Nortrup in Development

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Create a Mastodon Integration for Zapier

This site is hosted on GitHub pages using Hugo, mostly because it gives me an excuse to play with very simple CI/CD pipelines and scratch the itch that wishes I was an engineer rather than a product manager. Hugo is nice because it creates the RSS feeds that I love to have and use myself. I have been using that RSS feed to drive automated publishing of new articles to social media through Zapier. The pipeline looks something like this until just recently

#Mastodon | #Zapier | #Hugo

Better Product Management Through Bonsai

Two years ago my wife bought me a class to make a bonsai. I made a tiny tree in a small pot. It was generous to call it a Bonsai and most practitioners would look upon it with a sense of “that’s cute”. Since then, I’ve managed to keep that tree alive and now have a collection of trees that I’m slowly turning into Bonsai. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about horticulture and art, and maybe some things that make me a better product manager along the way.

#Product Management | #Bonsai

Product Operations First Take

I recently took on the role of Product Operations at Tanium. Which has been a wild ride and one of my most exciting things I’ve done in product in a long time. Here are some early notes by way of an experience report for others who might end up walking this path.

Some context; when I started this role, I had been at Tanium for two and a half years which is a good amount of time to learn the ins and the outs of the organization. I had spent a fair amount of time back benching on product practice. I had coached a few of the junior product managers and done some rabble-rousing and process suggesting.

#Product Management | #Product Operations | #Product Ops

Being a Platform PM

I’ve spent a lot of time as a platform product manager. At Splunk I managed the app certification platform that Splunkbase and Cloud relied on. Later I helped build the platform services for Splunk Cloud Services from the ground up. At Tanium I managed the Tanium Data Service which served as a common data layer for all of our modules.

Being the PM for a deeply technical platform team can be really hard. Unless you come from a deeply technical background it feels hard to have a way to helpfully contribute to that effort. A lot of the work that gets done by a platform team will be very in the weeds, or will be in close execution with the consumer up the stack and their PM on the problem you are trying to solve. You are also more removed from the end-user of the product, which can make empathy and understanding harder. That can make you feel like a glorified project manager.

#Product Management | #Platform

Making Yourself Disposable

One of the best leaders I ever worked with was my first XO at 1-14th Cavalry David Polizzotti. One day while we were deployed to Afghanistan I was stressing about something and he very calmly looked at me and told me that I needed to do a better job at accepting that I as an individual was a wholly replaceable cog in the machine. At the time that felt like a hard thing to swallow. I was a primary staff member for a combat squadron in an active combat zone. I felt a little big in my multi-cam britches.

#Product Management | #Leadership | #Military

Quick Prioritization of a Backlog

There is a lot of complexity in Product Management, but at the very heart of it what we look to do is order all of the things we could be doing to produce the most value possible. To do that we have to carefully weight the balance of value to effort in order to properly sequence the infinite set of work that we could be doing.

Estimating is a tricky and messy business, and I’m frequently skeptical of. But when you are trying to prioritize multiple potential projects as a product manager, having some basic numbers can really help things along. This is a system I’ve used multiple times to quickly establish baseline value and effort estimates. I like it because it is fast and avoids a lot of hemming and hawing. The goal of this system is to get things in mostly the right order and avoid making big mistakes.

#Roadmap | #Product Management | #WSJF

Manipulating the Sorted Backlog

I’ve written recent guides to creating a backlog from scratch and sorting your backlog by value and effort. As part of building and sorting the ideas and initiatives on your roadmap you will start to show that roadmap to other people. When you do people will have opinions about the order that you have sorted things in. In most cases their opinion will either be agreement, or more commonly, they would like the thing that is important to them to be higher on the list. These differing opinions are good, this is why we build a roadmap. It is better to have those discussions when we are thinking about building things then after we have spent time building something.

#Roadmap | #Product Management | #WSJF | #Prioritization

Roadmaps From Scratch

Very rarely will you build a roadmap from absolute scratch. But the technique is helpful because you can apply the process to help rationalize or refit an existing roadmap. I’m a strong believer that you should be able to connect all the work you are doing from top to bottom of the company. A developer should be able to look at any task and put it into the context of the larger solution they are building, the problem it solves for the customer, and the business objective that it supports.

#Roadmap | #Product Management | #Cost of Delay | #WSJF

Product Management Scale Up

In several PM Communities I frequent I see people who constantly ask, should I take a job a this series A or B startup, or a job at some extreme scale public cloud or tech company. Every time I see it I’m confused by it because I think of those companies being so far apart in experience that you should spend your time clarifying what you want in a job before trying to pick one or the other. In a hyperscale company there is tremendous specialization for products with billions of users. At a small start up it’s all generalists.

#Product Management | #Org Design

Star Magnolia Update

2021-12-04

I got this tree in November and wanted to do some initial wiring on it and start to pull down the major branches that I wanted to keep.

Before well I wrapped but didn’t bend):

I broke a few minor branches while trying to put some bend in. Attempted to fix with superglue, we’ll see what happens. Generally happy with bringing secondary branches closer to horizontal and adding some shape to them.

#Bonsai | #Star Magnolia