Introductions
From Atlanta, Georgia
Passioante about technology since a very young age, TI 99 4. - He learned from a manual, and started developing.
25 year - professional career. Worked for Mahattan Associates - 100th empolyee.
Worked for Hispanicare - created his own fitness bussiness too
wondering wifi - new business - bought by VMWare - 3rd emplyee
Consulting - business based, led teams and projects.
He was going to start his own company but was contacted by new compnay. Company was for consulting
Joined MSFT as the cloud advocacy team. develoeprs and product teams liason. Started his blog in 2009. He's very passioante about sharing to the comunity. He started talkign to different groups in MSFT because he wanted to be more impactful. Ended in a .NET PM group where he is now.
Key things: Had to learn about marketing slae,s and accounting. Had to build first datacenter and such when building own business.
Questions
- I'd love to hear an overview of how you got to where you are!
- How and why did you make the transition?
- Individual contributor working across teams. He provides direction and guidance. He likes the challenge of product development . He foudn that his own opinion didn't matter nearly as much as the end-user. He loves using telemetry and signals to find what users want
- He gets both software development abilities and product control. He can maange the product, talk wit hpeople, and develop. Heis passion is coding, but he has skills in different aspect.
- Leverage - anyone can sign up to use wordpres, but
- What's your opinion of developer vs. product manager after experiencing both?
- How do you balance writing and work?
- Bug on your site
- Keeps up a couple kanban boards taht are consistently up to date. Inbox zero bwhich means I ahve somethign to do
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blog - signal to noise ratio
Raise Your Signal-to-Noise Ratio
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Power of 3 - A month is only 3 big milestones that can complete in a mont, week, or day
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Monthly, quarterly, weekly goals
- Big fan of unplugging and not focusing on technology
- You've been in tech industry as a developer for a long time. What is your advice for a potential junior product manager who is just leaving college without your technical background?
- What you think doesn't matter? - Pre-conceived notions about products doesn't really help.
- The customer base is the only thing that matters.
- Ex. Hypotheses based on being in the space, but the customer base believes something different.
- Be humble - use experiences and skills to drive a product, but your main job is to listen. You need to trust the evidence of what the customers truly want.
- Just because you think something doesn't mean the same thing for consumer.
- Dedicated customer experience team.
- Go to team → Interested in customers using "product x" → practical to find these customers → correct way to interview these individuals → keep unbiased questioning.
- What do you wish you knew before you entered your first product role?
- Already had a ton of the knowledge
- Customer Driven Development - testing hypotheses that were onboarded during the training.
- Customer Workshop that was handoff to develop hypotheses and opinions to reach a goal
- What are your main priorities in your day to day?
- As items come onto a list, prioritization is for blocks of work in a day. It is deadline driven and if a task is old, priortiztation to get it done.
- Easy Tasks
- Reoccurring meetings
- Triaging PRs etc.
- Made a change to EF core is going to be maintained
- Documentation for sample, clear documents for using the platform
- Technology owned by another team, gather information about the project
- See if the technology is suitable for the team
- Idea buckets
- What's the most challenging product or feature you've delivered and why?
- What is the biggest challenge you're currently facing?
- Motivating, cross-team collaboration. Because your goals are not the same goals of other teams, it's difficult to deal with the team's work.
- Informing others in the product that there isn't a future for a product.