Nortrup in Development

In 1776 the founders of the United States of America wrote a Declaration of Independence.

A professional is someone who makes a living doing something.

Yesterday my daughter’s Yoto mini took a dunk in the bathtub.

I had intended to write a big long post on all the things I learned as a Product Ops leader as Tanium for a year, but it got long and rambly, so I’m going to attempt a series of shorter posts that will hopefully get written.

I try to explain work in progress limits a lot and feel like it comes across as an abstract concept a lot of the time.

I’ve been working on implementing Product Management tools for the last year in one way or another.

This fall I was asked to officiate the wedding of my sister-in-law Rachel to her fiance Mike.

I recently had a conversation with several Product Managers at work who wanted me to step in and set a standard for how and who was responsible for triaging bugs reported to their teams.

The OODA loop (Observe Orient Decide Act) is a concept originally coming out of the Air Force for pilots conducting air to air combat.

The Fediverse is great, I love it, but as I see more and more projects to spring up to replace different private social media operations.

I’ve stayed on the sidelines of much of the LLM debate, but I’m willing to stake out my skepticism on this “world changing” technology.

Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.”

I’ve been working with Productboard a lot in the past few months.

It’s early spring here in the Seattle area that means its time to get into my very modest garden and start going any repotting that needs doing.

I’m in the midst of reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer (affiliate link) to my list of recommended reads for Product Managers.

I did a fun bit of Hugo templating today that seemed worth sharing.

Jeff Gothelf has a great post that brings together Product Managemet and my preferred philosophy, Stoicism.

A quick roundup of the things I’ve been reading and enjoying this week From Outputs to Outcomes: Bridging the Four Gaps Itamar Gilad Start using outcome goals right now where you can.

I want the Fediverse to succeed, but it needs to be easy for laypersons to start and run their own small communities, here is how to make it work.

I think my core challenge with Product Ops, particularly standing it up from scratch, is the tension for modeling systems and processes as they are now vs how I want them to be.

I’ve been enjoying the fediverse and mastodon as I’ve left Twitter for reasons.

This site is hosted on GitHub pages using Hugo, mostly because it gives me an excuse to play with very simple CI/CD pipelines and scratch the itch that wishes I was an engineer rather than a product manager.

Two years ago my wife bought me a class to make a bonsai.

I recently took on the role of Product Operations at Tanium.

I’ve spent a lot of time as a platform product manager.

One of the best leaders I ever worked with was my first XO at 1-14th Cavalry David Polizzotti.

There is a lot of complexity in Product Management, but at the very heart of it what we look to do is order all of the things we could be doing to produce the most value possible.

I’ve written recent guides to creating a backlog from scratch and sorting your backlog by value and effort.

Very rarely will you build a roadmap from absolute scratch.

In several PM Communities I frequent I see people who constantly ask, should I take a job a this series A or B startup, or a job at some extreme scale public cloud or tech company.

2021-12-04 I got this tree in November and wanted to do some initial wiring on it and start to pull down the major branches that I wanted to keep.

This is a running log for a Star Magnolia that I acquired from a nursery as a Bonsai project.

I’ve been pulling and analyzing Mik Kirsten’s Flow Framework metrics for several months at work.

I spoke recently with someone who was new to Product Management and was trying to learn how to do the job by reading blogs and books that talk about everyone’s ideal nirvana of product management.

I’ve been working with some stakeholders on how we do prioritization as a Product Management team.

I’m sure if you’ve talked to me recently you’ve heard my song and dance on outcomes based road mapping.

If you start building an enterprise product eventually you are going to get asked to start building integrations with other enterprise products.

Military officers interested in moving into technology should consider careers in Product Management.

Solid Pods (Personal Online Data Store) are an open source project from the efforts of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the original internet) with a goal of re-decentralizing the internet.

I made a career transition into Product Management four years ago.

Commuting is a pain.

There has been much ink spilled and great gnashing of teeth over Facebook’s news tab and the inclusion of Breitbart as a “high quality” news source.

I don’t like conducting interviews.

I’ve been a product manager for three and a half years after being an Army officer for eight.

Watching the aggressive use of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit to disrupt American political and social systems makes me think that organizations above a certain size should have a Chief Devil’s Advocate on their team.

I listened to a great episode of Deliver It on DevOps for Product Owners and a comment by the Lee Janson that you don’t have to have perfect DevOps practices right away really struck home with me.

Ken Norton in an effort to help companies understand how to hire product managers wrote a guide: How to Hire a Product Manager I’m here to argue that the person you are looking for might just be a transitioning or former military officer.

Michael Cata’s wrote a smart article discussing the Department of Defense is reacting to changing events with agility.

I’ve helped plan brigade and battalion level operations in my time as a staff officer and company commander.