When I’ve pulled some data into Google Sheets I often want a way to quickly chart the count of something, maybe it’s support tickets and I want to chart the incidence of particular tags or count tickets for each customer. In this situation I want a nice neat chart showing from ordered data.
Category Archives: Work
On statistical, and mental, models…
All models are wrong, but some are useful – George Box
On flexibility in achieving your vision…
I’ve been using a quote in roadmap presentations as a nod to the inevitability of change: “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” – Helmuth von Moltke the Elder Reading the Wikipedia page for Helmuth, I now learn he was the creator of a new …
The power of Experience Visions and the UBAD theory of Gaining Durable Buy-in
My Sunday reading today included a great Jared Spool article on the power of Experience Visions. You can think of an experience vision as a giant flag on a tall post in the sand, far away on the horizon. The flag is too far way to walk to anytime soon. It will take years. (In …
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Thinking about “value”
The more I think about value the slipperier that word gets, but in a recent conversation something crystallised for me, a little crack in the facade of my naivety. I realised that when you’re serving businesses, value is realised differently for the client organisation than it is for the users in the client organisation. (It …
On researching the competition…
A research minded Product Manager, if a competitor just launched a new product, they go out and talk to users right away: “what does this mean for you?”, “how does this fit into your life?” They’re looking for those opportunities to discover new things rather than sitting and saying “we need to get to feature parity with …
Measuring software productivity (cue teeth sucking)
In the A16z podcast episode on “Feedback Loops” they talk about the controversial, and frankly just tricky, topic of measuring productivity. I found the whole episode interesting, but you might want to listen for 5-10 minutes from about 20:00 minutes in or just read my notes and trust I’ve heard them right 😃 My notes: …
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Marty Cagan in London, April 2018
As part of diving into Product Management, I noticed that Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group was speaking at a Business of Software evening in London. Marty was recommended as a figure to follow by Brie, my colleague at Automattic, so I grabbed a ticket immediately. Marty centred his talk around unleashing and empowering the …
I’m reading around problems, experiments, and solutions
There's a lot of product management talk at the moment about defining the product roadmap in terms of problems, rather than features or solutions. I will write up my reading on roadmaps another day, but today I wanted to collate and synthesise some of my reading on approaching individual steps, opportunities, and problems along the …
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I’m reading about… Product Managers
At WordPress.com VIP we're looking into more formal Product Management, to help ensure that all our teams are aligned behind a consistent vision and a clear set of priorities. As such, I've been reading around about the Product Manager role to understand best practices from other organisations and from leaders in the field. As one of …