I’m actually an Etsy vendor – I have a store called TurningCat (turningcat.etsy.com) where I sell handmade pens I make in my home shop. For me this job would be an awesome connection between what I do for work and what I do for renewal.

Etsy is seeking a talented Product Manager to coordinate the conceptual and technical development of new products. As a member of Etsy’s product team, you will work with your peers in design, engineering, support, business, operations, and marketing to ship successful, meaningful products for Etsy’s community. This position is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Of course, I’m pretty committed to being a West Coaster at the moment, so I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Etsy :: Careers

I’ve been enjoying Bret Simmons’ series about personal branding lately. In a series of posts he covers why personal branding is so important (The Google Background Check), how to get started (Personal Branding: Some Simple First Steps), and what you’re trying to accomplish – that is, to show that you Consistently Contribute Value, as well as many other topics.

The Web offers all of us an incredible opportunity to get the word out about who we are and how we can help others solve problems that matter to them.  That’s your personal brand.  Personal branding can help you in your job search if you are between jobs or help you remain more flexible in your current job.  Getting good at personal branding is easy, but it will take commitment on your part.

I was happy to see that I’d already done a few of the steps, but there are lots more for me to follow. How are you doing on your personal brand? Leave me a comment to let me know.

On Language – Defending Against Language Pedants – NYTimes.com

So I say outpedant the pedants, and allow yourself to gluttonously revel in the linguistic improprieties of yore as you familiarize yourself with the nearly unique enormity of the gloriously mistaken heritage that our literature is comprised of.

Ammon Shea tells the pedants to take a chill pill, and tells us how to handle those pedants, in this clever and useful “On Language” column from the Sunday, 4 October 2009, New York Times Magazine.

I just posted an article on the Innovation Jam, Accept Software’s blog, with yet another shot at a good metaphor for product management:

Product management is a complicated and multi-faceted activity, and each of these concepts offer useful guidelines as we strive to create successful and useful products that kick ass. But there are several other characterizations I’ve found helpful over the years both to understand what I do, and to explain it to others. Since they’re not common, I would like to share them (over several posts):

One aspect of the product manager role is to do impedance matching.

From Wikipedia: The term ‘impedance’ means the resistance of a system to an energy source. For constant signals, this resistance can also be constant. For varying signals, it usually changes with frequency.

Impedance is an unfamiliar concept if you’re not an electrical engineer or a ham radio operator (I was KA6HAJ). But it basically means the resistance of a medium to information transmission, usually between components of different types. I think we can all agree that customers and developers are “different types” – and there’s naturally a communication barrier.

The product manager’s job is to bridge that barrier. In the language of electronics, the product manager is a type of transformer.

Wikipedia again: … [transformers are] used extensively in modern communications, particularly in frequency conversion mixers to make cellular phone and data transmission networks possible.

The product manager takes the signal from the market – needs, desires, complaints, misunderstandings – and transforms it into a signal that the engineering organization understands – requirements, specifications, defects, enhancement requests, and so on. Likewise, the product manager takes the signal from the engineering organization – a product with features – and transforms it into a signal for the market such as a value proposition, a set of benefits, and talking points.

Link: How To Talk To Your Mom About Product Management

I’d love to hear your thoughts – either here or on the Innovation Jam!

Several mobile phones. (Image via Wikipedia)

Do you remember this situation? You made some plans with friends, got to the meeting place, and they weren’t there. You hung around waiting, they never show, having gotten a better offer (“party with Bono, dude!”). Or they show up an hour later (“had a flat tire, dude!”). Or I don’t show up (“got in a fight with my girlfriend, dude!”). In any case, the plan breaks down and the whole thing goes off the rails.

Well, this rarely happens today. I would have called them, or they would have called me, and the whole experience would be back on track. In fact, with cell phones, our plan for the evening would be completely different to start with. It wouldn’t even be a plan – it would be a series of checkpoints. We’d review where we were and then make decisions about where to go next. Obviously, the overall goal would remain the same, but getting to that goal becomes a matter of coordinating.

This came to mind when listening to a 2005 Clay Shirky talk on the (awesome!) TEDTalks series. He said that with the cell phone revolution:

We stopped making plans – you say ‘I’ll call you when I get there.’ There’s a general replacement of planning with coordination.

We’ve all experienced the fragility of these plans – whether in our personal lives as in my story above, or at work, where we usually call it “the waterfall methodology” in software development. Once something goes wrong – or not according to plan – it can be extremely difficult to get the plan back on track.

And isn’t that just what “agile” does – replace step-by-step planning with a process of coordinating to achieve a goal? At every point everyone is in touch (if necessary) to get clarification, to make sure progress is being made toward the goal, and to ensure that indeed the final goal is worthwhile arriving at. When circumstances change (“Bono wants the product with feature X instead of feature Y, dude!”) we can adapt because we’re coordinated.

Comments?