A Response to Marty Cagan’s “Product Management vs. Product Marketing”

Although over 6-1/2 years old, Marty Cagan’s “Product Management vs. Product Marketing” remains the Silicon Valley Product Group’s top blog article. (It’s entirely possible, of course, that it’s popularity is self-reinforced due to its prominent position on the SVPG home page…) While I generally agree with Marty’s premise and proposed solution, I believe that the article was written primarily from a Waterfall perspective and that an Agile perspective offers a better way out.
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2014-03-31T08:47:13-08:00March 28th, 2014|0 Comments
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The Decelerator Helmet: Slow Motion for Real Life

The Decelerator Helmet offers an experimental approach to an essential subject of our globalized, fast moving society. The technical reproducible senses are consigned to an apparatus which allows the user a perception of the world in slow motion. The float of time as apparently invariant constant is broken and subjected under the users control.

2017-02-13T13:22:18-08:00March 28th, 2014|0 Comments
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A “Breathing” Piece of Optical Art Made from One-way Mirrors

Three out of six surfaces of the cube are made of flexible membrane (foil mirror) with air tank and a compressor connected to it and the other three mirrors are semi transparent spy-glass. By inflating or deflating the air tank, the membrane turns convex or concave, deforming the reflections.

Gorgeous! Instead of using a compressor, I think it would have been interesting to add linear actuators to each of the three flexible membranes so that more complex patterns could have been created. Alternative lighting schemes would have been interesting, too.

Via http://www.numen.eu/installations/n-light/membrane/

2017-02-13T13:22:11-08:00March 27th, 2014|0 Comments
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We’re cutting food stamps by $8.6B over 10 years but continue to offer the top 1% $10B a year in handouts

“Each year, the federal government hands approximately $10 billion over to the richest 1% of Americans — mainly to rich retirees — according to an IBD analysis of data on various federal transfer programs.”

—  “The Richest 1% Get $10 Billion A Year From Uncle Sam”, Investor’s Business Daily

There are 120 million households in the US, so let’s just say that the 1% is 1.2 million households. Diving $10 billion by 1.2 million and you get $8,333 in average yearly payouts to each ultra-rich household.

Compare this to the fact that the average yearly Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, e.g., food stamps) annual benefit is $3,300 year.

Before we start cutting food stamps, we should start means testing Social Security and Medicare.

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2017-02-13T13:22:27-08:00March 11th, 2014|0 Comments
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Strongly Recommended Agile Learning Resources

One of the things that I think holds Scrum teams back from being successful is that they often learn about the Scrum process but don’t learn about Agile culture or infrastructure. Because Scrum is a system that relies on all of it’s parts, failure to master Agile culture and infrastructure means that companies will also fail to master Scrum. This failure is unbelievably costly for companies and teams: “average” teams deliver only a 35% improvement over Waterfall, while properly coached teams deliver 300-400% improvements. I’ve seen this myself in my time working with Scrum teams at Atomic Online: once a team got properly coached and running, we were at least 3-4x as fast as when we started. This is rare, too: I have not yet worked with a team that has outperformed the teams I worked with at Atomic Online.

I think we owe it to ourselves as members of Scrum team to learn about and embrace Agile principles. This is hard to do without a “sensei” (a well-experienced Agile leader) who can can conduct gemba walks with incumbent leadership to bring about organizational transformation. In lieu of that, though, here are some resources that I hope can help to at least illustrate the difference between a true Agile/Scrum/Kanban environment and a waterfall environment that has adopted a few Scrum processes.

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2016-02-01T15:26:43-08:00March 5th, 2014|0 Comments
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Having Trouble with the Rich Text Editor on WordPress? It Might be mod_pagespeed

I updated to WordPress 3.8.1 about a month ago. Since then, I’ve been having nothing but issues with the rich text editor. For instance, clicking on the hyperlink icon brought me back to the Posts page and none of the links worked in the Publish box.

I tried enabling different themes, disabling plugins, and reciting various voodoo incantations to no avail. I saw some errors in my console that appeared to have been related to the mod_pagespeed extension I’m running on my server. So, I added “ModPagespeed=off” to the URL for the post edit page. That fixed the issue!

To “permanently” resolve the issue, I added the following to a .htaccess file located within my /wp-admin/ directory:

  ModPagespeed off

That’s all that was needed. Come to think of it, this is probably a reasonably good idea for anyone running WordPress and mod_pagespeed. I hope this is helpful to you!

Update Mar-03-14: It was mod_pagespeed.

@jmarantz on Twitter helpfully remarked:

@chrisgagne What MPS version were you using? We fixed that a few versions back and it should be resolved as of 1.6:the latest stable release

So, there you have it. Thanks, jmarantz! If you’re running into this, update your mod_pagespeed to 1.6. If you can’t do that, add the directives above.

Creative Commons photo from Wikipedia

2014-03-11T17:21:13-08:00March 2nd, 2014|0 Comments
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A Donkey in Agra

I shot this photo in Agra, India, just a few minutes before I saw the Taj Mahal for the first time since I was a child. In color (below), there’s a irony in the bright colors of the bag and the donkey’s seemingly forlorn expression. This photo has haunted me since I’ve taken it. Perhaps it’s because it feels like a perfect snapshot of a particular time I felt my heart pouring out with compassion for a fellow sentient being. It also reminds me a bit of Au Hasard Balthazar.

Donkey, original color file

2014-03-11T22:22:35-08:00March 2nd, 2014|0 Comments
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How to use Google Hangouts to Easily Host Your Daily Standup

If you have a distributed team or can’t get a regular meeting space in your workplace, online video conferencing may be your next best alternative for a Scrum team’s daily standup. While I always advocate for co-located teams with a dedicated meeting place for standups, I realize that this isn’t always feasible.

You’re probably well aware that it often takes a few valuable minutes to corral everyone together using Skype, Google Hangouts, or other online video conference tools. This can really eat into the efficiencies of a 15-minute daily meeting. I really like Sqwiggle, but it is limited to four active video callers at any given time. Google Hangouts supports up to 10 users and works relatively well, but sometimes it’s a hassle to get everyone in the same chat at the same time. (Have more than 10 people in your Scrum team? Please consider splitting that team apart for optimal performance.) Never fear: simple instructions follow. This works as of Feburary 28th, 2014.

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2014-05-01T10:22:51-08:00February 28th, 2014|0 Comments
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