Category: 2.6 Product Management

Another role or function that is often confusing to Germany high-tech companies is product management. Startups tend to get it right these days, but large organizations often remain unfazed by a lack of strong product management.

A product manager is responsible for defining the product innovation and associated business plan (strategic product management) as well as working out features to a level of detail (technical product management) so that they can be passed on to engineering. As the saying goes,

A product manager is responsible for building the right product, while an engineering manager is responsible for building the product right.

Continue reading “The Importance of Product Management”

I’m seeking advice on how to frame the research question for a research project (Ph.D. thesis) on software product management and open source. The simple heuristic “non-differentiating -> open source it, competitively differentating -> keep it closed” doesn’t cut it because of secondary effects like development efficiency resulting from open sourcing, market opportunities resulting from platform compatiblity, etc.

The best I could come up with so far are three different but related questions. These are:

1. For a non-differentiating function, which open source component to use?
2. For a chosen open source component, how to manage this dependency?
3. For a competitively differentiating function, when to open source?

Questions 1 and 2 are well-defined. Question 3 remains unwieldy. The heuristic mentioned above would answer “never”, but this is not true, as explained. Overall competitive situation and compatibility considerations may still lead to open sourcing unique intellectual property.

I’m seeking comments as to how practitioners (or other researchers) would look at this question. Any comments are appreciated.

Schufa is a German credit rating agency. By law it is required to provide information to consumers (while it makes all its money, for now, off corporate customers). As a consequence, its password and login screens have been designed, I suggest, to be as unusable as possible. Below please find a screen-shot of the PIN setting dialog, (The pin is the second of two passwords you need to login.) There are plenty of requirements. My favorite requirement is “use at least one special character but don’t use any illegal special characters”. Also, kind of amusing, the admonishment “to think really hard to remember your PIN”.