I don’t like conducting interviews. I would rather be interviewed for a job than interview someone for a job. If I have to choose between written and oral communication, I will usually prefer to write. I like async communication because I have time to think clearly and then commit to words what I’m thinking. I have a mild central auditory processing disorder, meaning an in-person interview pushes my limits of listening, and critically processing, and taking notes on answers in real time....
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....
Michael Cata’s wrote a smart article discussing the Department of Defense is reacting to changing events with agility. He thinks we have a good start in the Army Operating Concept. In good units the Army already operates as an agile and learning organization. When lead by astute and prudent leaders it can very closely resemble an organization applying the Scrum Methodology.
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I’ve helped plan brigade and battalion level operations in my time as a staff officer and company commander. Lots of staff officers and NCOs standing over a map, drawing symbols on acetate, scribbling notes on paper and into emails and documents. Once the drawing is done one or several staff officers walks away from the table and copies all of the graphics onto power point slides and the Command Post of the Future (CPoF)....