Comments on: On Product Management

By: Jon Frame

Jon Frame — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:25:16 +0000

I would like to try out the app.
Can you send me a link?

Thanks,
Jon Frame
Raleigh NC Office
jon.frame@oracle.com

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 22:00:01 +0000

Sure, money does change the equation. We have a similar dynamic among teams that have lobbied large groups to use Connect. We have no marketing and rely on viral adoption. So, when large orgs/teams make the jump, they tend to have a larger say-so in the product direction, which makes sense.

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:57:49 +0000

Thanks for the tip.

By: John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 09:21:39 +0000

You're in an interesting situation, since your customers do not directly pay to use your product (although perhaps the Oracle accountants allocate costs to users in some internal way). I'm in a different case, where my product is sold to paying customers in a market – a relatively small market (even optimistically, our market is in the thousands rather than the millions), which means that individual customers have a great say in the direction of the product. This results in a somewhat different dynamic in relation to the strategic direction vs tactical customer requests question.

By: Chrissy Hawkins

Chrissy Hawkins — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 06:47:23 +0000

My colleagues and I went on a strategy planning type of meeting for a few days and thought strategically how to improve our business within our roles. I am in Product Management .

We found gaps and filled the holes and now are working better as a team.

I found this book, “Reinvent your Enterprise through better knowledge work” by Jack Bergstrand and thought this would have helped us even more then but at least we can focus on the now and learn faster and better ways to improve our knowledge and work productivity.

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:14:49 +0000

Thanks for the kind words.

From the beginning, we've wanted to open source Connect, and several people (customers) have expressed interest. The problem is that I'm not sure how to do that from a process perspective. Maybe you can assist.

Noel's release of OraTweet "as is" for free may help us build a case for Connect.

Connect (and Mix) are JRuby apps. When it launched, Mix was the largest JRuby production app, and I think it still is, unless Connect has passed it. Either way, we've used a combination of Oracle and open source pieces.

Also, even if we open source it, we can't fully let go of Connect until we find it a home with a team to support it. People use it for work, and we can't bail on them.

By: JordanOAtOracle

JordanOAtOracle — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:53:58 +0000

Jake, first off I have to say how refreshing your blog entries and TheAppsLab is from an organizational perspective. Kudos and thank you!
Regarding your post, I have a couple of thoughts. First, what about donating Connect to oss.oracle.com? It sounds like once Rich and Anthony are done cleaning it up, you would have something worthy of submission. Doing this may actually provide many benefits to Connect, Oracle, and TheAppsLab. For Connect, the OSS benefits are pretty obvious from the number of contributors that you have the potential to garner. It will also give Rich and Anthony an opportunity to practice crowd-source product management . For Oracle, it shows our continued willingness to not horde innovation and ability to provide significant benefit to the community at large. And for TheAppsLab, it is just another example of justification of the benefit of the group.
This leads to my second point, that by giving Connect to the OSS community, it frees a majority of TheAppsLab team's time up for continuing to innovate. As a Sales Consultant, I am still struggling with ways to tie Social Networking into my daily activities. My personal goals are to be able to earn Trusted Adviser status to more customers, build more qualified pipeline, and stay more in touch with both the business and technology worlds. I think that as a group, all Sales Consultants would want the same thing. How would TheAppsLab begin to approach better defining the problem so that we can address it using current and future technology approaches. I would be very interested in being actively involved in such an effort.
So, short and sweet… AppsLab:
1. Keep up the great work!
2. Give your work to the community!
3. Create new products!
Cheers,
Jordan.