• Five years in Product - Leadership

    5 min read

    Continuing my little retrospective writing exercise on my journey in product management, in this part I wanted to talk a bit about my (bumpy) path to better understanding the nature of leadership.

    #prodmgmt

    This is part two on a series of posts on my transition to Product Management. If you’d like to see where this series began, feel free to checkout part one.

    As I’ve gone back and looked over some of the email traffic from my first couple of years in my role as Product Manager, one of the most obvious things that stands out is just how much was going on at the time (and how little I’ve apparently retained)!

    The backdrop of this period was a parallel effort in the company to:

    1. Modernize our software development practices by moving to a process built on Agile Scrum, and
    2. Shift way from our custom, consultative software development model to a product-centered approach focused on broader market needs.

    Either one of these would be a large, challenging transition. Looking back, attempting to tackle both at the same time was borderline insanity!

    Looking more closely at the transition to Product-oriented development, this is also seems to be a pretty common phase in the startup life-cycle.

    As I’ve talked to other folks in the industry, I’ve noticed that many startups, particularly those in the B2B space, initially succeed by developing a solution for a couple of “whales” that serve as an essential lifeline that keeps the company operating. Over time, as those successes beget more successes, the company can step back and focus more on the market than individual opportunities, and at that point, a pivot to a Product-centric development process makes a lot of sense.

    The trouble is, this is often not an easy transition. Ignoring the challenges in shifting the entire mindset and culture of an organization, there’s the basic politics of handing off responsibility for feature selection and prioritization from technology leadership to product leadership. As you can imagine, this transition can be very difficult if not handled delicately.

    Continue reading...

  • Locked in Internet Silos

    4 min read

    [“An intro post about my attempts to slowly pull myself out of internet silos so I can better control my data.”]

    #indieweb #selfhosting

    The Centralized Web

    I don’t think I’d be making news by pointing out that the internet, today, is dominated by large, centralized services. While this centralization of the internet is a far cry from the original vision of peer-to-peer interactions and democratization, those services have, in many ways, enriched our lives by connecting friends and family, individuals and businesses, citizens and government.

    But I also wouldn’t be making news by pointing out that those same services have a darker side, particularly those that would bill themselves as “free”. While ostensibly costing us nothing, these free services make billions collecting and monetizing our personal data while optimizing our use of those systems to enhance engagement. Worse, the data they collect, with or without our consent, is locked away outside of our control.

    I know this. And yet I still find myself making use of many of these services, including:

    • Google
      • Email (Gmail)
      • Storage (Photos, Drive)
      • Calendar (uh… Calendar)
      • Notes (Keep)
    • Github
    • Feedly
    • Ravelry

    And I’m sure many others besides.

    Each of these services provides immense value! Instead of having to host email, or create my own offsite storage system, or manage my own git server, I can save time and effort by having someone else do the work for me.

    However, in exchange, each of these services holds a piece of who I am. And I don’t control any of it.

    Continue reading...