Recent content on Nortrup in Development
In 1776 the founders of the United States of America wrote a Declaration of Independence. In that declaration they enumerated their list of grievances against the King of England. Today we find our own President behaving much like a wannabe king. Perhaps it is time to return to the sense of outrage that our founders found in the abuses of the king. This is not a call to revolution or violence, but…
A professional is someone who makes a living doing something. In order to be a professional, you must perform that function with high enough quality, consistently, over time, fast enough to pay the bills. People pay for quality. The higher and more consistent the quality, the more they will pay. If you can’t produce high enough quality work that people want to pay you for it, you…
Yesterday my daughter’s Yoto mini took a dunk in the bathtub. She was devastated, she uses it almost constantly. So it was Dad to the rescue. The device was straight forward to take apart, but I wanted to share how I did it so that other parents don’t have to figure it out on the fly.
I had intended to write a big long post on all the things I learned as a Product Ops leader as Tanium for a year, but it got long and rambly, so I’m going to attempt a series of shorter posts that will hopefully get written. Lesson one, when you are working on process of the product team, you are building engines not fuel. This is a metaphor from my good friend Jack Coates ( Part 1 Part 2)…
I try to explain work in progress limits a lot and feel like it comes across as an abstract concept a lot of the time. How much work can the team do at the same time? Or it gets a historical example from Toyota about kanban cards and spots on a pallet, which doesn’t make a ton of sense if you’ve never worked in a factory. Today I have a more concrete example, the kitchen sink and…
I’ve been working on implementing Product Management tools for the last year in one way or another. Both Productboard and JIRA Product Discovery allow you to rate the level of impact that a piece of customer feedback has. If your ratings are all over the map it can be hard to really understand what signals you are getting in your prioritization process. In the interest of having some…
This fall I was asked to officiate the wedding of my sister-in-law Rachel to her fiance Mike. It was a distinct pleasure and the first wedding I’ve ever been asked to officiate. My remarks were well received so I wanted to share them here in case they are useful to someone else. There are some minor changes I wrote on my script in the weekend before the wedding, but this is the script I…
I recently had a conversation with several Product Managers at work who wanted me to step in and set a standard for how and who was responsible for triaging bugs reported to their teams. The question was mostly focused on who inside of the team was responsible. Was that the engineering manager, the PM, the TPM? Between the four folks who came in mass to my office hours, there were five different…
The OODA loop (Observe Orient Decide Act) is a concept originally coming out of the Air Force for pilots conducting air to air combat. It’s now applied to many different systems thinking and design contexts. This week I was preparing to explain Product Operations to my new CEO and it occured to me that the role of Product Ops is to help power and accelerate the OODA loop for product…
The Fediverse is great, I love it, but as I see more and more projects to spring up to replace different private social media operations. First it was Twitter, now Reddit is seeing an exodus to Lemmy , there is also Pixelfed to replace instagram and bookwyrm to replace Goodreads. It’s great. But it isn’t without its problems. No consistent Identity We don’t have a clear identity…
I’ve stayed on the sidelines of much of the LLM debate, but I’m willing to stake out my skepticism on this “world changing” technology. As I think back over the arch of my online life, I see these foundational models as the latest in a series of events where amazing technology was going to change the world. But each time individual value is diluted for corporate money…
Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.” My colleague has a great instinct and she isn’t wrong in seeing the gaps that we have in the product and how we produce software. But I…
I’ve been working with Productboard a lot in the past few months. Purchasing and helping Tanium implement it has been one of my primary tools to help improve our prioritization, process, and transparency with the rest of the organization. One of my favorite things about Productboard is the ability to super easily document what fields are and how they are supposed to be used immediately…
It’s early spring here in the Seattle area that means its time to get into my very modest garden and start going any repotting that needs doing. We had a very warm early February, followed by a a cold spell in the second half of the month. Which meant that all the trees woke up, and then had to be shuffled in and out of my workshop. But when the trees start to wake up you have to do the work…
I’m in the midst of reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer (affiliate link) to my list of recommended reads for Product Managers. It is one of those books like Principals of Product Development Flow that show you why things work at a deeper systemic level that you’ve just been emersed in. It’s a book that points out the water for the fishes.
I did a fun bit of Hugo templating today that seemed worth sharing. I was previously generating my list of hashtags to apply to a social post inside of my Zapier workflow. I’d pull the list of tags then manipulate them into a single string and add the # symbol. Today I realized that this would be much simpler to do in Hugo as part of my JSON output. It came out like this:
Jeff Gothelf has a great post that brings together Product Managemet and my preferred philosophy, Stoicism. Understanding our customers’ users is key to building products they’ll both love. Measuring your success based on your customers’ behavior is the only way for you to know for sure whether or not you’re delivering value and solving a real problem for them. Any user behaviors that are one step…
A quick roundup of the things I’ve been reading and enjoying this week From Outputs to Outcomes: Bridging the Four Gaps Itamar Gilad Start using outcome goals right now where you can. For example if the mindset is ripe in some parts of the company, say certain product teams, start there. If you don’t have the infrastructure to run A/B experiments, start discovering your product using…
I want the Fediverse to succeed, but it needs to be easy for laypersons to start and run their own small communities, here is how to make it work.
I think my core challenge with Product Ops, particularly standing it up from scratch, is the tension for modeling systems and processes as they are now vs how I want them to be. Paired with the tension between how much we need to change and how fast the organization is able to absorb change. Especially as the guardian and manager of the product tool stack. I know that if I set up the tools the way…
I’ve been enjoying the fediverse and mastodon as I’ve left Twitter for reasons . But one thing that I’ve been exceptionally interested in has been watching multiple newcomers attempt to build offerings on top of the activitypub protocol, then fail dramatically when they realize that while what they have built might be useful for some use cases that it runs into an incredibly hard…
This site is hosted on GitHub pages using Hugo, mostly because it gives me an excuse to play with very simple CI/CD pipelines and scratch the itch that wishes I was an engineer rather than a product manager. Hugo is nice because it creates the RSS feeds that I love to have and use myself. I have been using that RSS feed to drive automated publishing of new articles to social media through Zapier.…
Two years ago my wife bought me a class to make a bonsai. I made a tiny tree in a small pot. It was generous to call it a Bonsai and most practitioners would look upon it with a sense of “that’s cute”. Since then, I’ve managed to keep that tree alive and now have a collection of trees that I’m slowly turning into Bonsai. Along the way I’ve learned a lot about…
I recently took on the role of Product Operations at Tanium. Which has been a wild ride and one of my most exciting things I’ve done in product in a long time. Here are some early notes by way of an experience report for others who might end up walking this path. Some context; when I started this role, I had been at Tanium for two and a half years which is a good amount of time to learn the…
I’ve spent a lot of time as a platform product manager. At Splunk I managed the app certification platform that Splunkbase and Cloud relied on. Later I helped build the platform services for Splunk Cloud Services from the ground up. At Tanium I managed the Tanium Data Service which served as a common data layer for all of our modules. Being the PM for a deeply technical platform team can be…
One of the best leaders I ever worked with was my first XO at 1-14th Cavalry David Polizzotti . One day while we were deployed to Afghanistan I was stressing about something and he very calmly looked at me and told me that I needed to do a better job at accepting that I as an individual was a wholly replaceable cog in the machine. At the time that felt like a hard thing to swallow. I was a primary…
I’ve written recent guides to creating a backlog from scratch and sorting your backlog by value and effort. As part of building and sorting the ideas and initiatives on your roadmap you will start to show that roadmap to other people. When you do people will have opinions about the order that you have sorted things in. In most cases their opinion will either be agreement, or more commonly,…
There is a lot of complexity in Product Management, but at the very heart of it what we look to do is order all of the things we could be doing to produce the most value possible. To do that we have to carefully weight the balance of value to effort in order to properly sequence the infinite set of work that we could be doing. Estimating is a tricky and messy business, and I’m frequently…
Very rarely will you build a roadmap from absolute scratch. But the technique is helpful because you can apply the process to help rationalize or refit an existing roadmap. I’m a strong believer that you should be able to connect all the work you are doing from top to bottom of the company. A developer should be able to look at any task and put it into the context of the larger solution they…
In several PM Communities I frequent I see people who constantly ask, should I take a job a this series A or B startup, or a job at some extreme scale public cloud or tech company. Every time I see it I’m confused by it because I think of those companies being so far apart in experience that you should spend your time clarifying what you want in a job before trying to pick one or the other.…
2021-12-04 I got this tree in November and wanted to do some initial wiring on it and start to pull down the major branches that I wanted to keep. Before well I wrapped but didn’t bend): I broke a few minor branches while trying to put some bend in. Attempted to fix with superglue, we’ll see what happens. Generally happy with bringing secondary branches closer to horizontal and adding…
This is a running log for a Star Magnolia that I acquired from a nursery as a Bonsai project.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 .
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…