Grab bag: Books, iPhones, beer, and other good things

Grab bag: iPhone 3.0 edition, plus valuable prizes

Creating a drama-free zone in product management

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 to do it convincingly can make or break you as a product manager. Here’s two real scenarios I’ve seen this week that underscore the point.

Scenario #1: “Where’s Feature A? We’ve been asking for it for a year? Why the hell haven’t we built it yet?”

You know this one. Someone’s pain point, which is perfectly valid, simmers along until one day it explodes. Only problem is that this is the first time anyone has mentioned Feature A in a long time, and certainly it didn’t come up in the last roadmap planning discussion.

Solution: The response can be heated–“why the hell didn’t you mention this six months ago?”–or it can be drama free. “Hey, I understand there’s a customer pain point here. Let’s look at the priorities we’ve got and understand where this fits in. Is this more important than our planned work in the next release? If so, that’s where it belongs. If not, then we all agree it can wait.”

There are three steps here: acknowledge, align, act. The first step is to acknowledge that the other person has valid reasons to be upset while shifting the discussion to the common interest–the customer–and introducing an objective measure, the priority. The key is focusing on the external, objective issue — the priority of the request — rather than getting into heated discussions. (Obviously it is easier to do this if you are using stack-ranked user requirements.)

Scenario #2: Suddenly four email threads pop out of nowhere regarding a longstanding customer pain point that has apparently reached crisis proportions for no particular reason. “Feature X is broken! We need to fix it!” goes up the cry. You, as the product manager, know that the apparent failure of Feature X is really a mishmash of legal and contractual issues coupled with a lack of Feature Y and Z. But management insists that the answer is to fix Feature X, and now four separate groups of people are trying to find things to fix in it (and generating long email threads).

Solution: The response should be comprehensive, quick, and above all drama free. It’s natural, as a product manager, to want to fly off the handle when there are so many people digging into an issue. But a quick, dispassionate, thorough response (“Here’s what we know, here’s what we’re going to do about it, and here’s what’s still unknown and our next steps to find out”) has benefits in that it acknowledges the problem, communicates that there are multiple issues, and lets the assembled parties know, to return to our Obama metaphor, “Everybody chill out: I got this.”

What are your favorite drama-free problem solutions? Conversely, are there cases where engaging in drama makes a positive difference in your work as a product manager?

Grab bag: Music music music Bloomsday edition

Eight years and counting

True to form for this year, I’m almost a week late with this anniversary observance, but June 11 marked the eighth year of Jarrett House North as a blog. My site, originally started as an occasionally updated static vanity page on March 14, 2000, morphed into a blog during my summer internship at Microsoft in 2001, picked up steam as I finished my MBA, got embroiled in online metrics during my first year at Microsoft then got deep into blogging practice in 2004, did serious houseblogging in 2005, recovered from the aftermath of running the Sony Boycott blog in 2006, kept the pace going in 2007, and crunched the numbers in 2008.

So here’s a retrospective in quantity and quality:

Plus, I half feared that getting engaged with Twitter and Facebook in a serious way would kill this blog, but so far it hasn’t.

Not bad for an eight year old blog. That’s like an 80 year old in blog years.

Grab bag: UVA big news edition

Grab bag: open and closed systems

Grab bag: old music, new music, slow food

Grab bag: Speed, queries, and Snow Leopard

Where was the Cabell House?

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The standard biography of the Virginia Glee Club traces their formation to the creation of a glee club at the University of Virginia’s “Cabell House,” which the group’s history calls the “Cabell House Men.” Inspired by my visit to the University this weekend, I went digging to find where and what the Cabell House was.

Jefferson’s original university design had 54 student rooms on the Lawn and a similar number on the East and West Ranges, holding somewhere between 150 and 200 students (assuming double residency for all the Lawn rooms except the Bachelor’s Row). So the growth in University attendance from 128 in 1842-1843 to more than 600 in 1856-1857 (figures from Philip Bruce’s History of the University of Virginia vol. III), combined with the lack of further dormitory space, led to a growth industry in Charlottesville boarding houses. One of these was the Brock Boarding House, later known as the Cabell House. Later called the “Stumble Inn,” the two-story brick structure, located on the north side of West Main Street between 9th and 10th, was ultimately razed. Today the block hosts a handful of businesses and a book shop and overlooks the train station on the other side of West Main Street.

The Glee Club’s formation wasn’t the only brush with fame the Cabell House had, however; it was also infamous as the site where John Singleton Mosby, later famous as the Confederate raider known as the Gray Ghost, shot fellow University student George S. Turpin.

2009 University of Virginia reunions

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I returned yesterday from an extended weekend attending my 15th class reunion at the University of Virginia. It was a great weekend and I had a lot of fun, though not necessarily because of the reunion itself.

We started the weekend on a rocky note, driving through pouring rain through Connecticut and New York before it finally cleared away when we got to New Jersey. Lisa and I drove on solo the next morning and made it to Charlottesville about 3 pm. I had grand plans of catching up with a few folks in town but was exhausted by the drive and we punted, managing only to have a few drinks at Michael’s Bistro and to get over to L’Etoile. Okay, so that wasn’t such hardship. In fact, Friday was a pretty amazing date, the first we’ve had in quite a long time.

Saturday was a more structured day. This year I went in with the expectation that we would go to a few things that interested us and otherwise spend most of the day with friends. And it worked out that way, kind of. We did hear Julian Bond speak about the connection between civil rights, changing demographics, and the evolution of R&B and rock music–an unexpected but pleasurable discussion with an old professor, if not perhaps as consciousness raising as some of Bond’s past lectures have been.

Then it was lunch, which was unpleasant. The Big Tent was raised over yesterday’s muddy grass, our claustrophobia was in full swing, and we retreated to a stone planter near the Small Special Collections Library to eat our hot dogs (good) and hamburgers (overcooked). A slow stroll around Grounds followed, during which I snapped the majority of the photos from this trip. We sat in the Rotunda for a disappointing class panel, but the real unexpected jewel was sitting in the Shannon Garden along the west side of the Rotunda. Named for Edgar Shannon, who presided over the University during its most turbulent period since the Civil War during the 1960s and early 1970s, it was a fittingly tranquil place that I had walked past many times before but never appreciated until the weekend. (The picture above shows the colonnade that Stanford White added during the post-fire renovation of the Rotunda to create what became the Shannon Garden.)

The reunion part of the weekend was the least successful, primarily because the 15th reunion is not too well attended for a lot of folks, and partly because I didn’t sign up for enough fun activities. (Lesson learned: will sign up for wine tasting next time.) But we had a great time catching up with Greg, Bernie, Anne and the other folks from the class that were there, and the reunion left me wanting to go back in five years and do it again–which I suppose is the goal of all good reunions.

Charlottesville dinner: L’etoile

Ah, Charlottesville. You continue to surprise me, even after I thought I had experienced it all. Superbly professional at the C&O? Check. Deep beer list and occasionally funny, regularly reliable bistro fare at Michael’s? Check. Surprisingly regionally wonderful at the late lamented Southern Culture (ah, the sweet potato fries!)? Check. Late night emergency room visit after the mushroom soup at the late unlamented Northern Exposure the night of my graduation? Uh, check.

But nothing prepared us for dinner at L’etoile tonight. Well, appetizers at Michael’s helped. But seriously: duck confit amuse-bouche was a tiny morsel of duck perfection. Sweetbreads: large yet delicate and just browned, with bacon and mushroom demi-glace lending depth beneath. Trout, superbly prepared with a turnip puree holding together just enough Virginia ham and peas still toothsome…. and that’s just what I had. Turns out they’ve been around for more than ten years and we never had found them—until tonight, when sitting over beers at Michael’s, Lisa gave my iPhone a shake, and Urbanspoon came up with the name.

Alas, Charlottesville! As various cleverer people than I have said, I would go back there tomorrow, but for the work I’ve taken on.

Getting ready

I’ve been out of circulation a bit over the last day or two at an offsite, so haven’t had a chance to post much about the week I’ve got ahead of me. I’m heading back to UVA for my 15th reunion starting tomorrow, and really looking forward to it.

Logistically, it won’t be simple–we have to take the whole family, including the dogs, down to New Jersey and then Lisa and I will head on solo the following day to Charlottesville. Two days of driving each way, for only two days in Charlottesville. Sigh.

This will be a good reunion for me, I think. Last time around we caught up with a lot of folks but were a little distracted by other business (we were in the middle of selling our house in Kirkland and moving back to the east coast). This time, not only will I hopefully find time to get some better photos of Grounds in full sunlight, but I’ll be fully plugged in to my surroundings in a way I haven’t been before. Doing all the research on the Glee Club has made me much more conscious of the history of the University, and in some ways I feel closer to the place as a result.

A physical reunion in the age of Facebook feels a little like an anachronism, but I feel like, having reconnected with so many folks virtually, I’m ready to seriously hang out and have a lot of fun with everyone without having to do all the small talk.