I Love It
I had the company holiday party this evening. I’ll start right out by saying, I am usually reluctant to go, because once I get there, I tend to feel uncomfortable. However, by the end, I’m having a great time.
There are a couple things I noticed this year, with it only being the second one that I’ve attended.
I suck at mingling. It’s true. It’s a major weakness that I simply must overcome. How does one do this? Well, by attending more mixers and holiday-like parties of course. Oh, and watching the people that are good at it helps too.
One thing I am good at — when I get talking about my job and what I do with someone that holds a significant interest, I am totally jazzed and off in another world. This happened tonight with some visitors from our German office. I am so pumped about 2006, and the roadmap and plans that I have been working on with our CTO, I want to shout it from the hilltops. I want to tell everyone what is in my head, that I want to execute on.
Have I made some mistakes thus far? Absolutely. But, it’s not the end of the world, and I’m recovering.
There’s one thing a mentor I have at work told me, "we’ll always take talent over experience, so you have nothing to worry about". Wow. What a great thing, eh? Well, it’s true, if the person you work for believes in the same thing.
I’m learning a lot of exercising patience, and how that can help. I’ve been reflecting quite a bit, and I love using this blog to do that. I also have learned to take every opportunity that I can to talk ad nausea about my passion - the product I am currently the Product Manager for. This, of course, has to happen regardless of what some folks may have on the horizon; they are out of your control. As per my previous post, just freakin’ execute. Nothing else matters. Line things up, bang them off. Boom - boom - boom - boom. Before you know it, you are the de factor answer for a lot of things in an organization. I’m on my way there, but need to get over this "maturity" hump and simply realize that at the end of the day, I need to do what I do best, which is my job.
I love what I do, and have incredible passion for it. I enjoy getting really detailed and talking about the finer points of Product Management. I need to have the patience to take things as they come and do what’s best for the organization. In my case, market-driven products are were it’s at, and I gotta say - I’m becoming a better Product Manager every day of the week.
Man, I love what I do.
Execute, Execute, Execute
There’s something I learned from a book a long time ago that I promised I would never forget as I progressed throughout my career:
Execute, execute, execute.
Bad strategy, good strategy - it don’t matter. If you execute well, you’re 90% ahead of the competition. And wow, have I failed to remember the wise teachings of Mr. Lou Gerstner. I wish I hadn’t.
The last two months at the office have been rather hectic, and I’ve lost sight of many simple things that I realize now played a large role in getting me where I am. No more. I have to recognize this as a minor bump in the road and get back on track rather quickly — as in, tomorrow.
Thanks, Lou.
The Bandwagon
I have all of our competitors in a custom search on Google News. This helps me to keep on top of things that I might need to during the course of a week to make sure I’m as prepared as possible when questions come my way about something that one of them is doing.
This happened this week.
Ever since Google Base came out, it’s been catching a lot of buzz. I’m a believer in the wait and see, especially with stuff like this. Some of the companies we compete against jumped right on the bandwagon as soon as Google made the release announcement. We did not, and I wasn’t about to start pushing for it.
Have we had clients inquire? Yes, 1. Will more do so? Yes, probably. So, why not jump into the fray and run a press release that our products now support Google Base? Because, that would be bandwagon jumping, which is not always the best strategy to play.
As I mentioned above, I’m more of a wait & see type guy, and I really think that the hype here will blow over. Is the app really generating TONS of traffic for those using it? I can’t see that being the case. Can I see it eventually being an effective component in a shopping comparison strategy? Yes.
Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t have plans to support the app in the new year; we do. It will just not be right away, and that’s not a bad thing. Small companies (especially those in software) tend to rely too much on doing everything their clients ask for at the drop of a hat, and we need to step away from this reactive approach. When you have a very strong product, Sales needs to rely on the existing feature set (and yes, maybe in some cases, the high-level road map), but every deal can not have a feature element to it, otherwise you’ll hit a ceiling when you try to scale.
At least, that’s what my short-time in this business is telling me. What do I know? I still have so much to learn, it’s a little daunting.
