Benjamin M. Hill

There are many ways to comprehend all the new communication methods available through the Internet.  One method is to chart the methods on their relative investment per communication (how much time and effort you put into each outgoing message) vs. the audience size of the communication (how many people might see your message).  This allows a comparison of twitter, SMS, IMing, blogging, spamming, and traditional media, as well as highlighting the empty space that twitter filled, providing clues as to why twitter has seen so much recent success. Check out the positioning at my SlideShare site: Communication Spectrum

Every PM/PjM's daily worry: How do you know how your team is doing?   How do you identify what is working well vs. what needs fixing before it becomes a serious issue and kills your timeline?  How do you take the temperature/check the pulse of your product in a way that helps instead of adds overhead?  How do you stop frustration before your team gets bogged down and productivity tanks? Which got me thinking: What would be the minimal amount of information (lowest process overhead) you need from your team to take the pulse of the project?  Potential answer that I'd love to impose on my next team as a COB daily form, with some sort of automated system that harasses anyone that forgets to fill in the form before they sign out for the day (and allows you to fill out the info via a mobile web interface during your commute home): Locate today on a X/Y graph:  X=How intense was today? (not at all to crazy intense) Y=How frustrating was today? (not at all to ...

I recently attended p-camp , a fantastic get-together for product managers from all over the US. Hidden among sessions in the vein of "Agile Now!" and "Can you be more Agile?" and "Agile and Scrum: How to be more Agileriffic" there was a gem of "The Future of Product Management" where we explored where the career of Product Manager was and where it was heading. And what I quickly realized was that people don't like us much. Come again? Ok, people like PMs as individuals just fine. (Well, people seem to generally like me, and seem to like the PMs I've worked with) But in general, there is a greater than average distrust of the PM as a role in an organization. As it turns out, there are some perfectly valid reasons. Engineers: don't like being told what to do (who does, really), and they don't like having to guess how hard something is before digging into it. And they really hate having to stop work on one thing and swit...