Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

I hope I have the time to come back to this thought tomorrow (along with some overdue Thanksgiving blogging). But I had the opportunity to meet up with an old colleague for lunch today and to discuss, among other things, two different agile project cycles. One project cycle ships every four to five months, has [...]

I installed version 2 of Taglocity on Friday. As I wrote a while ago, the older version of Taglocity has saved my bacon many times, and I was excited about the new features. I still am, but I’m a little more cautious about the new version today.
Why? Migration.
I installed the new version in the morning [...]

I’ve been up to my eyeballs in user doc recently, our software-as-a-service product offering having matured to the point that novice users need some guidance to get started with the software. This being a startup, we don’t have a tech writer, and I’ve added the relevant hat to my normal product management job–and rediscovering my [...]

Jane Wells at WordPress opens the kimono further on the decision to redesign the administrative user interface for 2.7. I griped a while back that it seemed like the design changes were being made in a non-systematic way, but it turns out there were solid usability testing exercises prior to the surveys we’ve all seen [...]

One of the downsides of being an early adopter in some areas is that I’m a late adopter in many others. I was using a desktop RSS aggregator back in 2002 (Radio Userland, then NetNewsWire) and so came late to the web-based news aggregator market. When I did hop on board, I used Bloglines, one [...]

I wrote previously about “technical debt,” the concept that the decision to defer necessary technical work (adopting an updated version of a new component, refactoring code to reduce cruft, etc.) accumulates across releases until it absorbs a project team’s entire capability to develop code. You “pay interest” on technical debt because it’s much harder and [...]

With the WordPress 2.7 Navigation Options Survey, the fine folks at Wordpress.org have opened the kimono on one of the trickiest product management tasks: user experience design. The context: the administrative interface of WordPress. The UI was famously redesigned earlier this year by Happy Cog studios, who applied a rigorous information architecture along with a [...]

Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing points to an interesting article on five different types of betas. One of Steve’s commenters suggests there is a sixth kind, the SaaS beta:
…ratchet up your release cycles to monthly, then you can call it a ‘release’ or a ‘beta.’ Either way customers get their hands on the new functionality. [...]

Being one of the top Google hits for “product manager resume” has its responsibilities as well as its perks. I occasionally, as I was today, get contacted by people trying to figure out things about the product management career path, and sometimes they ask really good questions. Today my correspondent asked, essentially, how to become [...]

…your bookmarks. Del.icio.us is offline and my whole morning routine is off. Okay, so instead of tagging these two links I’ll post them to my blog instead.
First, for those new product managers out there, as well as those that have been the copy machine once too often, check out the free ebook from Pragmatic Marketing, [...]

I ran across an interesting concept in my reading today: technical debt, and its cousin design debt. The concept is basically the application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to software development. As you develop software, you affect the entropy of the code. Feature development typically increases entropy, while refactoring and explicit design activities decrease [...]

I’ve stopped reading Jakob Nielsen on a regular basis, so I missed this: Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes. As it turns out, this is one of the few of Jakob’s Alertboxes that I agree with more than disagree with. Iterative design, paper prototypes, decide what your app should do, beware nonstandard GUI controls, design for the user [...]

When I came to my new company, I didn’t mind going from Vista back to Windows XP. There were a few tools and features that I missed, but ultimately one version of Windows isn’t too much different than another.
But I would have caused a serious uproar if I had to use something other than Office [...]

Apple has posted its application form for the new iPhone enterprise tools, whatever they are (Apple has been awfully nonspecific on that point). This is cool for a bunch of reasons:

It’s an open, transparent beta process for a piece of enterprise technology.
From Apple. When was the last time you heard any of the words in [...]

I am in awe of another product manager: the Cranky Product Manager. She posts infrequently but many of her posts are brilliant.
One from last year on “how to say no” to customer or sales feature requests caught my attention. Many of the comments on the post were insightful and mirrored my experience with dealing with [...]