Wayne Allen's Weblog

How to Hang a Picture

the spurious pundit has a really good post on how hard it is for manager types to do a good job of telling people what they want done.

Snippets:

First off, there's the mechanics of how to do it. What tools does he need? You know that there's a hammer and nails in the back of the supply closet. He doesn't, and it's fair of him to assume that you wouldn't have asked him to do something he didn't have the tools for. He looks around his desk, and he's got a stapler and a tape dispenser.

There is also another way this can go wrong, particularly with a certain breed of eager young programmer. You find that he's gone down this path when your boss comes by the next week to ask about this purchase order for a nail gun. So you talk to your guy and discover that he's spent the last week Googling, reading reference works, and posting to news groups. He's learned that you hang pictures on a nail driven into the wall, and that the right tool for driving nails into walls is a high-end, pneumatic nail gun. If you're lucky, you can point out that there's a difference between picture-hanging nails and structural nails, and that a small, lightweight hammer like you have in the supply closet is really the right tool for the job. If you're not lucky, you have a fight on your hands...

So now we get into higher-level design issues. Where should the picture go? At what height should it be hung? He has no way of judging any of this, and again, it's not as obvious as you think.

Product Management Rule #1

In my previous post we had some good discussion regarding rule # 1:

The best product managers follow the Pragmatic Marketing maxim: Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. Always use market facts to decide the best course of action.

The general sense of the responses was that this rule doesn't allow for innovation. So I tracked down Steve Johnson who was the source of the rules for comments. Here is his response (with permission):

Amazing that "use market facts" is somehow being misinterpreted as "Ask people what they want." The internet solved a huge, documented problem; people didn't ask for it by name but they had long asked for a solution to the problem of connecting businesses and consumers with a single connection point.

True, I don't rely too heavily on product management encouraging innovation; more often I need them to curb unfocused featureitis disguised as innovation.

Steve has a good point here. In the past I've noticed a similar disconnect between the desire to have "innovative" products and a willingness to collect data. Somehow people get to the point where what they believe is more important. This doesn't mean you have to ask people what they like, you can observe what they use, which is probably more accurate anyway.

Amazon, Ebay, Google and many others try new things all the time without lots of fanfare to see if they get used (i.e. market facts) to see if an idea is worthwhile.

Malcolm Gladwell in his Pop!Tech 2004 presentation (via ITConversations) talked about the Aeron chair and how people hated it at first, but gradually it became the best selling office chair of all time. His point was that people don't really know what they want. A common theme in software circles (the users don't really know what they need) there is some truth to it. But users (the market) will tell you if it is useful and you can save yourself a lot of time and effort if you collect some market facts.

Reference: A copyrighted story from SoftwareCEO written by Bob Weinstein Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it and published by Pragmatic Marketing on productmarketing.com

10 rules for successful product managers to live by

From a copyrighted story at SoftwareCEO written by Bob Weinstein Software product management: If you can't define it, you're doing a bad job at it

Product managers' rule #1: The best product managers follow the Pragmatic Marketing maxim: Your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. Always use market facts to decide the best course of action.

Product managers' rule #2: Product management is a not a "natural" fit for everyone. A good product manager has a technical background with business savvy. Software engineers and programmers, for example, can make a smooth transition to product management because they're starting off with a strong technical background. But technical smarts alone won't cut it.

Product managers' rule #3: In "Crossing the Chasm," Geoff Moore says that product management is a senior, business-oriented role and typically fails because we staff it with junior, technically-oriented people.

Product managers' rule #4: Credibility comes from being able to manage the business of the product. Otherwise, product management gets relegated to a technical support role.

Product managers' rule #5: Product management is about delivering what the market needs. Good product managers spend more time in front of customers and potential customers; they spend less time on sales calls and in their corporate offices.

Product managers' rule #6: Product management is not necessarily about delivering what the customer asks for. The best products solve the customer's problems and no more. A product manager has to observe and understand what the customer needs in order to solve the problem, rather than building the features the customer requests. "The old guys at Home Depot do this well," says Johnson. "They don't ask you what you want to buy; they ask you to describe your project so that they can tell what you need to buy."

Product managers' rule #7: Mature companies value product management and enjoy shorter time to market. According to a survey Pragmatic Marketing conducted with softwareminds, companies that consider product-management business critical cut their time to market in half. This results from more focus on the product and less last-minute reaction to sales demands du jour.

Product managers' rule #8: Product management usually fails when organized in the development or engineering team. Technical managers do not consider product management a value-add to their teams and relegate them to project management and scheduling.

Product managers' rule #9: Similarly, product management fails in sales departments. Naturally, sales management considers product management a sales resource and allocates 110 percent of its time for supporting salespeople.

Product managers' rule #10: It seems counterintuitive, but product managers who spend a lot of time supporting salespeople find that they are not valued by their companies. Invariably, the product managers who have been laid off are the ones who are closer to sales.

Merry Christmas Dear Reader

From me to all of you. Thanks for reading!

About that time Caesar Augustus ordered a census to be taken throughout the Empire. This was the first census when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Everyone had to travel to his own ancestral hometown to be accounted for. So Joseph went from the Galilean town of Nazareth up to Bethlehem in Judah, David's town, for the census. As a descendant of David, he had to go there. He went with Mary, his fiancee, who was pregnant.

While they were there, the time came for her to give birth. She gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in a blanket and laid him in a manger, because there was no room in the hostel.

There were sheepherders camping in the neighborhood. They had set night watches over their sheep. Suddenly, God's angel stood among them and God's glory blazed around them. They were terrified. The angel said, "Don't be afraid. I'm here to announce a great and joyful event that is meant for everybody, worldwide: A Savior has just been born in David's town, a Savior who is Messiah and Master. This is what you're to look for: a baby wrapped in a blanket and lying in a manger."

At once the angel was joined by a huge angelic choir singing God's praises:

Glory to God in the heavenly heights,

Peace to all men and women on earth who please him.

As the angel choir withdrew into heaven, the sheepherders talked it over. "Let's get over to Bethlehem as fast as we can and see for ourselves what God has revealed to us." They left, running, and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. Seeing was believing. They told everyone they met what the angels had said about this child. All who heard the sheepherders were impressed.

Mary kept all these things to herself, holding them dear, deep within herself. The sheepherders returned and let loose, glorifying and praising God for everything they had heard and seen. It turned out exactly the way they'd been told!

Luke 2: 1–20, The Message

Get Firefox to do NTLM

From Patrick Cauldwell's Blog - Firefox and Sharepoint

Being a dedicated Firefox user, one of the few things that was still thwarting me was SharePoint.  We use SharePoint internally for a ton of stuff, and it was a drag to have to fall back to that other browser.  SharePoint pages look and work fine in Firefox, but I was having to reauthenticate on every single page, which really hindered my enjoyment of the experience.

I finally figured out how to get Firefox to do NTLM, which means I don’t have to deal with the authentication dialogs, thereby reducing my dependence on IE to one and only one application (Oddpost). 

It’s not at all obvious how to make it work, and it took me a few tries.  You have to go to your Firefox address bar and type about:config.  This will bring up the internal config editor, which allows you to set all kinds of properties that influence Firefox’s behavior.  Look for the key called network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris.  Set that key’s value to a comma separated list of servers you want NTLM auth for.  So if your internal SharePoint sites are on servers called Larry and Mo, use “larry,mo”.  You can also add the same value to the key network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris.  It’s unclear to me if that second one is required, but I set it, and everything works.  Now SharePoint works like a champ, and authenticates automatically.

I only had to set network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and it works like a charm, although the likelihood of finding out this information on your own is slim. Even if you know the config setting name Google only knows about 27 pages with a reference to it and several of those are non-english. A classic case of geekism, you can do it, but only if you know the secret incantation (reminds me of all those “magic” registry settings).

NUnit Unit Testing of ASP.NET Pages, Base Classes, Controls and other widgetry using Cassini

NUnit Unit Testing of ASP.NET Pages, Base Classes, Controls and other widgetry using Cassini

Another one to keep track of…

.NET Html Agility Pack: How to use malformed HTML just like it was well-formed XML...

.NET Html Agility Pack: How to use malformed HTML just like it was well-formed XML...

Seems like a cool utility that I don’t wan’t to loose track of…

Visualizing duplication in a linear sequence

Ask E.T. had a pointer to Dotplot.

An entire software module of a telecommunications switch about two million lines of C.

Seems to be some interesting visualization here. I'll have to keep this one in the memory banks for future use.

[grid::fatherhood]

 Q: What advice would you have liked to receive when you were a new or expectant father?

The biggest surprise for me as a new father was that I would give up so much of my "personal" time to do kid and family stuff. Actually the surprise wasn't that I gave it up, but that I don't miss it. Being a father was so much more rewarding that now I wonder what I spent all that time doing.

So my advise is: don't worry about all the things you might have to give up and spend the time with your family, you won't regret it.

(It is all Tim Bacon's and Dave Hoover's idea)

How to Demoralize your Staff (or not)

From Project, Process & Business Improvement: Are You Loved?

A.J. found in Executive Leadership this list of the 5 biggest complaints employees have about their bosses:

1. Threats
2. Inconsistency
3. Wasting their time
4. Micromanaging them
5. Hypocrisy

 How many of these have to exist before your top talent starts walking out the door? I suspect it somewhat depends on the economy and how interested/vested they are. I suspect, however, that once you hit 3 out of 5 people start walking out the door.