Nortrup in Development

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Star Magnolia Bonsai Log / Plan

This is a running log for a Star Magnolia that I acquired from a nursery as a Bonsai project.

#Bonsai | #Star Magnolia

What I Look for in Flow Metrics

I’ve been pulling and analyzing Mik Kirsten’s Flow Framework metrics for several months at work. I do this with an incredibly ugly Clojure script that I wrote to learn Clojure. But I do think the metrics themselves have been a helpful lens to look at what is happening. Here are some of the questions I ask myself when I sit down to analyze the metrics.

#Product Management | #Flow

Experimenting With Your Process

I spoke recently with someone who was new to Product Management and was trying to learn how to do the job by reading blogs and books that talk about everyone’s ideal nirvana of product management. As he compared that with his organization (a large, well-respected company), he was distressed at the difference between what they saw and what they understood to be best practice. He was even debating if he should leave his current gig to work somewhere he could learn and practice this best-in-class PM craft.

#Product Management | #Process

Against Global Priorities

I’ve been working with some stakeholders on how we do prioritization as a Product Management team. I started by trying to build a matrix that would serve as an easy key for keeping product managers mostly on the same page for setting the priority field in JIRA. I think there is value in having common standards. But the more I thought about the problem, I got more uncomfortable, because we can’t prioritize globally and take into account local context.

#Product Management | #Prioritization

Outcome First Roadmaps

I’m sure if you’ve talked to me recently you’ve heard my song and dance on outcomes based road mapping. As I’ve been talking about it over the past few weeks something really clicked for me on why it’s so important to identify the outcomes early in the definition of an idea.

When you are trying to get work prioritized and on the road map, it’s straightforward to start with a name for the solution that conveys meaning and then find supporters who also like the sound of the idea. An easy default is to talk about the solution you are proposing to fix a problem. They go together to help form a narrative story that works well in a meeting. We have this problem, and here is the solution!

While this is really appealing, it also leaves us some challenges on the backend. If we prioritize problems with a measurement of what we are going to achieve better alignment on why we are trying to solve this problem, and allow ourselves more freedom to discover the right solution.

#Product Management | #Roadmap

Enterprise Product Integrations Journey

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.

#Product Management | #Enterprise Products

Military to Product Management - Level Equivalents

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”. This will give recruiters and hiring managers something that they are familiar with on your resume and will allow you to open the conversation about how the roles are similar and you are trained for it. It is much better to have a conversation with a recruiter that starts with “I didn’t realize that the military had Product Managers”, to which you can answer, “Well my official title was Platoon Leader, but let me tell you about how the roles are very similar…” The alternative is that you don’t have any conversations because the recruiting software is literally looking for the words “Product Manager” in the job titles of your resume and you get filtered out.

#Product Management | #Military

Solid Pods - A Better Place to Store User Data

Solid Pods (Personal Online Data Store) are an open source project from the efforts of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the original internet) with a goal of re-decentralizing the internet. This project is still in development, I think it has a lot to offer in order to help make developing web applications easier and safer for the developer, user, and society at large.

Solid provides a web standard’s compliant API to provide the owner of the pod with an identity (WebID), storage (document store), and relational language for data. Applications can be built to access and store data in the pod, rather than in storage systems owned by the application.

#Technology | #Open Source

The Self Taught Product Manager

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 still maintain that those assertions holdup, and I think most companies would do well to hire more Junior Military Officers as Junior Product Managers.

#Product Management | #Professional Development | #Books

One Wheel Pint - An Honest Review

Commuting is a pain. My particular commute is a multi-stage, adventure that can take an hour on a decent day and mind boggling amounts of time if something goes wrong in Seattle traffic. My spouse and I start by carpooling to our day-care, drop off a kiddo, then catch a bus into downtown, and finally walk across town to my office. Most of the time it works just fine. But it doesn’t take much to throw off the whole experience to a post-apocalyptic hell-scape of gridlock. In the past several years, we’ve seen car accidents and trucks full of bees or fish completely stop the major high ways and all of the side streets.

#Review