Co-written with Seetharam Param, CEO of ReleaseIQ.io

I was reminiscing with a friend and former colleague of mine recently about how we both have experienced product and service releases that were under tremendous pressure to deliver a new feature or capability and were already behind schedule. Along with the highly charged environment and the pressures on the team, people were already tired and quality issues started creeping into the builds. Look, our teams had the best of intentions but being behind on a critical release meant that ultimately quality there was an impact on quality. And, when we finally managed…

RIGD.IO COLLABORATIVE AUTOMATION FOR INCIDENT MANAGEMENT

SlackOps for PagerDuty Part 5

In this installment of our Series we are going to explore some things you need to do during your PagerDuty incident response. Things let setting the incident commander, assigning tasks, and running through a basic triage. Some of these activities are run for every incident, others you might not need to do. In the case of triage you might have a different triage depending on the nature of the incident or the priority. Let’s tackle them on at a time.

Incident Response Activity 1: Set the Incident Commander

The role of the incident incident commander is to own the incident and drive it…

Co-written with Mike Dimitroff, CTO of RigD.io

Chatbots as UI — what we have so far

Do you need a bot to translate for you? One that is “fluent in over six million forms of communication” could certainly come in handy sometimes. Handy enough to put up with its… shortcomings.

But if you need to “interpret the entire Imperial network”, and the only interface you have is a wall socket, a bot is pretty much your only choice.

DevOps has taken the application and operations community by storm. The unification of application development and application operations has already shown profound effects on the application lifecycle of service/product ideation, architecture, build, test, deploy, configure and operate. Where traditionally application development was owned by the business, or lines of business, operations was typically owned by the IT department (heck they owned the data center, servers, network and everything that one needed to stand up infrastructure for the application to run on). These two silos oftentimes did not work together and finger pointing was commonplace. Common scenarios where software worked in…

As someone who has experienced the highs and lows that accompany life as a Product Manager, I am keenly aware of the challenges this important role plays in the technology industry [and so many others]. Where many of the departments in the organization — whether large or small — may choose to operate in silos, Product Management is the department that brings all of the teams together to ensure everyone’s voice is heard, vision is seen, and needs are met. It is the department, when run well, ensures a comprehensive approach to strategy and decision making. …

There will come a time in your career where you will bring out a new product in a new market space or segment. This blog is not about the new product requirements, or even how to target this new space. I am assuming that you and your team, as professionals, will have done the research on the key problems customers will be facing and how the capabilities and features of the new product will be addressing those problems. You and the engineering team should be well on your way to building the right product. But, are you?

Customer Maturity

This is a…

By Wayne Greene and Laurent Gharda

Product Managers are a unique class, a veritable professional unicorn. Responsible for creating business value out of the ether, they must create value as it relates to a “whole product”. They can bridge the business and the technical, forge links between architects, and be the ones who go to market. Seeing the big picture while deciding on micro-features is a piece of cake. Un-ruffling the feathers of irate customers followed by sorting the backlog that results from back-to-back meetings is but one context shift this magical character must handle. The Product Manager must create…

Jointly blogged by Laurent Gharda & Wayne Greene

As good product managers and product marketing managers, we are told that one of the constituencies that we need to listen to are the sales teams. Those product sales specialists and system engineers that take leads, qualify them, align value proposition with customer pain points, enable a proof of concept or similar trial, identify key decision makers and close the deals. We back in HQ may at time like to sit back and watch the numbers in Salesforce and monitor the success of these sales teams. Yeah right!

Nothing Important Happens in the Office

We know we need to get out of the sprint reviews and…