This was a great story about how Google’s search distribution deal dramatically increased cost of entry for Neeva, a putative competitor. This also reminded me of the Monster/AB InBev deal mentioned in “The Little Book that Builds Wealth:” To be fair, it is occasionally possible to take the success of a blockbuster product or service and leverage it into an economic moat. Look at Hansen Natural, which markets the Monster brand of energy drinks that surged onto the market in the early part of this decade.

This post was originally published on Inside Q4, stories and lessons learned from the Q4 Inc. R&D team. Hiring is a flow, not a project. The requirement was extreme: hire 15 Product Managers (and one Director of Product) in the next year and a half. When I arrived at Q4 in October of 2021, we were entering a period of hyper-growth in Product Design, Engineering and Product Management. We had huge ambitions and needed to scale our team — fast.

“Creative thinking requires a relaxed state, the ability to think through options at a slow pace and the openness to explore different alternatives without fear.” - Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

A software license touches on the software, not on the human relationships which the software mediates. It is those relationships that lock us into positions where Zuckerberg’s foot is on our necks. The Eternal Mainframe, Rudolf Winestock

In yesterday’s journal there was an interview with the CEO of The Weather Channel, talking about the future of Weather content. Weather might seem trivial, but it’s one of the most important kinds of content to get right on any platform. Companies like Yahoo, Apple, Samsung, and others agonize over how to present weather content in a way that is visually fresh but still familiar. Weather Channel just relaunched on several platforms, and I was curious to hear what they had to say.

When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

I’ve been spending a lot of time helping one client with their 2011 Product Roadmap. Although we’re not “doing Agile,” I’ve introduced them to the product backlog. So far it’s been a powerful planning tool. So Scott Sehlhorst’s post on how to prioritize resonated with me. When creating a backlog, or managing features, you need to remember that feature priority is a tool to be used to plan your work. Don’t get too specific about the exact rank of individual items, and remember that the eventual order of implementation should reflect what from a business, technical, and user perspective.

Programmers write code, QA specialists (really just a specialized kind of programmer) make sure that it works, designers create flows, layouts, copy and graphics, and sales people sell. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on costs and revenues, and manage the business - but that’s not what most product managers do. So do we really need product managers? Or do we just need someone to make sure that someone is leading the team and taking accountability for delivering something that consumers want and customers pay for?

When I took on my current job I was given an established product team and a mostly-new engineering team. We also had a brand new engineering manager, QA manager, and program manager working with us. Our job was to launch an all-new version of Toolbar while we maintained our existing versions and continued to support new corporate partners. Engineering and QA had just been moved overseas. We didn’t have any well-defined processes in place to build and maintain software.

I’m a big fan of managing by objective. Wherever possible, I believe that PMs, engineers, testers and designers should begin their work by first agreeing to (or at least accepting) a list of user and business objectives that a feature or product should fulfill. This will be useful in framing the many discussions that will follow. This week in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz discusses how Microsoft made some tough decisions in the design of Word 2007.

As a product manager it is tempting to blame failures on the action - or inaction - of others. This is dangerous because it allows one to avoid responsibility for the commtiments they make. To be a great product manager you have to be a good leader. That means holding yourself accountable. The best definition of accountability I’ve seen describes accountability as “a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results (Connors, Smith and Hickman, ‘The Oz Principle’).

For all my time at Yahoo I’ve had the good fortune of working under Tapan Bhat. I worked for him directly for the first year as we tried to sort out My Yahoo!. “My” was and is a pretty geeky product, with a lot of power user features. Our job was to figure out how to turn it into a mass market product. Having it for several years before abandoning it I felt that I had a great sense of what users wanted in a “personalized home page,” and what we needed to do to make the product grow again.

Something to blog about After nearly four years at Yahoo! I finally feel like I have something to blog about. One of the best things about my job is that I get to learn from some of the best minds on the internet. Periodically, something that I learn resonates so deeply, or describes my situation so precisely that I can’t help but print it in 30 point font and hang it on the wall of my cube.