Author: paranoidmike

A Product Manager sharing experiences on & of the job.

Purity of Product, Sales or Code – are ALL wrong

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I caught this echo-chamber discussion on the LinkedIn Product Management channel:

https://www.linkedin.com/comm/groups/42629/42629-6103296611813781509

Somehow I thought I’d mention a thing or two and then bail, but the more I wrote the more strongly I felt how misguided the “keep your product vision pure” message was. Here’s what I wrote, think of it what you will:

Purity of the product is one ideal; never losing another “key” sale is another such ideal. Making every user happy and productive with your product is a third such, and never shipping imperfect code is yet another.

None of these ideals can be achieved in isolation for very long *and* maintain a successful business. Sometimes we have to flex on one of these ideals to help the rest of the organization improve their position on another.

If I put my foot down and refused to engage with any of my key customers’ feature requests, any responsible sales exec would have my head…examined.

If I gave into every customer want, no product leader (engineering, marketing or product management) would have any faith in my vision of the product.

If I constantly let the engineers gold-plate the code and drive out all tech debt, we’d be so far behind the market we’d never get around to acquiring new customers.

Rallying around the banner of “never let Sales disrupt the purity of my product’s vision@ sounds just as naive as “never ship an insecure product” and “always involve your Designers up front and throughout the development process” (both of which I’ve observed firsthand in those respective domains).

Never forget that every signal from the market can be that incredible insight that *causes* you the change your product strategy, and Sales are often your eyes and ears gathering input from customers that you yourself weren’t there to acquire.

Best advice? If it’s a significant sales opportunity/downgrade, and you haven’t spoken with that customer before, it’s worth considering taking a half-hour out of your schedule to qualify the sales opportunity *and* the feature request yourself – if only to increase the strength of the signal and decrease the risk of making the wrong call.

I personally don’t do enough of this, but when I do it gives me irreplaceable opportunities to learn from customers who aren’t there to feed me what they think I should hear (i.e. the standing “customer council”) and let me pivot the conversation to find out what else they really need (i.e. other items in considering) that Sales didn’t take the time to ask about.

New job at New Relic: First Month Report

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An incredible place, rewarding experiences, emotionally engaged people.

Week one: feeling incredibly welcome, people are buzzing by saying “hi” but dropping no turds in my lap

Week two: I’m starting to get to understand the scope of my job and it terrifies me; tigers are lurking in the shadowy forest, and I’m hearing some occasional growls

Week three: I’ve slain a small house cat and feel like a warrior born; scouting parties are starting to make contact, and I’m getting involved in a real (but small) skirmishes with that beast they call “work”

There’s three levels of tired that come with an amazing new job:

  1. Tired when I get home. “I might turn in at a reasonable bedtime, honey.”
  2. Bone tired as I drag myself down the street, hoping I I don’t get mistake for a drunk before I get home.
  3. Drop like a sack of rocks when I cross the threshold. “I’m sorry I drooled on you while using you as a pillow, Mr. Fellow Bus Passenger.”

I am so glad I’m not driving home after work these days – “reckless” and “menacing” would be likely adjectives among the charges.

Highlights include:

  • Hardest mindfulness lesson: “we have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen first and then speak” – I am fighting to curb every ego instinct I have to stop trying to sound smart (show off as if I already understand all this new shit) and ask questions or just look like I don’t know what everyone’s talking about
  • Met a dude who spent six months working between Stockholm Sweden and Hillsboro Oregon. (We made many jokes drawing increasingly-strained comparisons between the two sexy locales)
  • Favourite hair colour I’ve seen: burgundy/orange/yellow stripes (like a funhouse Neapolitan ice cream)
  • Estimated number of people who recognized me by my hat: 5 by Tuesday
  • How welcome I felt by the end of day one: 10/10 (would do it over again)
  • How overwhelmed I felt by the end of week two: 12/10 (would crush my brain over again)
  • Best Google Mail hack: http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use-gmail-more
  • “6months” – the amount of time every SINGLE person says it’ll take for me to be a net contributor to the business
  • New phrases: “icebergs vs. ice cubes” (are problems big, or do they just start out that way because everything’s so loud at the start), “N+1 query”
  • Never laughed as much at work – spontaneously – at least not sober. This is a very entertaining group of folks (or they’re just as warped as me). Friday’s highlight – “Anyone interested in a quiche run to Lauretta Jeans? I’m feeling like elevensies today.”
  • Bus asymmetry: getting on the 14 (Hawthorne) anytime between 7:30-8:30, sit with lots of normal, quiet, keep-to-themselves people. Getting on the 4 (Division) at work towards home anytime between 4:30-6:30, (and couldn’t think of a good joke to wrap up this thought)
  • Best spontaneous phrase I came up with to describe my mental state by week 3: the project plan I drafted hasn’t made me feel competent, but it “bounded my insecurities”
  • Perspective I heard I love: Intuit obsesses on our customer problems, not on what we’re building
  • “Discovering not declaring” how core values were generated
  • “Bring out the best in each other” – not a regulated nation-state

On the scale of behaviours of people with whom I’ve had to work in my career, the worst of them I’ve encountered at New Relic are pretty mild, and the best of them are bend-over-backwards nice, helpful and fun to be around.

Anticipation

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Contemplating the question of whether I’m ready for my new job as an annointed (annoying? the words sound so similar…) Product Manager at New Relic.

iu-2

Excited, yes! This is going to be a learning opportunity without compare, and tons of opportunity to get to know a whole new set of customers.  The amount of stuff I don’t know is huge – I know a lot of stuff on which I’ll build, and I’m a super-sponge for the customer needs, the way their tech works, and what’s really important to everyone – and there’s plenty of opportunity to live that dream.

Nervous? Hells yeah. Those customers could be very demanding; the engineers might find me wanting; the technology is terribly complex and I worry if there are things I’ll just never get.  Worst case, they’ll encounter me as one of “those people” – the folks who don’t understand the technology, are talking out their ass, and end up misrepresenting the way it really works or how long it could really take to deliver a new feature.iu-3

Ready to start working?  Um.  YES.  I’ve been getting more and more anxious about all the what-ifs, the ways I might embarrass myself and how many ways I want to help out and make good stuff happen.  I thought the time off between jobs would be helpful to get my mind at ease and clear of the old world; clear was easy, but ‘at ease’ was apparently not in my playbook.

See you on the other side!iu

Non-Diversity Apologists still abound in Comics

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I did a dumb thing today.

I read the comments below this post at the Marvel: The Untold Story page:

https://www.facebook.com/MarvelComicsUntoldStory/posts/634186903384002

And immediately lost another month off my life due to the immediate blood pressure spike.

I recovered some of those lost future days by reading the source article upon which the comments were theoretically made:
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/07/kelly-sue-deconnick-profile

Why do the moron patrol spout their ill-informed opinions when the confounding data is so easy to obtain?  If there was no systemic discrimination biasing the work-for-hire systems at the Big Two (DC and Marvel) towards white males, I’d expect to see a relative population among female creators somewhere better than the female engineering population we see in the tech industry (which according to the best of the paucity of data out there, is around 12%).

Here’s the latest figures for DC’s male-to-female stats:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2015/07/08/gendercrunching-special-edition-dcyou/

And for reference, here’s a similar study of both DC and Marvel from 2012:
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2012/10/30/gendercrunching-august-2012/

Analysis/conjecture: the % of creators hired by the Big Two who are female has consistently peaked in the low teens, and even % of back-office employees is generally lower than the magic 30% threshold (where “gender diversity” is celebrated, and beyond which females start to experience a marked uptick in pushback, and “diversity initiatives” start to see institutionalized resistance).  And sadly, this is years after fans demand DC take action to change it (and they agreed).  Maybe DC thinks that <10% is their end goal?

Hell, when one of the paragons of progressive thinking and hiring, Apple, can’t even make it past 30%, where do smaller creative companies and the masses of ‘invisible’ tech corporations stand a chance?  Google’s 30% is even held up as an achievement, which is DEPRESSING.

Contrary to what I’ve heard in the comics press and hallways for years, comics fans are about half female these days.  Hasn’t always been that way, but it’s also fascinating that readership has achieved near-parity when many (men of course) predicted it would never, and that maybe it shouldn’t (to preserve the enclave of “what we white males have always enjoyed in the safe past”).  It’s not like there isn’t interest from females, and I’d predict this to bleed into the creative population who’s trying to get a gig there – it would blow my mind that only 10% of the people trying to create comics are women.  (This article mentions women outnumber men in an undergraduate cartooning setting, for example, and then quotes the instructor, “It’s also not uncommon that they’re the best students in class”.)

So assume for a moment the fantastic proposition that there’s a greater proportion of women clamouring for the gig than are getting the gig, what does that say about the selection filter: are those making the hire decisions going to explain this by saying that the greater proportion of women aren’t as talented as the men?  That they aren’t applying through the correct/operative/off-the-books channels?  Or that they are actually just more comfortable hiring people like them (white, male, cis)?

[Relevant anecdote: Bobbie Chase, a female editorial director for DC, was quoted in this article saying, “We’re pursuing people all the time who could be new voices for comic books, but it’s still going to be a predominantly male industry. I don’t think that has to change, but we can certainly make a much better balance.”]

[Another relevant anecdote: Ann Nocenti in this article said, “Its undeniable when you look at industry-wide statistics, women are hired low, their salaries are lower; I think statistically you can say women aren’t treated fairly in any industry.”]

Any answer raises troubling questions that I really hope are being examined and answered honestly, and which will drive systemic change in both the comics and the tech industry.

robliefeldcaptainamerica
Even freakish Cap thinks there’s a problem here

 

Leaving Intel on a (commuter transit vehicle?) – New Relic here I come!

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Good news. Hell, great news!!  I’ve accepted a role as Product Manager at New Relic (a very cool, local Portland-based software company). I’ll be joining them later in July – wild adventures await!

So with that simple admission comes a little Story Time: you know me, and you know I’ve grown into a well-oiled Product Owner and Interaction Designer in my work at Intel (for basically the same organization for my eight years there).  

Working for them allowed me to grow into these skills while delivering a suite of business applications, a Security Conference website and as little paperwork as I could get away with.  

[None of those fully-stocked portfolios of art pieces for me – I stopped trying to “build my portfolio” when I realized it was a textbook example of the Waste that gets in the way of thoroughly agile development.]

Using those skills, I birthed the core application out of conversations I had with team members in 2008, and shepherded it through:

  • its underground “you shouldn’t spend any time on this Mike” phase
  • a series of dev teams (man, when I was first delegated “half an engineer”, what a momentous achievement that was!)
  • many competing ‘visions’ of what it should be when it grew up, and
  • over 100 sprints of delivery – short, long, successful, abject failure, research, tech debt, “spike” (aka “we have no idea what we’re doing”), breakneck, misdirected and surprising

Recently I took on an exciting and challenging volunteer assignment with an IT team who are responsible for internal collaboration tools.  Which was both a rewarding and fast-moving learning experience – it’s incredible how much planning goes on when you have a 4:1 ratio of non-doers to doers, and it’s amazing to see how much good dev work actually happens despite that.

A little while later, a friend recommended me to a hiring manager at New Relic, who reached out for a coffee to talk about a ridiculously challenging role they’ve designed to assist their Agents teams. That conversation continued through three rounds of interviews (and a heavy-duty homework assignment!) and blew my mind by manifesting into an offer I patently couldn’t refuse.

This new PM role is both incredibly suited to my talents and brings a range of new challenges for me to tackle – I’ll be contributing to product direction for six teams in a fast-growing, revenue-focused organization with a heavy engineering bent and a lot of new customers and technologies to learn. I couldn’t be more excited about this.

So hey, if you happen to be looking for new features in the New Relic product stack, drop me a line come end of July and I’ll see if I can’t connect you to the right players (it might even be me!).  I will use my newfound powers with utmost gravity…
Spidey

Discovered artist: Justin Ponseur

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https://m.facebook.com/JPoColors
At the DevSigner conference this morning, Justin McDowell (@revolt_puppy) turned me on to the realistic, natural colour work of Justin Ponseur. 

After a few minutes flipping through his site, I am definitely a fan. His colour work adds another level of gorgeous to even the best artists (and probably covers a lot of sins from the lesser artists).

You Get Invited When You Add Believable Value

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I’m constantly amazed and amused at this kind of “but *I* deserve to be invited too” thinking:
All too often folks don’t want to bring everyone in on Day 1.
And that’s the real problem.
They don’t want to relinquish the (illusion of) control. They want the freedom to make many of the decisions without participating in this crucial collaborative work. Well, guess what? That’s a very costly move: The later everyone is brought in the greater the overall project risk.
In my career, I’ve heard this from the Operations folks, the Support team, the Security high priests, and most recently from the UX zealots.
This usually takes the form of “but if only they’d included us too in the conversation at the beginning, we wouldn’t be in this mess” fantasy.  The longer I watch these folks argue from the sidelines [and one of the things I used to do], the less sympathy I feel.
Telling us on the development & delivery side of the organization that we need to include you too feels a little like telling a kid they have to watch all the good movies with their parents in the room.  I’m sorry, what exactly about that sounds like an incentive?
“Oh, well if you found that security flaw in architecture instead of during test, it would’ve been orders of magnitude cheaper.”  As if it’s a pure win-win scenario – and not, as reality suggests from talking to the folks actually doing the real work, that rather than *prevent* every statistical possibility, often times we’d rather get the product out in front of people and find out which things *actually* bit them/us on the butt, and only spend time fixing *those* things.  Get product out there capturing revenue months earlier, plus reduce your investment on the long tail of an infinite number of possible issues that would cost schedule and profits to fix up front (and turn out to be non-issues)?  Yeah, you don’t need an MBA to make that kind of call.
[Not to mention, “fixing something in architecture is cheaper” assumes (1) that the architecture is communicated, interpreted and implemented carefully and successfully, (2) that new bugs aren’t introduced at every translation layer because the architects abandon their responsibility to follow-through, and (3) that they anticipated and addressed every implementation issue.]
“But if you just invited the UX designers/researchers before starting to talk about product features and ideas, you’ll have a much wider palette of well-designed ideas to work from.”  Yes, that’s potentially true – if your designers have a clear idea what the target users need – or if the researchers can turn around actionable findings in a short timeframe – or your UX bigots don’t throw cold water on every speculative idea and colour the conversation with “how crappy everyone but me is”.  That dude is real fun at parties.
We love working with that guy
Are you one of these people I’m picking on?  Are you sufficiently pissed off yet?  OK, good – then we’re getting close to a defensive wound we’re all still harbouring.  Which is the right time to clarify: I absolutely appreciate working with folks who are aligned to our business priorities, and work to get us actionable results in a timely manner that are relevant to the business problem we’re facing.  I’ve spent decades now working with security and usability geeks, and some I’ve found to be extremely helpful.  Some I’ve found less so.  Guess which ones I’ve heard complain like this?
Here’s the pitch from a Product Manager to everyone who’s vying to get a seat at the table: I don’t have enough room at the table to entertain everyone’s ego.  You ever try to drive an effective decision-making body when the room (or conference bridge) is stuffed so bad, it looks like a clown car?
It's a fun ride until you can't breathe
It’s a fun ride until you can’t breathe
Those who I invite to the table are effective collaborators.  If you have a concern, make sure it’s the most important thing on your plate, make sure it’s something I can understand, and make damn sure it’s something that’s going to have an impact on our business results.  Every time you spend your precious ante on “but what if…” and not “here’s a problem and here are all the possible/feasible/useful solutions, depending on your priorities”, your invitation to the next conversation fades like Marty McFly’s family in that photo.
McFly-Erasedfromexistance

Conferences and unconferences – I’ll go to the latter over the former every time

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Best conferences I go to have no prepared agenda, no “luminaries” aggrandizing themselves, lots of fascinating up to the minute topics and copious discussion in session. “Papers” written in advance is the best way to stifle all that rich interaction, because it’s a sieve to filter out all those who haven’t yet attained expert status – and I rarely learn as much from experts, since they are usually quoting from their own tired catchphrases rather than original thought in response to others’ earnest inquiry.

Give me the interaction – that’s where I learn best – over the lecture. If I can throw in an inspired idea (or sometimes, a bit of snark) and hear a legitimate response to that, it far exceeds my trying to silently (or long after the monologue has completed, from an over-lit and terribly conspicuous microphone) parse out a heavily compacted or cryptic thought pattern. 

Give me intimacy, not hollow echoey halls filled with row upon row of anonymizing and silencing seats. 

Give me half-baked theories or simply questions to get the ball rolling, rather than twee or horribly over-thought concepts that are important only to the speaker (because they actualize the speaker’s self-centredism rather than actually enlighten the audience (and maybe even the facilitator).

Give me an unconference, not a conference. Scale is nearly impossible in the former, and often seems the point of the latter. Bragging rights is not how many attendees, but how many smiles and new connections. 

Advice for a brand-spanking new Product Owner

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I’ve started a mentee collection.  Not a manatee collection:
manatees
My mentees are better looking
I’m mentoring three new Product Owners, collecting them into my posse as I encounter new Product Owners who have no peers/colleagues from whom to learn the ropes.
The rant below was inspired by a real-life plea for help from a newly-minted Product Owner at my company.  Knowing how anxious and overwhelmed I was when I realized what I’d gotten myself into, these are the kinds of “start small, start here, build on your successes” advice I’d give my past self (can we use Skynet’s back-in-time portal yet?):
What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
  • I’m inclined (especially with new teams, new process, new roles) to start small – get a rhythm, build a few quick wins, get small pieces shipped in short timeframes, even if it’s not technically a “potentially shippable product”
    • The important thing is to start seeing chunks of more valuable engineering work delivered earlier
    • For example, I’m currently getting the team to work on a “research spike” to determine if they can figure out how to add “test our site using IE11” to the test coverage – plus we’re doing the second story (broken up from a larger story) to deliver an Export capability to our project planner (just started with flat file, unformatted CSV as an export deliverable for now – it’s good value to users, and we’ll refine and “gold plate” it later)
    • I’ve also had them working on some of the more ‘valuable’ tech debt over the last few months – cleaning out old database tables, removing dependencies on legacy code and data structures, etc. – all written as “stories” (probably doesn’t fit the dogmatic definition), small bits of work each, that ideally could’ve been done all at once, but are easier to schedule, are establishing a rhythm, and have given them hope that I’m committed to systems hygiene as part of our negotiation between “user value” and “systems integrity”
  • Encourage the team to adopt SCRUM (or whatever flavour of Agile-ish behaviour they’re aiming at) in stages – don’t try to swallow it all at once
    • As a fresh PO, I’d stand up and tell them I don’t expect them to get everything right the first time, and especially not when they’re playing with all these new “process toys”
    • e.g.. Try the “sprint planning” and “retrospective discussion”, and drop everything else, for the first sprint – see how it goes, spend the time discussing “things to do more of and things to do less of” at the end, and ask them whether they’re ready to add “daily stand-ups” or “story point estimation” or “story breakdown” to their process
    • Personally I don’t want process to get in the way of the engineering – I want it to be a net break-even, and if you try to do all the process all at once, there’s no way that they’ll get any effective engineering done that first sprint or two – just too much flailing and failing on friggin terminology, not enough on learning to succeed at the job with incremental improvements along the way)
  • As quickly as possible, focus your efforts on the WHAT and the WHY of every piece of engineering work that the team sets out to do.
    • Any of us that come from engineering will still trip over the HOW too many times to count before we get really good at this, but it’s worth the effort to learn.
    • The most satisfying feeling as a PO is setting the team a challenge you yourself have no idea how they’ll deliver, and watching them struggle, flail and invent something they never knew they could do.
    • Over time, they’ll recognize your trust and confidence in them – in giving them the leeway and slack to take on challenging problems and kick the shit out of them]
    • It’s taken me years to let go of this, and I’m still meddling more than I should, but it’s satisfying to imagine how it’d feel for my ‘product CEO’ to have faith that I’ll do an amazing job figuring out how to make it happen
  • The big focus for you – for as long as you inhabit this crucial role – is to spend as much time in the heads of your users (and unfortunately, stakeholders who aren’t end users) to understand what will be the most valuable thing to deliver to them as soon as possible
  • The trick is “most valuable part of functionality”, not the ideal solution
  • e.g. The users want to be able to import the set of security requirements into their ‘work tracking system’ (Jira, RTC, Rally, Trello, etc).
    • It would be awesome to have it pre-filtered to just what they need, pre-annotated to fit exactly the field structure of each of their tools, and able to be exported back into our system
    • However, the most important first incremental delivery of value before we work out all those problems is “structured list of the names of the tasks, their current status and a link to more info on how to deliver them” – a far cry from the ideal solution, and probably ten steps between here and there
    • I’ll carve out this first step as a story, where the WHY is “I need to track this shit in my native work tracker”, and the WHAT is “the details that are critical to me tracing back to what I need to know to be successful”
    • The rest of that work I’ll represent as notes in a parent Epic, or one or more Stories that may or may not be fleshed out enough for the dev team to tackle (depending on how soon I/we think we might get around to delivering that residual incremental value)
In a future post I’ll introduce the fever-dream “system” I use to calculate priority for each story and Epic, but seriously you’ve got plenty to chew on just getting out of the starter’s gate. We can setup a 1:1 call for whenever in the future you want to review results/commiserate over failures/discuss additional experiments that you’re ready to try.
It’s an adventure – a Very Real experience in both asserting control and letting go of absolute control over the direction of the product. It’s a blast.  If you’re a new Product Owner, welcome to the tribe.

The “-ity” Echo Chamber

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What Kicked Off This Rant

I watch a blog at work that lectures about all the reasons why they’re wrong about this blogger’s pet subjects – design, UX, research, many of the secondary aspects of quality of a piece of software (much like security and privacy are secondary quality characteristics of technology projects). Overlong weekly screeds with tons of footnoted research to “prove” the points.

Footnotes.

Like a dozen per post.

No, seriously.

Then the fawning praise comes in from the people in the same field who all already agree with the points being made, and feel like their voice is being amplified and broadcast.

Only it ain’t. When your readership is the Echo Choir, I’m sure the adulation and affirmation that you’re “right” feels great, but does any of that advocacy translate into changing the minds of the folks who actually hold the power to implement (or ignore) your demands?

Echo Chamber

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