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Welcome! Here you'll find my collection of writings on product management and productivity. I am sharing my knowledge and experiences learned over my career in the hopes that it will help you excel in your role.

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Add Agility to your Product Management Process

Agile is a software development process that focuses on delivering customer facing value in small iterations. This article assumes that your development team works in Agile Scrum. At my current company, the Product Management Process is what I would term Scrumfall. We do not build heavy Product Requirements Documents that we turn over to developers. Rather, we plan iterations while still maintaining an overall vision of what we think the final product should look like.

Rework Book Summary

The book Rework talks about the product development process at Basecamp. This is an outline of the book.

Lead the Field Book Summary

The book Lead the Field is one of those old school self-help books who’s advice is still applicable today. It focuses on developing yourself around serving others, developing a positive attitude, personal responsibility and goal setting. I wrote this outline so I could come back and visit the key points in the book. Have you read any good productivity books? I’d love you to take a moment to tell my your favorite in the comments.

Stop Treating Your Users Like Children

I spent about 15 minutes yesterday bulk deleting photos from Google+. Each time I clicked delete on a photo the computer so kindly asked me “Are you sure you want to do this?” I dutifully clicked “Yes”, as I’ve done thousands of times over the last 20+ years. Then, it hit me. Why am I still doing this? It’s 2013. If my computer were a sentient being and asked me to confirm every time I took some slightly dangerous action I would respond with something very sarcastic.

Be Amazing

I recently went to a great BYOB restaurant that just opened in Philadelphia. A week later, they sent me this. When was the last time you did something unexpected and awesome for your customers? Writing this card probably took the waitress 30 seconds to write. The impact for the business is priceless. I’ve already told a number of people about it (including you, the reader) and when I posted it on Facebook generated interest in the restaurant by people on my friend’s list.