Ross Mayfield
CEO and co-founder of Pingpad, making social productivity as instant, simple and social as messaging. Previously VP at SlideShare (acquired by LinkedIn), Co-Founder, CEO at Socialtext (the enterprise social software pioneer) and RateXchange (a B2B bandwidth exchange)
Roadmapping with the loudest guy in the room
Overcoming 🔮Shiny Object Syndrome with customer conversations and data You know the story. You’re the product manager and have worked hard to organize the quarterly product planning meeting with the leadership team and key stakeholders. You’ve engaged customers, worked with the dev team to estimate effort, combed through 1,000 support tickets. Tirelessly charted a thematic vision […]
Problems with Product Discovery
Working with Product Manager customers on product discovery, I’ve observed some interesting patterns. Teams move from problems to solutions too quickly, use MVPs for solution feedback, are biased on singular requests, and loose context across the process. If the following observations seem like common sense and aren’t problems with your team, good for you! Moving […]
Products are Conversations
Cartoon by Gapingvoid Products are Conversations We’ve lost our way in Product Management. When the biggest problem Product Managers face is setting roadmap priorities based on market feedback, it’s symptomatic of the underlying practices and tools. Simply put, Products are Conversations. How you orchestrate conversations with customers and cross-functionally in your organization is what makes […]
The Product Manager Problem
Ever since the Product Manager role was created to bring decision making as close to customers as possible, it has been an art and science of collaborating with stakeholders. The problem today is how to scale collaboration with your stakeholders, when the signal-to noise ratio is out of control: Customers overwhelmed with choice and information […]
Slack won the first Group Messaging war
With the Slack-Atlassian partnership, round one is won and done. To the victor went the spoils. Now on to the next front, with Microsoft and others to contend with. Slack surpassed HipChat in users in late 2014 and has outpaced HipChat ever since, according to Zapier, which offers tools that enable users to connect cloud-hosted […]
Twitter’s Nuclear Option
If Twitter’s countermeasures fail in the run up to the mid-term election, they should prepare a nuclear option. Russian intelligence distorted the democratic process of the 2016 Presidential Election by manipulating social media, and perhaps more. A tech backlash is in full swing, where the power of unintended and intended (ads) consequences wielded by […]
Introduction to TeamOps
TeamOps is the combination of practices, apps and cultural philosophies, prompted by the shift to group messaging like Slack beyond software developers.
Shifting to Slack Requires New Practices and Re-tooling
The biggest change in enterprise collaboration is the shift to group messaging. Like all meaningful change in enterprise applications (PCs, spreadsheets, LANs, email, IM, Social), this began in the consumer sphere and entered the enterprise from the bottom-up. This time it was mobile group messaging apps like WhatsApp. Slack had amazing timing to meet this […]
Knowledge Management Systems and the Rise of Slack
Knowledge Management Systems and the Rise of Slack This is the third phase of knowledge management. It happens as a by-product of getting work done, so people know what they are doing. Photo by Dmitri Popov on Unsplash In the late 90s there was a Knowledge Management bubble. KM was at the forefront of what we now […]
Rishi, Slack can be right for you. You just need the right tools and practices to focus your work.
Although Slack is positioned as a productivity tool, it becomes counterproductive when misused. Instant messaging applications enable communication that is online, synchronous and on-demand. This tends to be appropriate for interrupt-driven teams like those in customer service and sales. However, project-oriented teams tend to suffer from inundation. As a software developer in product development, I […]
