Nortrup in Development

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The Compliant News Room

There has been much ink spilled and great gnashing of teeth over Facebook’s news tab and the inclusion of Breitbart as a “high quality” news source. I continue to be amazed that social media organizations have moved to help establish clear standards and certification for what counts as a high quality newsroom.

In Enterprise software if you want large companies (like Facebook) to buy your software or services, you will eventually have to get a compliance attestation from a third party auditor that your company follows industry standard practices around code development, testing, deployment, and security. Depending on who your potential customers are there are a cornucopia of potential certifications, SOC2, ISO (lots of these actually), HIPAA for health, PCI for credit cards, FedRAMP for the U.S. Federal government. All of these standards provide you a checklist practices that you have to demonstrate your compliance with, then you find an auditor to come in, look at your books and ask you to prove that you follow your own stated policies.

#Society | #News

The Email Interview

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. Critical assessment of the candidate’s answer will probably be the functional task that drops.

#Technology

The Product Manager as Scout

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. I’m largely in agreement John Cutler about the overload of product manager responsibilities and the danger of centralizing them. I’m here to propose that product managers should think of themselves as good scouts rather than all controlling owners of the product.

#Product Management | #Military

Chief Devil’s Advocate

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. (See: https://xkcd.com/1432/) But it’s original use was as a formal position in the Catholic church to argue against the canonization of individuals to sainthood.

#Product Management

Continuous Improvement — A Journey

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.

#Product Management | #Ci/Cd

Why a Military Officer Should Be Your Product Manager

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.

#Military | #Product Management

Productboard Field Descripsions and Good Process Docs

#Military | #Product Management

Army Brigades Are Built on Agile.

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.

#Military | #Agile

Sequence Diagrams and Better Operations Planning.

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). They also produce the all important narrative for the OPORD/FRAGO/WARNO.

#Military