Welcome to Spidey
For this weekend only, to coincide with the opening Spider-Man 3, I’ll be wearing my superhero colors proudly with this theme.
I am a huge fan of Spider-Man, and will be one of the geeks lined up for the 12:01am showing tonight. I hope everyone will go check it out this weekend, and gets a kick out of the new movie starring my favorite superhero of all time.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Product Manager,
–Adam
Rick: Thank You
I have to thank Rick Segal for the very kind words. It was a really nice surprise to land in Toronto today and get to read that.
I really appreciate it, Rick and am having an incredible time shipping some very cool products at MusiciP!
XBox Breakage
So, last week while I was working towards getting some hardcore achievements, my xbox 360 crapped out on me. It’s been a pretty frustrating week, considering it happened while my wife has been out on business.
All my pizza eating, xbox playing plans went right out the window.
But, it was an interesting experience to go through all of the points of support before deciding, yes it needs to go in for repairs. I pretty much tried everything.
My first step was to head over to xbox.com. It was really simple to find their knowledbase, and the articles I worked with were well laid out and written. Very simple to diagnose / find what was wrong with my console and get their tips.
Once I had played out as much as I could, I actually managed to get the DVD-ROM drive working to the point of getting back in game and getting some stuff done. But, it didn’t last too long before my entire console was frozen again.
So, on to email support. They wrote back quite a friendly message and told me to call support. They had all the helpful info: phone number, reference number based on my email, and the name of the support rep that replied, which I really like. I actually have our support reps do the same thing.
Now, the one beef I had with support was, the rep was CLEARLY reading right off of a script. Now, I realize that she probably didn’t even work for Microsoft or the XBox team, but it would have been nice if she did. I always got this feeling that the XBox team was this cool little start-up like thing inside of the bigger borg that is MSFT.
I lost that when I talked to support. Now, don’t get me wrong, she did a good job and gave me everything I needed, but it seemed like returning the console was the very first thing she jumped to. She didn’t even sound like she owned an XBox, let alone understand what a DVD-ROM drive was and what I was saying to her.
I think had she actually been more passionate about the console, and had something like, “yeah, my friends went through that, what date was your console issued? Yeah, we’ve had reports of those failing” — or something more than just going down her paper script, it would have continued me buying into the small, start-up like XBox team brand.
Maybe I’m crazy, though. I could very well be the only person on Earth that gets that feeling about the XBox team. But, that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that Support is a key part of Product Management. You get it built into their thinking that there is something more they could do to enhance the customer’s experience. A rep that was saying, “hey, we noticed that 3,000 of the 10,000 XBox’s manufactured during date X to date Y had DVD-ROM problems” would allow MSFT to put the right literature on their site.
I’m not saying that they don’t do that, but based on who I spoke with, I have a hard time buying into that type of ambition going on from their front lines.
Ask for Help
One of my challenges as I mature and grow-up (in the work sense) is knowing when to ask for help.
It’s really easy to want to take everything on yourself, but you will inevitably end-up bottlenecking something, and that slows down the machine / momentum. You don’t want to be the cause of that, although for those of us that eat and breathe ambition, that’s tough.
The last couple of weeks for me have been really fast-paced. But I’m really learning so much - especially about a) executing key product management tasks and b) management. I got caught off-guard when I went through a deliverable review this week as part of things my team is working on.
It was the cause of it not being done as completely as it could have been, and that pissed me off.
But, I now know (yes, from hard lessons learned) that I can’t let that stuff eat me up as it has in the past. That paralyzes you (me especially), and as such, work quality degrades.
So this time, I’m getting off my ass and actually letting it inspire me to do better. Management can be tricky; while the concepts are easy, the devil lives in the details. I’m not, and never plan to be, a passive manager. I love being involved and communication vision, and things like that. I just need to get better at paying attention to detail.
Ahhh, thanks for listening. Heh. As I was writing, I just connected the dots there in my head; wow, funny how that works.
One thing I have noticed before, and noticed it again today, is that throughout my time in the workplace, I advance by jumping knowledge / experience levels. And, it’s always a clear step for me. Not “title” or “salary” or anything like that, but having gone through certain things a couple of times and picking up on details.
I just made a level jump this afternoon, and thanks for hearing me out.
Five Things You Don’t Know About Me
Thanks to Rachel for tagging me!
One
I wanted to be a rock star from about 12 years old until around 16 — I even went as far as to record my own 12-song album where I wrote all the songs and played all the instruments.
No, you can’t hear it. I’m not even sure Rachel has heard the entire thing…
Two
I bite my nails like crazy. As a result, I get sore fingers…which totally suck.
Three
I played a lot of sports as a kid / teenager, but stopped when I got really started into business.
I had / have to overcome the “fear” of not having a University degree, and accordingly, I read a ton of business books. I hate the thought police, but am learning to deal with that stuff.
Four
I learn most effectively when starting with advanced concepts and then progressively moving back to simple ones and the fundamentals. I work a lot on instinct, and question (constantly) those with many years of experience when unsure to make sure my instincts are correct.
Five
The large majority of my happiest memories from teenage-hood involve my now Wife, and I couldn’t be happier about that. We’ve been together since I was in grade 12 (when I went through high school in Canada, we went to grade 13), and she was in grade 11.
We met on a school trip to Europe and I absolutely love the way she tells our story. Whenever it comes up, I just look to her and listen — it’s awesome.
