Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

If you know that almost infamously classic line, you probably are a lover of the movie Office Space.

It has to be one of my all time favorite movies.

Why have I started this post you may ask?

To try to explain to my family, friends and those that ask me questions like "What exactly is your job?" or "How do you make a living?"

My favorite answer and subsequently most common answer "I do stuff."

My official designation at NetworkIP is that of a "Senior Product Manager." Fancy huh? But doesn't exactly state what it is I do, unless of course you go with the smart-ass answer of "I manage products, duh."

Product Management is a fanscinating and what I would consider to be a better (yet sort of complex) form of corporate management. Shortly after accepting the promotion to Product Manager I figured I should buy a book. Which I would like to make a comment on this idea. When I first started with my previous company I thought the ideal of "Buy a book and read it vs training courses/classes." was just something that was promoted within the company because of it's obvious cost savings. However, after reading a number of books that about the time of the American revolution and Age of Enlightenment.

I have read about Generals in the American Continental Army that were made generals because they had read books on soldiering. There was one guy that ended up being in charge of the artillery not for his experience, but for his readings on the subject. Quite fascinating in today's world. I mean I could read about artillery and soldiering but honestly never feel like I should be a General in charges of troops.

Anyway, so having spent the first 5 years or so of my career. Yeah funny to think of it as a career vs a job. But my career with the idea in my head that if there was something I needed to learn that I should just buy a book, I bought a book on Product Management. I did learn quite a bit about what my role SHOULD be.

Obviously, a text book can only provide the "should" and "could" of how things work. Actual application of such knowledge is up to the individual and sometimes the group (ie the company). I believe that my current company has done an ok job trying to implement the concept of Product Management. However, "Rome was not built in a day." so the work continues.

Back to what it is that I do for a living. Typically a Product Manager is a multi-disciplined individual, someone who can cross over between the different departments that are required to support a product. Now, in the book(s) this is stated as a very hard individual to find. I would agree with that. As someone who has sat on the fence between technical & sales, I can state first hand that it is hard to do both well. And obviously stating only two categories is a understatement. Before moving on, let me just say this. That in a room full of sales, marketing, and business folk I am more often than not the most technically inclined in the room. In a room full of developers and support staff I am more often than not the most marketing and business inclined.

"Jack of all trades, master of none." I have since High School tried to know a little bit about everything. When I attended a journalism conference in Chicago my Senior year I decided this philosophy was best. The more you know and can do, the more valuable you are to a company.

So I do consider myself a multi-disciplined individual the more colorful saying is "Jack of All Trades", except I have become very technical in the last few years. I spent the first year of my career as a Technical Writer, it was my job to produce the software manual. I am more than willing to say that I did not produce a GREAT software manual. I produced a reference manual, a manual that told you the limitations and basic functionality of our software interface. This ultimately was not very glamorous. The software wasn't complete so writing a "How to.." manual is kind of hard. Not to mention that the overall interaction amongst the various parts of the platform weren't known by any one person, one could argue they aren't fully known to any one person 8 years later.

Because of the manuals relationship to customers that led me to helping out with the Sales department. Helping with the Sales dept. led to me helping with the Marketing department. Sales & Marketing go hand in hand. I spent about 6 months or so being sort of a liason between the Marketing department and the Development (R&D) group.

Then I got promoted to Sales Engineering, a newly formed department that was supposed to assist Sales on the technical aspects of software, in part to help ensure that the Development group wasn't constantly being interrupted by Sales folk. Which brings up another quote from Office Space "I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to!".

I have met a few engineers in my day that have the capacity to interact with customers and quite a few that honestly should never be put in front of people you are trying to strike a deal with. There are various reasons, intense personality, lack of personality, personal hygiene, etc. Mind you I by no means consider myself a people person, but I have managed to get some compliments from customers.

A lot of those compliments came from the time I spent in the Professional Service Group, PSG department. My job was more of a consultant and account managment role. We were tasked with getting our customers to be happy with us, the ones that weren't particularly pleased that is, and getting the ones that liked us to like us even more (ie buy more software and services).

Ok, so back to Product Management, I was going over the history of what I have done. I have spent time writing documentation, time building sales proposals, crafting marketing campaigns/messages, training customers, pitching sales deals, project managing, writing technical specs for features/services, invoicing customers, custom development (programming), installing hardware and software, wiring T1s, design databases, attending tradeshows, competitive analysis, support (troubleshooting), and much more.

I by no means consider myself an expert in any of those areas.

Product Management needs not necessarily the ability to perform these actions as part of the job, but knowing what these tasks entails definitely is a requirement. The book(s) often talk about splitting the roles of Product Management into two functional roles. Product Marketing Manager and Technical Product Manager. Again, finding individuals who are GOOD in both Sales/Marketing & Technical stuff.

Now, I have rambled on for a bit. Have I really answered what it is I do for a living? Or did I just give more definition to what "stuff" is?

I am responsible for getting the product developed, tested, documentation written, sales staff trained, marketing message crafted, and support organized. Some of this I have to do myself. I have turned a personal interest in PHP programming into a very useful skill for work. I am not going to quit my day job to go and be a PHP programmer, but I do enjoy being able to say "I only play a programmer on TV."

I prefer to delegate work out, but I will admit I have a tendancy to want to just do it myself. However, learning to teach someone to do something may take more time upfront, but it pays for itself many times over in the end.

In the last two years I have worked on many product. None of them have been widly successful. But each one has yielded lessons for me and I would like to think that I have learned the lessons well.

I will get to prove that soon. NetworkIP is launching a new company soon. Soon enough that I figure it is ok to leak it here on my blog. I mean we have already sent out notice of a name change to our customers.

Our new company is Jaduka. I have a new title. Chief Technical Officer. My boss still introduces me as "Acting Chief Technical Officer" which is fine by me, because I have business cards. Take a look...






So in addition to my Senior Product Manager duties I get to wax poetic about technology and think about the bigger picture.

Ok, so hopefully that answers a little bit about what I do for a living.

If not, just remember "I do stuff." and sometimes I try to describe it as "I do computer stuff."

Not bad for a Journalism major though, huh?



Office Space Quotes
http://quotations.about.com/cs/moviequotes/a/bloffice_space1.htm

So for anyone who read my first posts, I talked about trying to get that discipline of making daily entries. I did good there for a while.

However, as the title says, "Old Habits die hard". The past two weeks have been very work intensive. Which means that when I get home it is time to eat dinner, watch a little TV, maybe play a video game (you know to relax) for an hour or so, then sleep.

Let it be known that I HATE getting up early, so early morning posts are pretty much not on the table for discussion.

For what little adoring public that I have reading this blog regularly, namely my family, I apologize for the radio silence.

I am fully willing to admit that I am not the most organized person in the world. I rely on my memory quite a bit, which unfortunately is very full lately, and occasionally something pushes another thing out of my head.

My boss keeps this very neat and organized "To-Do" list and has suggested that I do the same. My mom had actually gone to training (paid for by the State of Michigan) to learn how to organize using Franklin planner stuff. When that happened, she got me one too. It didn't help.

I like the To-Do list concept. However, while I am a HUGE fan of paper notes and documentation, a paper To-Do list for me keeps being too inefficient and I fall back into my old habits.

In one of the books on Product Management, The Product Manager's Handbook, it talks about time management being very important. And I fully agree. I am currently have at least 3 projects that require my direct involvement to allow others to continue with their bits, I have another project where I am one of the primary contributors. Then there is all the random stuff that happens with being the Product Manager and subsequently the only one trained to do Sales Engineering for my products, I get tied up with customer questions, which for the most part are higher ranking than the other projects.

So while I am not the most organized person and I do not have excellent time management skills, I would argue that I am very proficient in judging what the priority of my ongoing projects are vs incoming randmon stuff, and thus working on the item that is most important first, even if that project just showed up 5 minutes ago.

So I think I have the whole project prioritization down. With that in mind, I have to say I really like dotProject. I did an install for work and another for Jeremy so that he can try to keep things straight on the uRevoo project.

However, it isn't really very portable, in the sense of if I am not connected to the web. Of course, except for vacations in northern Michigan, I am usually within 30 ft of a broadband connection. (Something to be proud of, I hope.)

Now, I am not advocating MS-Project, as that has issues revolving around licensing and being able to share project plans and schedules. But I think that is jumping the gun on a different post, one where I discuss my findings on dotProject vs MS-Project. I have used MS-Project 2000 when I was at Simplified pretty extensively. And I have used dotProject for PrivateTel & uRevoo stuff well enough to find that if you don't edit your php.ini file you can't produce the gantt charts for a project you need a gantt chart for. (You have to increase the maximum memory size allocated to a PHP script.) But again, that is for another post. Maybe one I will write up tomorrow.

So getting back to portable. Paper is portable, however, paper is inefficient from the perspective that it is a passive medium. I have noticed that recently I refer to lots of stuff as passive vs active. Not sure why, seems like the way to refer to some things.

Paper is passive becuase...
1. You have to write on paper, paper cannot write on iteself.
2. You have to remember read the paper, paper doesn't remind you to read it.
3. You have to remember to write on paper, paper can't remind you about something.

While I need something that is more Active...
1. Something that will remind me of meetings.
2. Something that will remind me of deadlines. (remind me a day(s) ahead, vs 5 minutes ahead)
3. Something that can sync with my computer, ie write to itself, sort of.

I had a Palm Pilot Vx, not just a V but a Vx. I just had to have that extra like 4MB of Ram. This was back in like 2000 I think.


(image courtesy of ePinions.)

However, I guess I wasn't geeky enough to truly use it properly. I also had a TMobile Pocket PC 2002, a PDA and a Phone. Thinking that carrying two things was too cumbersome, if I had them all in one, then I would be golden.


(image courtesy of PocketPCMag.)

Well it didn't work out that way. There have been many a smart person who has said "A tool is only as effective/productive as it's owner." I found the Pocket PC useful, I started keeping appointments and stuff in it. And I even paid for the GPRS modem service, so I could download email and what not to it. This actually was pretty useful. I could read some email without having to be at my computer. However, the GPRS service was SLOW, I mean it made 56k dialup seem fast. And then the work email server got changed and was no longer compatible with my pocket pc email client.

So, it got replaced by a smaller, easier to carry phone. Cuz that was kind of the other thing. I was nice not to have to carry a phone and a PDA. However, the Pocket PC 2002 wasn't as convenient to slide into my pants pocket as the various little Nokia phones I have owned.

My current phone is the Nokia 3220. Nice little phone, has a camera on it. And it even has a data port. Way cool, I can load MIDI files as ring tones, sync my contacts, and even my calendar. If I used MS-Outlook.

Well, I don't use MS-Outlook. And honestly, I never WANT to. I have been using Outlook Express since like 1996, quite fond if it actually. I tried MS-Outlook briefly in 1998 and over the years have been forced to help troubleshoot glitches with it. I will say the latest version seems to have lots of things fixed in it. However, I still don't want it. As a matter of fact, I think I have made a point of keeping it off my machine.

I tried Thunderbird briefly about a year ago, again a topic for another post. I didn't like it as much as Outlook Express, but it too has come a long way since my last encounter with it.

My point about mentioning my latest phone is that I have made an effort to enter things into my phone, IMPORTANT meetings and dates. I don't put lots of stuff in it, because obviously using the phone's keypad to enter in the information is inefficient.

That brings us to my next evolutionary step in trying to get myself organized. I have recently ordered a new PDA.

Gina had recently done a LOT of research on PDAs as she has a new job and wants to be very organized. She decided ultimately on the Palm Z22.


(courtesy of Palm)

Part of the decision was that she had previously been successfully organized using a planner (like the ones from Franklin, yet not Franklin). But felt that working for a hi-tech company meant that she should have a digital organizer. I would have to agree, when in geek rome, do as the geeky romans do.

Well the Palm interface has improved, it has color, it works more like windows. But between the Palm Vx and the Pocket PC 2002, I was a bigger fan of the windows based one. Yes, yes. I know "Reistance is futile", Microsoft, blah, blah. I am not saying they do everything better. But for me, I dig the WindowsCE/PocketPC stuff more than I do the PalmOS.

So I decided on going with an iPaq vs a Dell Axim or what not. HP has been making the iPaq a long time, and I think they do it best (make a WindowsCE based PDA that is.)

I shopped around. I decided that I wanted some wireless connectivity. But I didn't want to make this thing my phone. And honestly to get the Tmobile Pocket PC MDA was just out of my price range.

I wanted wifi, not bluetooth. You can connect wifi just about anywhere (even in northern michigan, see my post), but bluetooth is well more device-to-device networking still.

This meant that I was looking for the HP rx 1955.


(courtesy of HP)

I normally buy all this sort of stuff on NewEgg. However, this time around I decided to use Froogle.

And I eventually landed over at Overstock.com. I have never bought from them before, but Sara and Amanda seem to like them. While the unit I bought is a refurb the price was very right $189.00. NewEgg is like $275. On top of the Overstock has 2 year replacement/protection plan for $29.99.

So the grand total (including $2.95 shipping) was $221.94. I have bought refurb before, usually telecom hardware mind you, but usually prefer brand new toys. However, at an overall price lower than NewEgg and with a 2 year replacement (NewEgg's 2 year replacement plan is $59.99, so grand NewEgg total would have been $340.97, $4.99 shipping included).

So with my ass covered if the unit dies in 30 days and the price being well below new, I bought it. Unfortunately, I will have to wait until probably next Friday to start using it. I am headed to Dallas next week and it appears that I leave out before it arrives.

An MSU faculty member once told me that "If you do something consistently for 7 days it will become habit." I forget exactly how this came up, but it has stuck with me to this day. Only thing is that "Old habits die hard."

So I will keep you posted on how I like the rx1955 and how I am using it. I look forward to working some mojo with dotProject to get the data exportable into the rx1955, and at the very least, with the wifi on the PDA, I can access dotProject from just about every where.

All for now, lunch is over, back to work.