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.

Many years ago, when I was going off to start grad school, BW (at the time, she wasn’t BW, just B) and I rented a big yellow truck to haul all of our prized personal belongings to our new home (at least for the next two years). It was a long trip (2 days worth of driving), so we did the prudent traveler thing and went to AAA and got a bunch of maps to plan our route. The maps were not only for us, but others, too. Since this was the age before cell phone ubiquity, for safety reasons, we gave a copy to BW’s parents so that they would know what route we were following in case we didn’t show up at our destination or check in periodically.

I wrote a comment the other day on another blog, Security Buddha, in response to a post about how Product Managers (at least not the ones who write blogs) are not really geared for rapid product release cycles. The author had reviewed several Product Management blogs, including this one, and came to this conclusion–

“I can’t help feeling that most of the PM gurus are cut out for old school software development with long release cycles and would balk at the real meaning in the Agile Manifesto.”

My comments on Security Buddha went something like this (paraphrased, but you can see the original here):

On a recent trip to a trade show, I witnessed an interaction (several, actually) that underscored the importance of clear communication. For Product Managers, this actually has applications on a few levels. Here’s what happened–

My return flight connected through Washington D.C. and unfortunately, the 767 that was originally scheduled had mechanical problems (or at least that’s what we were told) and a 757 was now what we would be flying. What this meant was that there were instantly 40 less seats available for customers. It also meant that seat assignments changed, but more about that later.