The Productologist

It’s been a little over a month since I started using this new note-taking method and I wanted to provide some details on how it’s going for me. To be honest, it hasn’t been as easy to switch to this note-taking style as I thought it would be. I have struggled on a few fronts–

Paper

I’ve been listening to career-related podcasts on my commute to and from work lately and one of my favorites is Manager Tools. They are basically two management consultants (Mark Horstman and Michael Auzenne) who talk about tips and tricks to being a good manager, which if you have supervised others at work, you know is not as easy as it seems.

At the end of each calendar year, I spend a bit of time cleaning house (figuratively, and sometimes literally). I look at the things that I have accomplished (or not), the tools that I have used (or not) and formulate a plan for the coming year.

This year, I realized that I was not spending enough time reading. Not reading for pleasure, but for professional and career growth. As a Product Manager, the majority of my time is spent on 3 things:

1. Meetings
2. Customer/Prospect Calls
3. Product Documentation (MRDs, PRDs, Sales training, product evangelization, status reports, etc)

I wrote earlier about how I was confused about why someone would base their business on someone else’s APIs. I found this article on Programmable Web about a company called YottaMusic that had done just that and gotten bit by the API owner (Rhapsody) discontinuing support of the API.

You can read their write up and check out other reports.

From what I have read, it sounds like the YottaMusic service was a well-liked enhancement to the Rhapsody service, but they developed their product based on undocumented APIs.

Thoughts? Am I missing the boat on this?

[Business2.0 homage #1]

Back in July 2007, there was a article in Business 2.0 about making mashups easy for non-technical users. As more and more users embrace web technologies, companies have looked for ways to provide a way for the unfettered masses to take advantage of the latest and greatest that the Internet has to offer. Internet publishing is a prime example of how a previously complex process (coding HTML, creating images, creating dynamic pages, FTP’ing files, etc) turned into blogging, which is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection who can type and remember their login and password.

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