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.

Today, my own advice worked…for me. I went to visit a customer with some other team members to hear feedback from the customer about their experience with my product and hear some of their enhancement requests. I tend to over-prepare for these types of visits where I end up bringing a lot more than I need (everyone else on my team just brought a notebook and pen), but today it turned out that my over-preparedness paid off.

I wrote earlier that it’s a good idea to bring along a thumb drive in case you need to transfer files. I also carry around an extra (my company gives them as tchochkies) that I can give out if needed.

In a post I wrote back in March [Hiring for Success], I discussed the importance of finding and hiring great Product Managers. But in the same way that great workers can be a boon to your organization, poor performers can drag you down. Not only do they create more work for others on the team, but they can poison the atmosphere and cause other members to become frustrated or leave.

“When they (managers) finally decide to get rid of the under-performing slob who plays PC solitaire all day in her cubicle, it can be surprisingly tough to do. And that, in turn, affects productive workers. Few things demotivate an organization faster than tolerating and retaining low performers,” says Grant Freeland, a regional leader in Boston Consulting Group’s organization practice.

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):