I was with Mind Candy yesterday at the SiliconMilkRoundabout looking for some new talent 
It was a great day and it was really exciting to see so many London startups in one space. I haven’t seen anything like it in London before. What really pleased me was that all the companies were product companies. I remember the first dot com boom and London was a buzz on agencies that were growing like crazy to build websites for everyone and anyone.
Product companies are far more interesting in my eyes, they get to create and learn about market fit. They need to do Agile, Customer Discovery and focus on user experience to be successful. Which is all the stuff I love.
I am really looking forward to the next one.
posted by Dharmesh
As a product manager you are with a product throughout its whole lifetime. One of things to be mindful of are the different mental phase transitions that you must go through to ensure that your product’s first slice gets out of the door.
The last 10% is a key point where you must double or triple your efforts otherwise you will never ship. It is the point where your stories are complete and it kinda feels like it is done. That is the moment where people want to go to the new exciting project and it is the time when as a product manager you must start to really push.
This is the moment where you are regression testing, bug fixing, performance testing and working with ops to ensure that it can go into a production environment.
Remember to keep super focussed and to keep everyone on track. This is the hard bit and you also have to become harder and bloody minded about it otherwise you will never ship. Once you ship you will change mindset again and you can start getting real learning that will help you iterate your product and generate maximum value and revenue.
posted by Dharmesh
A lot of companies and teams say they are doing agile or scrum and it turns out it is scrumbut (Scrum without the core processes that make it work). In my experience the biggest reason for ScrumBut is that the company as a whole hasn’t bought into the cadence that scrum, agile, kanban (whatever you want to call it) requires to function well.
When development teams use Scrum to protect themselves from the rest of the business you might have something better than before, but you are not going to reap the rewards of agile processes. In smaller companies it should be easier to get the whole company to buy into the process. You just introduce it for the development team and then start shipping frequently. If they were not agile before they will very quickly see the benefits and as everyone is so close the company will adjust.
In larger companies this is much harder and the timescales for change might take a long time as there are people that can cause ScrumBut who are not even aware of the difficulties of software development. This is where someone has to hold that vision and has the patience to slowly push the company in the right direction.
A good way is to take a small self contained project and demonstrate the value and then use that as a model for other projects.
The thing is the value of Agile is pervasive and once you start on the journey eventually everyone is one over. Just as long as someone keeps pushing it along.
posted by Dharmesh
I have decided to work for a great company called MindCandy that make www.moshimonsters.com in London as a Technical Product Manager. Sardinia has been great for many many things, but I couldn’t refuse the chance to work there. Everything changes as they say.
posted by Dharmesh
