Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

Four reactions that I agree with (parts of) in response to Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday:

Doc Searls places the iPad in the context of vertical integration (apps all the way down to CPUs) and horizontal playing fields and says, “What you have to appreciate, even admire, is how well Apple plays the vertical game. It’s [...]

I just got back from the craziness that is the opening week of the new H Mart in Burlington, MA. It was instructive on several levels, not least of which was the personal (note to self: wait three weeks after the opening of a new highly hyped destination before attempting to visit). But there were [...]

The recent flap over the impending death of tr.im reminds me of a discussion I had at the Berkman Center when I crashed one of their meetings back in 2004. The question was, do you use external services with your blog? That is, do you host your images on Flickr or a related service? Do [...]

If there’s any doubt that management skills are portable across industries, consider this: one of the most valuable organizational traits that carried the Obama team to victory in 2008 is one of the most valuable factors for success in product management. I’m talking about the ability to create a “drama free zone,” and the ability [...]

I apologize for the plethora of linkblog posts here over the past little bit, and for their relative paucity. It’s been a busy few months. I got a new boss and transitioned from a “second product manager” to more of a lead role, at about the same time that we launched a set of significant [...]

I thought I had seen every possible permutation on the problem of how to prioritize requirements. Then the engineers at my company came up with a new one: the pony priority.
Is “pony” an acronym? Nope.
It’s the lowest priority there is. It’s the “I want a pony! No, you can’t have a pony” priority. Or as [...]

As a product manager in an agile development model, one of the most difficult things to do is building a roadmap. This is because making feature commitments for six to nine months out feels contrary to the spirit of being “agile” and maintaining flexibility to change course to support the needs of the business.
Why is [...]

It’s not going to be a Stevenote (and on that note, best wishes to Steve as he gets his hormones back in balance and gets some protein in his system). But I’ll be watching all the more closely, to see how Phil Schiller takes on the challenge of igniting excitement in the Mac faithful. Like [...]

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 [...]