, and he has reinforced his belief that long term success and growth is tied to building businesses that are difficult to replicate. Think old line industrial. You make steel. Simple inputs. Iron ore, coke, some other metals to tune the alloys. In a simple hand-built kiln, with care and caution, you could learn to…
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Product Management Types: The Bull in a China Shop
Back for more exposition on the various types of product managers in the wild. This time, we tackle the “Bull in a China Shop” persona. This is a product manager who is tone deaf to the on-the-ground situation in an organization, who has a superiority complex.What does a Bull in a China Shop look like?n.b. – I will shorten this to a Bull to save the carpal tunnel syndrome from over typing… What…
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Product Management Types: The Dive Bomber
Being in product a long time and working with many product managers across many different industries (all tech though,) the Dude has observations about some stylistic variations in both the substance of the position, as well as the low-level execution. Today the Dude wants to talk about the “Dive Bomber” What is a dive bomber? The term originates from World War II, by the Axis powers. It took…
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Product Personas: Starry-eyed Engineers
A recent post about a week-long fire drill, and how the Dude’s teammates got their shit together (or didn’t) caused the Dude to consider writing a series on the personas of various product managers, and how they approach the position. The Dude is a grizzled veteran, who has worked closely with probably 50 different product managers throughout his career, and – naturally – has thoughts about how…
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Jira Returns to my Life
As we are moving to a more “agile” methodology for our development (not software or hardware), we are moving to a tool that the Dude has a rather complicated relationship with, Jira. The Dude first encountered Jira in 2009, when it was the issue tracker (aka bug tracker) and the tool that we used in the agile transition. Back then, it was a lot clunkier than it is today, and it was, uh painful…
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Consultants
Sometimes, you need help. A lot of help. And you don’t have the expertise in-house. What can you do? You can hire some talent and grow them You can train some people you have to gain that talent You can dial and smile, and call a consultant While I could spend hundreds or thousands of words on these options, let’s cut to the chase. You have a skills mis-match, and it is likely that you do not…
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The end is neigh - perhaps
When I first learnt of the service called Über, in the early-ish 2010’s, I thought what fresh hell was this business model? From a high level, the concept of the sharing economy sorta made sense. I mean, I have things that I don’t use that often, and if I could make a few bucks by loaning them out, I can see how that might make sense. Common good, and reduced waste. But pretty quickly it was…
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Purposeful Opacity
Hypothetical scenario today. Assume that you are a business that sells via a long-established network of partners (or representatives). For 20+ years, this network has been successful, growing your business until it is thriving, stable, and showing the growth of a mature business. A leader in the organization sees that we are “giving away” a lot of margin to these agents/reps/partners, and want…
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Sales and Bad Business
The Dude is going to rant about sales. Again. Our sales dude (really, he is a biz dev manager) has a couple of smallish customers who want this thing. He wants it badly. So, he paired up with a product manager in a different team (think professional services) and he wants me to build a product to help these customers. The sales dude has hit the Dude up over and over on this, and even a casual…
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Reflections on 2020, and the future
The Dude can’t sugarcoat it, 2020 sucked. Majorly. The year began with the inklings that a pandemic might by upon us, but that didn’t stop the Dude from working a tradeshow in late January. Turns out that was the last travel the Dude would do for the year (n.b. – He’s not complaining, travel lost its luster years ago) But little did he know how deep the malaise would go. When he returned home…
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Executive Fluffing
Executives are not like the rest of us. The Dude has said this before and has defended this position multiple times. But yesterday, he experienced another executive quirk, the “Fluffer” If you get offended easily, now is the time to bail out on this post, and to go read about puppy dogs playing with kittens or some such shit. In the video Pornography industry, the adult actors and actresses…
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Problem Space - Where Product Management Lives
As the Dude wrote in his last post, a quick blurb about looking for a new product manager highlighted the trend towards demanding candidates for product managers to have a computer science (CS) degree, and experience in software development. This came up as the Dude was looking for open job req’s that were in his space to look for what is attracting quality candidates. And even some pretty wide…
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Toxicity - Work Ethic
A couple of weeks ago, the Dude had to physically restrain himself from an outburst on Twitter. It was touch and go there for a while, but he thinks he has gotten the ire under control. The cause? A week that someone he follows who has become a self-proclaimed “growth hacker” that essentially said: If you aren’t putting in long hours, if you aren’t responding within an hour at all times of the…
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OKRs, a management cop-out
The Dude now works for an Objective, Key Results (OKR) organization. It is both new, yet not new, more of a formalization and codification of how things have been done. In some ways it is cool. There are tools, the team(s) are engaged, and progress does happen. In fact, it is an effective way to make a small-ish business unit behave more nimbly, and set short term goals that can be met with a…
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What Product Managers should focus on
The Dude is in a funk. This time it is all about the expectations of senior management out of product management, and how the direct management of product management is framed. (Whoa, the Dude just used ‘Management’ three times in one sentence.) How to frame this is tricky, so stick with the Dude. The Dude has had several “bosses” over his 22+ year career in product manager, and they can be…
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