Thx Derrek. I'll be pretty transparent so stay tuned as we go through the wild ride together.

Thx Steve. Totally agree. I have been having at least 2 meetings a day partly for that reason exactly.

Amen to that. I was a co-founder of a startup back in 1999 and it was freaking intense. My hope is I'll be a bit smarter and more thoughtful this time around so that when the challenges present themselves, I'll keep my head straight!

Thx Eric. I'm guessing ur a Chrome user? At any rate, someone on my team would love to interview you to get more feedback. Can you shoot a mail to rfritzky marchex.com and tell him Tom sent you. We'll hook you up with a Starbucks card for your trouble!

how's that for agile ;-)

ok just swapped out sharethis for like :-)

So true, closes i have is the sharethis widget :-(

Sacrelage!

Who said anything about being subtle ;-) In all seriousness, I mainly don't like the clumsiness of writing "he or she" all the time and we live in such a male dominated world that saying "she" is my small way of saying, the PM doesn't always need to look like Brad Pitt (otherwise, I'd be out of job too).

Ganesh it's a fair point and we can't ignore the customers' own stated "requirements" even if they're sometimes more like expectations than needs. Furthermore, sometimes their requirements are perfectly valid (though in that case they'd be used and not be on the chopping block). That said, I would argue that if you spend a too many cycles meeting the check boxes for RFP's and analyst reports, you might risk ending up with a parity product? Perhaps you can really deliver breakthrough innovation AND satisfy the conventional wisdom requirements but that's a tall order. I got to wonder if innovative enterprise-oriented products like Xobni, Salesforce, Yammer, Adwords Editor, Doubleclick, and Snagit went at least partially outside the Analyst feature tables to change their respective games...

Thx for stopping by Wayne. If you find any rock stars who decide they prefer Seattle, send 'em my way ;-)

Hi Chris. Be my guest! The web was meant to be open :-)

Interesting enough, some folks on twitter are huge proponents of listing all of a products legacy features in a PRD in order to provide context. That seems pretty hard core to me. I find engineers and program managers won't read any PRD over 10 pages and most of them need to be mocks.

Hi Puneet: Sorry for the confusing abbreviation. No-res mockups are a UI design that's particularly low-resolution, i.e., very rough sketch. Used as a prop to enable more productive customer interviews and flesh out early concept ideas. Tom

Hi Puneet, I'd consider a few options: 1) Ask your manager or other internal mentors to allow you to work on a project with them that utilizes those skills. 2) If #1 doesn't work, just volunteer to drive some project in your spare time and find an external mentor. 3) Consider a continuing education, weekend workshop (likve SVproduct), or online learning. Hope this helps. Tom

there are some interesting comments on this topic from folks on the FP Page if you're interested. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Always-be-Shipping/154639537882335

If I were at an It company, I'd then move to either a small cap or a startup. If I didn't mind the risk and found a super cool startup, I'd go that route. If I found a small cap with a big time stretch opportunity and I didn't want early stage risk, I'd go that route. I personally would probably not move to an incumbent from an It company since if I really wanted to play defense at the industry leader, I'd be better off staying at the It company for a couple more years as it transitioned to incumbency.

Yep. "loop" means series of 1:1 interviews with different individuals at the potential employer usually takes 4-6 hours total.

Hi Daria. I totally agree. It was mainly laziness on my part doing a google image search for "headshots" and finding that most of the female pictures seemed to be fashion model types. FWIW, some of the best product/ux/pgm/etc people I've worked with have been women. In my last job, our VP was a super smart woman and I learned a lot about leadership from her example. Thanks for taking the time to give feedback and following the blog. Tom

dear google search pm, i've started using the spacebar more to jump down below the fold and found another bug. if you type in "dog tricks" and you hit the space bar twice after the "s" in "tricks", I'd expect it to jump to below the fold. instead it thinks i want to search for "dog tricks " which kind of makes no sense. you should assume the second space bar tap means jump down, not search for content with two spaces. thanks, abs pm

Update: Turns out the sticker style, while much neater looking new, is very hard to erase and after a few days looks like a 3 year old whiteboard. The whiteboard paint on the other hand worked out really well and is really easy to erase. It also gives you max writing area. Only thing we'll be doing differently is smoothing the underlying surface first so we don't have this orange skin effect which can make it a bit harder to draw fine details.

Yeah, he was doing a sound bite interview and the irony is they were just about to go a layer deeper into some more insights when he trivialized their research. The good news is I don't think he was trying to be a jerk, he just didn't grasp the depth of their findings.