Jarrett House NorthNow with 80% less politics!

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 [...]

Well, that was fast. Google Chrome went from new to 1.0 in about 100 days:

But is it ready? And why so soon?

I expected Google to add more features over time, since the merely architectural improvements of the browser didn’t seem to meet the critical differentiator threshold to justify launching a new browser. But that didn’t [...]

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 [...]

MobileMe (aka former .Mac) subscribers received an overdue email from the MobileMe team today, apologizing for the rocky roll-out of the new service and extending a free month of service to all subscribers.
The email contained the following interesting paragraph:
Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under [...]

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 [...]

Peter Gabriel’s RealWorld Studios have teamed up with Bowers & Wilkins (B&W speakers) to bring an online music club targeted at audiophiles. It’s not really a store, because the service offers only subscription pricing and the content is exclusive–up and coming musicians recording at RealWorld. The B&W Music Club is part of a set of [...]