February 2012
1 post
January 2012
3 posts
Product Farmer
I’ve been mulling over a new metaphor for product management: farming. The farm metaphor has been used to describe software development in general. I believe it is also relevant to describing, specifically, the product management process. Farmers produce crops to fill a societal need. Some crops are staples that drive modern society, growth, and advancement. Others are more vanity, but provide...
Hell to Implement
Reproduced from the Learning Product Management board on Quora. One warning sign I’ve developed a sense to watch for is when a developer reports that something is or was “hell” to implement. This often translates to an incomplete understanding of the problem, the solution, or the technology needed to implement the solution. Having an incomplete understanding is natural when solving new problems...
December 2011
3 posts
Time to communicate to your team, do you take the...
The deal is nearly done. This sale is the biggest sale of your product yet. A significant milestone by any measuring stick. The buy decision hinges on one critical feature which you happily agree to build as it strategically aligns with your product roadmap. It’s not every day the stars align! You must act fast and execute well. A minor slipup will not jeopardize the deal, but as a...
Resolving Conflicting #1 Priorities—An Answer on...
Posting another answer I posted to a question on Quora about resolving conflicting #1 priorities. The Question What are good ways to resolve conflicting “#1 priorities”? This is an open-ended question intended to spur discussion, I have no particular conflicts that need resolving at the moment. My Answer I find a few ways to interpret this question: that the priorities conflict because you...
Resolving Conflicting #1 Priorities—An Answer on...
Posting another answer I posted to a question on Quora about resolving conflicting #1 priorities. The Question What are good ways to resolve conflicting “#1 priorities”? This is an open-ended question intended to spur discussion, I have no particular conflicts that need resolving at the moment. My Answer I find a few ways to interpret this question: that the priorities conflict because you...
November 2011
4 posts
Features Requiring Complexity—An Answer on Quora
An answer I posted to a question on Quora about protecting complexity when it is required received positive feedback. The question and my answer follow. The Question As a Product Manager who is technical, what are the best ways to protect a feature that requires additional complexity from the Simpletons? I have external influences in my product organization that tend to oversimplify features...
Product Management Craftsmanship—Mastery level
In the previous post, product management was considered as a craft. Specifically mentors, a salient features of a craft, were discussed. Newer product managers can avoid making costly, live-fire mistakes by tapping into the experience of mentors available to them. I suspect that most product managers have mentors available to them. Whether or not they choose to utilize their mentors is a separate...
Product Management Craftsmanship—Mentors
Product management is a craft says Bob Corrigan, a sucessful product manager and author of the ack/nak blog. He said this on the February 2009 episode of the Product Management Pulse Podcast (PMPP), “The Craft of Product Management,” where I first heard it, and on a ack/nak post, “meditation: on mastery”. Until recently, Bob claims, there were no product management focused programs at...
September 2011
5 posts
9 tags
5 tags
3 tags
1 tag
June 2011
6 posts
January 2010
2 posts
cereal & coffee
Posted via web from byte plight | Comment »
checking out post.ly
Posted via web from byte plight | Comment »
December 2009
2 posts
October 2009
2 posts
September 2009
1 post
August 2009
1 post
June 2009
6 posts
Apple Snow Leopard
So Apple put out some news about Snow Leopard today. I was surprised to find that, rather than the usual barrage of flashy new features on a new OS X release, the Snow Leopard page highlights a rather subdued but loaded categories of improvement: Better. Faster. Easier. Next-generation technologies. More accessible than ever. Exchange support.As I glanced through this list and the short...
Grab a snickers...
Posted via email from byte plight | Comment »
That paradigm shift? Yeah, it's coming
Recently I wrote Why Email Clients Need to Change which was a commentary on a post by the same name on gigaom. The gist of the post is that we are on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal information management, driven by the explosion of user generated content about which we care (ours and others). Managing all this information with our current application technology is untenable. Email...
California Cities on Google Squared
Apparently the ‘height’ of San Diego is 5’8.. never knew.. XD Posted via email from byte plight | Comment »
May 2009
3 posts
Your email address & Posterous
Over the past few weeks I’ve seen an increase in the amount of spam to one of my email addresses, perhaps as much as three times the average from a month ago. It’s usually not possible to tell the exact cause of an increase in spam: unless you judiciously track and sparingly use an address, there is always the possibility that it’s arrival on spam lists was simply delayed or...
Respect the comment
Forgive me my ignorance if there is already a way to do this. From Posterous (and most other blog platforms), I find one thing conspicuously missing: love of the comment. Posterous leverages the power of rich formatting in email clients, which has been under development for far longer than the rich editing tools of blogging platforms, to make posting both easy and powerful, but does not extend...
The People Vs. The Companies
I find it so odd and frustrating, this friction between ‘for the good of consumers’ and ‘for the good of companies’ in our society and economic system. That is to say that, often what is ‘good’ for the people is not good for enterprise, and vice versa, what is good for enterprise is often not good for the consumers they serve. Wouldn’t it be splendid if...
April 2009
14 posts
Get in the back of the van - Swede Mason
via youtube.com …. Posted via web from byte plight | Comment »
edushi.com maps of China cities (broken images...
Check out these maps of cities in China at edushi.com, they’re exquisite! Visit the site and click on a city name to explore. The amount of detail is amazing, especially considering the number of cities for which they have created these 3D maps. If you zoom the map out, and zoom your browser out, you can get an ultra wide view. Some maps also have animations, such...
Gmail fail
This time it was Gmail that failed. At first I thought it was Posterous, but when I look at the mail I sent to Posterous, the same images are missing. I’ve used inline images in Gmail before without a hitch, but perhaps it was just overloaded this time.. Let me try that post one more time. Posted via email from byte plight | Comment »
edushi.com maps of China cities
Check out these maps of cities in China at edushi.com, they’re exquisite! Visit the site and click on a city name to explore. The amount of detail is amazing, especially considering the number of cities for which they have created these 3D maps. If you zoom the map out, and zoom your browser out, you can get an ultra wide view. Some maps also have animations, such as...
Untitled
I’ve been using Posterous for about a week now (be sure to check out my other Posterous at http://compusthetics.com too!). Take a look at the post list for byteplight.com. Where on earth do these page view numbers come from?? They don’t line up with the Analytics numbers by orders of magnitude. My first guess was that the numbers had something to do with the nesting problem noted in...
The aesthetic beauty and simplicity of "archive"
Welcome to compusthetics.com, a celebration of that in the world (in particular the world of technology) which is aesthetically beautiful. Occasionally we’ll discuss grand schemes, breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, and unsurpassed elegance in computing. Other times we’ll break out the microscope and focus on seemingly inconsequential details which nonetheless have a greater impact on our...
Why Email Clients Need to Change
Today, I have to visit dozens of other sites and services to make sense of my online life. This is a waste: I already have a record of all these transactions in my inbox. I just need a better way to look at them. via gigaom.com I agree with what’s being said here, and I feel that we are close to a paradigm shift in the way we create and use an online ‘information inbox.’...
giant beetle robot
via youtube.com Posted via web from byte plight | Comment »
Artifacts From the Future - Smithsonian (2096)
via wired.com Out of all the future predictions, this one strikes a particularly funny chord. ala http://www.metafilter.com/73510/Artifacts-from-the-Future Posted via web from byte plight | Comment »
Autopost to Tumblr
OK, I know I said I wasn’t going to turn on Autopost for Tumblr… I know I said I wanted to test Posterous and Tumblr apples-to-apples… but it’s clear to me already that Tumblr isn’t designed to handle the post content I’m sending to Posterous. Because I’m emailing the post to Tumblr directly (instead of using Posterous Autopost), there is also no link to...
