""

gmail plus crm

"So is there a pattern of behavior for new product managers that ensures long term success? I’ll argue yes, and for my new hires I boil it down to three phases:
2 weeks, 2 months, and 2 quarters."

"We mistake dumb luck for a machine that produces success. We rely on induction when we should rely on deduction, and then, having realized our mistake, we lean on “data-driven decisions” in lieu of common sense. We chase patterns that aren’t there and miss eager markets right in front of us. All this while projecting the confidence, real or manufactured, that’s necessary to play the game."

exceptional post from @teich on dev process, deadlines and death marches.

"They found that inspired people were more open to new experiences, and reported more absorption in their tasks. "Openness to Experience" often came before inspiration, suggesting that those who are more open to inspiration are more likely to experience it. Additionally, inspired individuals weren't more conscientious, supporting the view that inspiration is something that happens to you and is not willed. Inspired individuals also reported having a stronger drive to master their work, but were less competitive, which makes sense if you think of competition as a non-transcendent desire to outperform competitors. Inspired people were more intrinsically motivated and less extrinsically motivated, variables that also strongly impact work performance."

"JuiceDefender - Battery Saver is a powerful yet easy to use power manager app specifically designed to extend the battery life of your Android device. Packed with smart functions, it automatically and transparently manages the most battery draining components, like 3G/4G connectivity and WiFi.
"

You’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself
—Ice Cube, Check Yo Self

Everyone in the technology industry seems to agree that people are paramount, yet nobody seems to be on the same page with what the people organization­—Human Resources—should look like.

The problem is that when it comes to HR, most CEOs don’t really know what they want. In theory, they want a well-managed company with a great culture. Instinctively they know that an HR organization probably can’t deliver that. As a result, CEOs usually punt on the issue and implement something that’s sub-optimal if not worthless.

Interestingly, one of the first things that you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good Quality Assurance organization cannot build a high quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality Human Resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

The Employee Lifecycle
The best way to approach management quality assurance is through the lens of the employee lifecycle. From hire to retire, how good is your company? Is your management team world-class in all phases? How do you know?

A great HR organization will support, measure and help improve your management team. Some of the questions that they will help you answer:

Recruiting and hiring

Do you sharply understand the skills and talents required to succeed in every open position?
Are your interviewers well prepared?
Do your managers and employees do an effective job of selling your company to prospective employees?
Do interviewers arrive on time?
Do managers and recruiters follow up with candidates in a timely fashion?
Do you compete effectively for talent against the best companies?

Compensation

Do your benefits make sense for your company demographics?
How do your salary and stock option packages compare to the companies that you compete with for talent?
How well do your performance rankings correspond to your compensation practices?

Training and Integration

When you hire an employee how long does it take them to become productive from the perspective of the employee, her peers, and her manager?
Shortly after joining, how well does an employee understand what’s expected of her?

Performance management

Do your managers give consistent, clear feedback to their employees?
What is the quality of your company’s written performance reviews?
Did all of your employees receive their reviews on time?
Do you effectively manage out poor performers?

Motivation

Are you employees excited to come to work?
Do your employees believe in the mission of the company?
Do they enjoy coming to work every day?
Do you have any employees who are actively disengaged?
Do your employees clearly understand what’s expected of them?
Do employees stay a long time or do they quit faster than normal?
Why do employees quit?

Requirements to be great at running HR
What kind of person should you look for to comprehensively and continuously understand the quality of your management team? Here are some key requirements:

World-class process design skills—Much like the head of quality assurance, the head of HR must be a masterful process designer. One key to accurately measuring critical management processes is excellent process design and control.
A true diplomat—Nobody likes a tattle tale and there is no way for an HR organization to be effective if the management team doesn’t implicitly trust it. Managers must believe that HR is there to help them improve rather than police them. Great HR leaders genuinely want to help the managers and could care less about getting credit for identifying problems. They will work directly with the managers to get quality up and only escalate to the CEO when necessary. If an HR leader hoards knowledge, makes power plays, or plays politics, he will be useless.
Industry knowledge—Compensation, benefits, best recruiting practices, et al are all fast moving targets. The head of HR must be deeply networked in the industry and stay abreast of all the latest developments.
Intellectual heft to be the CEO’s trusted advisor—None of the other skills matter if the CEO does not fully back the head of HR in holding the managers to a high quality standard. In order for this to happen, the CEO must trust the HR leader’s thinking and judgment.
Understanding of things unspoken—When management quality starts to break down in a company, nobody says anything about it, but super perceptive people can tell that the company is slipping. You need one of those.

Acknowledgement
I would like to give a very special thanks to my head of human resources, Shannon Callahan, who taught me everything that I know about this subject.

can attach bugs to visual elements through a wysiwyg approach

nice list

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we'll need at launch (the press release and the faq) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

"are you merely managing an organization, just leading an organization — or are you building an institution? "

"There may be no greater ongoing source of confusion, mis-set expectations, and outright deception than the ubiquitous software product road map. Are you tired of road map heartburn? Then take the Road Mapper’s Anonymous pledge and swear off bad habits forever"

slick concept

"Cinch gives you simple, mouse-driven window management by defining the left, right, and top edges of your screen as 'hot zones'. Drag a window until the mouse cursor enters one of these zones then drop the window to have it cinch into place. Cinching to the left or right edges of the screen will resize the window to fill exactly half the screen, allowing you to easily compare two windows side-by-side (splitscreen). Cinching to the top edge of the screen will resize the window to fill the entire screen (fullscreen). Dragging a window away from its cinched position will restore the window to its original size."

awesome excerpts from a Quora post

"Maybe you were just wrong about what an intuitive user workflow would be. Then you say, “I agree, it is confusing.  Can you walk me through how you use it, so that I can better understand how we might make it better?” When you start feeling defensive, it’s usually for a reason – you know something isn’t really quite right.  Use that feeling to learn something useful."

"I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures. They also have misconceptions about the creative process sometimes. We do have these people who we give a chance to on the belief they’re right, and can rise to the occasion, and we are wrong sometimes, because we can’t see what goes on in their heads. And our measure, because we can’t see inside people’s heads, is the team. If the team is functioning well, and healthy, it will solve the problem."

Was controversial when it was published, but still very interesting.

like pivotal tracker

like the "walking skeleton" concept and much more

"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. Working software is the primary measure of progress. … Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential. …

"the third and last of a series on getting your start up to go fast"

Good breakdown into "1. Online Marketing, Outreach Strategies & Building Brand Visibility 2. Public Relations 3. Customer & Technical Support 4. Product Development & Quality Assurance 5. Sales & Business Partnerships 6. Internal Web 2.0 Ambassador 7. Reporting 8. Goal Setting & Professional Development"

"You have a piece of functionality that you need to add to your system. You see two ways to do it, one is quick to do but is messy - you are sure that it will make further changes harder in the future. The other results in a cleaner design, but will take longer to put in place. Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future."

word on the street is CM > Constant Contact > Mail Chimp

lifehacker suggested

good overview of the process of choosing a CMS, plus mini-reviews of your options.

Bravo!

guidelines for staying in control of your time

Henceforth, a program manager would: 1. Design UIs 2. Write functional specs 3. Coordinate teams 4. Serve as the customer advocate, and 5. Wear Banana Republic chinos

"Current fishing regulations usually have minimum size limits to protect smaller fish. That, Sugihara maintains, is exactly wrong. “It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back but the larger, older fish that should be spared,” he explains. They stabilize the population and provide “more and better quality offspring.” Laboratory experiments with captive fish back up Sugihara’s conclusions. For instance, David Conover of Stony Brook University found that harvesting larger Atlantic silversides from his tanks over five generations produced a population of smaller individuals."

"how we use Socialtext's wiki for tight, fast, iterative collaboration with product management, design, development and QA. The transparency and participative contribution fostered by the Socialtext toolset enables a broader network of weaker ties with customers and customer-facing folk in sales, marketing, support and professional services. The broader network of weaker ties helps Socialtext understand our customer's needs, and the short development cycle lets the leadership team flexibly prioritize what's needed for the business. A key principle of agile is adapting your process to the your current processes and needs, and a key principle of Socialtext is a set of tools that let you adapt your processes to be responsive to change."

"All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else."

Add date/time stamps, replace numbers, insert text, convert case, add auto-numbers, process folders and sub-folders....plus a whole lot more! Rename multiple files quickly, according to many flexible criteria. Rename files in many ways: add, replace, insert text into file names. Convert case, add numbers. Remove or change file extensions. Check the detailed preview before renaming. Rename photos using EXIF meta data (i.e. "Date Picture Taken", "Resolution" and other information embedded in all JPG photo files) Rename your holiday pictures from a meaningless dsc1790.jpg to NewYork1.jpg in a flash. Rename MP3 files using ID3 tags (a.k.a. MP3 ID3 tag renaming). Change files' creation and modification time stamps.

" a story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate and instantly react to real-world changes. It's based on agile development methods, but it can be used on a variety of types of projects. Tracker frees you up to focus on getting things done without getting bogged down trying to keep your plans in sync with reality."

looks like TAC lite isn't enough for what i need... and TAC doesn't have a stable 6.x release

Inside the Obama campaign, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent generation of organizers has built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people's organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.

handy plugin for managing roles in Wordpress

allows for inline editing of the date, title, author, categories, tags, status and more on both posts and pages without leaving the “Manage” admin sections. No need to load each post or page individually. Simply double-click anywhere in the post or page row and when you’re done, press enter. Alternately, you can click the link in the new “Edit” column.

allow you to set forums private. You can control what user roles can view, edit, delete, and post to each forum

"an API for other modules to create lists of users and give them access to nodes. It has no UI of its own and will not do anything by itself" required by Forum Access

"I’ve come to believe urgency is poisonous. Urgency may get things done a few days sooner, but what does it cost in morale? Few things burn morale like urgency. Urgency is acidic." JF

a project designed to help you educate yourself about advanced business concepts. This manifesto will show you how to substantially increase your knowledge of business on your own time and with little cost, all without setting foot inside a classroom.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do.

it will be far better to invest in smart people watching the social aspects of the system at launch than in smart algorithms guiding those aspects.

good overview of swap space (circa dec 2007)

"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Likewise, Brooks memorably stated "The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."

gather evidence, mostly from historical timesheet data, that you feed back into your schedules. What you get is not just one ship date: you get a confidence distribution curve, showing the probability that you will ship on any given date.

If you blog you have to be intimate. You have to say something about yourself. Blogging punishes the ego. If you try and impose yourself they stop linking.

Excellent article on innovation "People who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped having an old idea"

installing and configuring an automated infrastructure management system (puppet), version control system (subversion), continuous build and test (frequently cruisecontrol.rb), software deployment (capistrano), monitoring (currently evaluating Hyperic, Ze

"I always know what time it is," he says. "It is always now. And now is when you should do it."

Explanation and advice for boards

Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Real learning si a cycle of questioning, experimenting, and reflecting. It's how we convert curiosity into an innovative solution, so learning must BE the work, not something separate fr

intuitive time tracker

a free wiki driven project management tool written in php5. Freelancers and small teams can easily setup projects and keep track of tasks, issues, bugs, efforts etc.

view, preview, install, uninstall, print in color, customize size and text of the previews, browse your hard drive for fonts, create your own folders that you can drag fonts into, convenient and automatic categorization, drag-n-drop to add font files (eve

To outsiders, programmers are viewed as a sort of inner-circle of magicians who speak a rather cryptic language aimed at impressing others, as well as themselves.

In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable -- Eisenhower

Project management is a social problem. It is 99.5% about getting everyone who knows something about the state of the project to share what they know with everyone else. Getting all the relevant information is 99.5% of the problem, analyzing the informati

Capturing the collective intelligence of a diverse group of people to give you insight about what may happen in the future vs. relying solely on individual experts

open source and freely downloadable constituent relationship management solution. CiviCRM is web-based, open source, internationalized, and designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental groups.

tracks time and money for your projects