As Product Managers, our customers teach us the most. So I’m saying thanks.

Dear customer,

Thank you. Thank you for your time, your patience and your trust. Thank you for sharing with me your problems, and letting me do what I could to solve them.

Thank you for participating in user research. For letting me watch you work while I sat beside you or from 8,000 miles away over a video conference. Thanks for staying late at work while I was in Australia so that I could at least sleep until 6 am and still get to speak to you.

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As a product manager, I love solving my customer’s problems. So it’s always tempting to try and keep developing our product to serve all of our users problems. Realistically, we can’t solve them all — but where do we draw the line?

It was great to attend the Fiber Connect tradeshow in Orlando last week. Shows like this give us a great opportunity to observe the value chain that we’re part of. This is important for product development as it gives a sense of which problems are served well, and which aren’t. …

If you’re in the business of automation, a simplistic view is that you’re in the business of destroying jobs. As someone who is in that business and doesn’t like the idea of destroying jobs, this can be hard to make peace with.

Dollars saved are proportional to hours worked by people

For the last four years, I’ve worked on technology that designs fiber optic networks (when I mention ‘design’ in this article, I’m mostly referring to the design that is the output of an algorithm, more context here if you’re interested). Our whole value proposition has been about reducing the amount of money companies need to spend on designing…

I recently attended the Broadband Communities Summit (BBC) in Austin, TX. Over the last few years, I’ve been to several conferences like this on the US high-speed broadband conference circuit. Generally, at these conferences, talks focus on the “why’s” of high-speed broadband as well as the “how to justify the why”. At this point — I’m kind of over it. …