If you start building an enterprise product eventually you are going to get asked to start building integrations with other enterprise products. This is ultimately an essential evil. Your customers already have a host of enterprise products handling the rest of their workflow. Your product is looking to do something with data coming from or going to another part of the business workflow. No one wants to reenter all of their data into a new system by hand, you need to be part of the ecosystem....
Military officers interested in moving into technology should consider careers in Product Management. There are strong parallels between the roles and product management requires many of the skill sets that effective officers have developed in their time in the service. But believing that you would be a good product manager and actually getting your foot in the door for an interview is another story.
When applying for roles, I recommend listing your experience in the military as a Product Manager rather than as a “Company Commander” or “Platoon Leader”....
I made a career transition into Product Management four years ago. Prior to starting my first role at Splunk as a line level Product Manager my previous experience was in the U.S. Army. I didn’t know that product management was a career field option when I started my job search, and as I look back on it I’m amazed I got any interviews at all. I had no meaningful experience building software, and I made some blind assertions that I had qualifying experience as an Army Officer....
I’ve been a product manager for three and a half years after being an Army officer for eight. Never in that time have I felt like I truly owned all of the products I’ve worked on. I’ve never had the final say in everything, and I’ve never sat to review that every single story met all of the acceptance criteria. Time, team dynamics, and the nature of working on large complex products precludes any single person from being able to exert that level of control....
Watching the aggressive use of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit to disrupt American political and social systems makes me think that organizations above a certain size should have a Chief Devil’s Advocate on their team. This exec should be focused on every way that your product could be used for misdeeds.
The term Devil’s Advocate is commonly used when someone wants to sound smart in a meeting by being contrary about the topic under discussion....
I listened to a great episode of Deliver It on DevOps for Product Owners and a comment by the Lee Janson that you don’t have to have perfect DevOps practices right away really struck home with me. Upon reflection it exactly maps to the evolution that my team has been going through over the past year on our developer tool Splunk AppInspect.
AppInspect is a tool that has grown tremendously in my year with Splunk from a something we built for internal assessment of apps that applied for our Certification Program, to a tool publicly available that as both a standalone CLI tool or through an REST API....
Ken Norton in an effort to help companies understand how to hire product managers wrote a guide: How to Hire a Product Manager I’m here to argue that the person you are looking for might just be a transitioning or former military officer. I have never been a Product Manager, but I have spent the last eight years as an officer in the United States Army, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some amazing peers and the honor of leading, coaching and mentoring some very promising young lieutenants....