I write about products and the PM role.
Like many customers, I don’t like it when businesses say “No” to me, but I recently found myself on the giving end of that “No”. It was a new experience for me. As you may know from my blog, one of the products I own at Microsoft is an internal wiki platform for enterprise documentation….
I recently learned how to set up my own VPN server, and in this article I share those learnings. The server I set up is an OpenVPN Access Server. All the resources are provisioned from Microsoft Azure’s Portal UI. I chose Azure to host these resources because it is the cloud platform I am most…
(Note: When I wrote this article I thought I was going to stop working on enterprise documentation to work on Inner Source. — Turned out, I’ve been given the opportunity to work on both!) In this article, I share some of my thoughts about enterprise documentation to wrap up my experience as a documentation PM…
As a documentation PM, I recently took some spare time to inspect the Talk Pages feature in the MediaWiki software. As an enterprise documentation PM, I concluded that Talk Pages has its limits when MediaWiki software is used in enterprise settings (instead of public settings, for example, Wikipedia). So, I came up with a feature…
I must admit that the idea of embracing ambiguity didn’t come naturally for me at first: after all, as a computer science graduate I was trained to think binary — zero or one, yes or no, right or wrong. But when evaluating products as a PM, there is usually a spectrum of shades of gray…
It’s been exactly one year since I became a full-time PM with Microsoft. Among the plethora of things I’ve learned about products, one of the most resonating piece is about storytelling: A good story must make sense to the audience. This is harder than it sounds. The first corollary of this is that you must take…
This past week, I unlocked an important PM achievement: interviewing customers face-to-face. In fact, after 12 customer interviews in 4 days, I found it both exciting and challenging, especially for someone who hasn’t done it before. (I had had customer interviews before, but only over Skype.) Thanks to the unexpected challenges posed by these in-person…