Nortrup in Development

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Yoto Mini Teardown and Rescue

Yesterday my daughter’s Yoto mini took a dunk in the bathtub. She was devastated, she uses it almost constantly. So it was Dad to the rescue.  The device was straight forward to take apart, but I wanted to share how I did it so that other parents don’t have to figure it out on the fly.

#Technology | #Yoto

Product Ops as the Engine Not the Fuel

I had intended to write a big long post on all the things I learned as a Product Ops leader as Tanium for a year, but it got long and rambly, so I’m going to attempt a series of shorter posts that will hopefully get written. 

Lesson one, when you are working on process of the product team, you are building engines not fuel. This is a metaphor from my good friend Jack Coates (Part 1 Part 2) that he usually applies to building end user products that need content, and that no one wants to build content and teams want to build engines because they are fun and sexy. Similarly when you are building process for your product management team you should resist the urge to try and do the work of the process yourself. 

#Product Operations | #Product Management | #Systems Thinking

Work in Progress and the Kitchen Sink

I try to explain work in progress limits a lot and feel like it comes across as an abstract concept a lot of the time. How much work can the team do at the same time? Or it gets a historical example from Toyota about kanban cards and spots on a pallet, which doesn’t make a ton of sense if you’ve never worked in a factory.

Today I have a more concrete example, the kitchen sink and putting the dishes away. My system of washing the dishes starts at the dining room table, goes to the dishwasher or sink then goes back to the drying rack or the cabinets

#Work in Progress

Rating Customer Insights

I’ve been working on implementing Product Management tools for the last year in one way or another. Both Productboard and JIRA Product Discovery allow you to rate the level of impact that a piece of customer feedback has. If your ratings are all over the map it can be hard to really understand what signals you are getting in your prioritization process.

In the interest of having some consistency I’ve come to like this scale for rating customer interest.

#Product Management | #Product Ops | #Product Operations

An Officiant's Wedding Script

This fall I was asked to officiate the wedding of my sister-in-law Rachel to her fiance Mike. It was a distinct pleasure and the first wedding I’ve ever been asked to officiate. My remarks were well received so I wanted to share them here in case they are useful to someone else. There are some minor changes I wrote on my script in the weekend before the wedding, but this is the script I started with.

#Wedding

Keep Your Standards to a Minimum

I recently had a conversation with several Product Managers  at work who wanted me to step in and set a standard for how and who was responsible for triaging bugs reported to their teams. The question was mostly focused on who inside of the team was responsible. Was that the engineering manager, the PM, the TPM?  Between the four folks who came in mass to my office hours, there were five different ways of managing bug triage.  This was causing some challenges because there was a RACI being built to set expectations.

I had a very firm “No I won’t create this standard for you”.  And I’m here to caution other product leaders and product operations teams not to do it either.  When you are operating a dynamic adaptive system with multiple independent teams.  It is important to be very thoughtful about where and when you set and enforce standards.  Some questions you should ask yourself before establishing a standard that everyone must follow. 

#Product Operations | #Product Management

Product Operations Feeds the OODA Loop

The OODA loop (Observe Orient Decide Act) is a concept originally coming out of the Air Force for pilots conducting air to air combat. It’s now applied to many different systems thinking and design contexts. This week I was preparing to explain Product Operations to my new CEO and it occured to me that the role of Product Ops is to help power and accelerate the OODA loop for product management teams.

#Product Operations | #Product Management

A Solid Fediverse

The Fediverse is great, I love it, but as I see more and more projects to spring up to replace different private social media operations. First it was Twitter, now Reddit is seeing an exodus to Lemmy, there is also Pixelfed to replace instagram and bookwyrm to replace Goodreads.

It’s great. But it isn’t without its problems.

No consistent Identity

We don’t have a clear identity federation system. I came across Keyoxide which seems like a great way to start gluing your identities together, but is not yet user friendly. As a result I have an ID on three different fediverse services and I can only sort of glue them together with profile links.

#Fediverse | #Solid

LLMs - I Won't Be Fooled Again

I’ve stayed on the sidelines of much of the LLM debate, but I’m willing to stake out my skepticism on this “world changing” technology. As I think back over the arch of my online life, I see these foundational models as the latest in a series of events where amazing technology was going to change the world. But each time individual value is diluted for corporate money grabs.

Going way back in time, my first real formative experience on the internet was Geocities. When a friend showed me that I could write an HTML file and make it show up on the internet I was hooked. It was magic to me that I could make something the whole world could see. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of how to make these sites.

#Technology | #LLMs | #AI

Balancing Feedback Loops in Product

Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.”

My colleague has a great instinct and she isn’t wrong in seeing the gaps that we have in the product and how we produce software.  But I think that its important to apply systems thinking to solving these problems.  That requires us to understand where we can apply leverage to change the balancing feedback loops that are enabling and constraining our products.

#Product Management | #Systems Thinking