hansef

Yep, which just adds to the implausibility of this person existing on-hand in an organization. But if we can't find product owners in the wild reliably, how do we as consultants help nurture them in the projects we are engaged in, and help our projects and clients succeed?

I've experienced this in my own 7-year practice as CTO of an agile rails consulting shop, growing from 2 to 20 people while working with dozens of clients ranging from government agencies to VC-funded startups and self-funded single founders. Some of these projects have been extremely successful, while others have resulted in high-quality software which never saw the light of day or met real user needs. I would estimate the ratio of success to failure has been 1:5. It's deeply disheartening for me, and for the outstanding development teams I've built, to see work we have put months or years of effort into collapse due to lack of focus and clear, cohesive product management and vision.

The successful clients all had someone inhouse they could dedicate full-time to defining a well-structured backlog, grooming stories, balancing feedback from stakeholders, acceptance testing work, communicating with design and development, and generally acting as the unary executive voice of the product.

SomeONE. And the problem is that the role here calls for both executive, rather than committee, function and requires a broad generalist skillset. A good product owner needs to think analytically, write clearly, communicate firmly and negotiate competing needs and priorities. They need to be comfortable discussing technical details, even if they are not themselves technical. They need taste and understanding for user experience, even if they are not themselves a designer. They need delegation skills and a keen editorial instinct.

There are many more people with money to build software than with someone in-house with a matching set of aptitudes and is available to own a project.

Instead we get a group of department heads, with overfull schedules and competing needs. We get people who come to us with ideas for apps they are sure will make them wealthy. We create beautiful software for them, they "launch" in the App Store, and we never hear from them again. We get VPs of Product who spend more time in endless fundraising meetings than talking to their customers and development team.

The real surprise is that the success ratio has been this high.

Brand and product simplicity, elegance of implementation. What is Dropbox's competitive advantage, or Instagram's?

Nice! What are you guys using for encoding and transport?

I'm also working on a Chrome and Firefox extension which uses Craigslist as a data source, and this is my understanding as well

I think that rich client-side js apps packaged as browser extensions offer some interesting opportunities in general - being able to behave more like a normal client, instead of a giant aggregation host, allowing you to avoid angering services like Craigslist, being able to ask the user for permissions for increased localstorage limits (the default in most browsers is a measly 5mb) and the ability to do cross-domain ajax requests, etc.

Social streaming creates white noise, while curated social sharing provides meaning. Having the devices in a hundred friends' pockets passively alert their social profile that they ate at a burger joint is meaningless. Having my friend tweet a photo of the mouthwatering burger she ate at the Umami Burger in my neighborhood at least provides some level of ambient value.

I listen to a lot of new music. My Spotify account is linked to Facebook. Seeing an automatically posted list of the last 70 songs I listened to might be interesting to a stalker, but having me specifically post "Bah, the new Weeknd mixtape isn't nearly as good as House of Balloons" actually tells you something about my taste.

What did you read/study? Do you have a finance background? I've heard of people getting pretty burnt in options trading as well. :)

Hired over a dozen engineers in the last couple years - swearing is a cultural signifier for me. It's a (small) cue that you might be a good team fit. If you say "fuck" while interviewing with me, I'm slightly more likely to hire you.

+1 - I love your guys' model, just looking forward to seeing some bigger course projects!

I love what Codeacademy is doing, but hope they'll be rolling out some meatier lesson content with that 2m round before too long. The entire venturebeat-post-worthy jQuery lessons take about 3 minutes to go through (http://www.codecademy.com/courses/jquery-and-the-dom/1#!/exe...)

c.f. also non-work-related internet use in general, bathroom breaks, staring out the window and thinking, and other productivity-killing pursuits on "company time" ;)

Orly? Granted, compete data is far far far from reliable, but: http://grab.by/grabs/70bf6fda125dad336eaadd829f2739f3.png

Look like vrbo has (and has been retaining) about a 10x multiple in traffic over airbnb. Granted, this isn't (again) reliable data, and also does not in any way speak to revenue, but this doesn't smell like unadulterated "lunch eating" to me.

yep. we've been doing this for five years, as we've grown from 3 people to 20. haven't had an issue yet. work with people you like and trust - everything else will follow smoothly.

Sure, but at the same time I think it's worth also taking a moment to think about this number. 10% of the world's population has an active Facebook account. That's staggering. The best number I can find for MySpace is 100 million active users. It's easy to misrepresent the scales involved just because they're so very large, but the difference between 100 million and 600 million is huge. 17 year olds are fickle consumers. 53 year old Aunt Sue is not. How many people still have a paid AOL account simply because they don't want to lose their email address? AOL's stayed alive for YEARS on them. I don't think Facebook is particularly overvalued: it may not be what all of your friends are using 5 years from now, but it's going to be a very, very big and profitable company for many, many, many years.

The naysayers below aren't part of your target audience. As someone who is, I think it's brilliant.

Wow the writing in this piece is atrocious.

"Let's be very clear, the competition is Apple (AAPL), but those hardware companies who would take on the gang from Cupertino, HP among them, have one huge disadvantage, they don't really do software."

"What HP did when it dropped $1.2 billion on Palm, was signal that software is finally front and center for the largest PC company on the planet."

Commas are great, they help you get away, for example, with run-on sentences, the only thing is, you can't just put them anywhere.

This is what you get when you spend millions of dollars on an enterprise CMS + integration once every 8 years or so.

Damnit, you beat me to my bitching.

> People are naturally predisposed to upvote cotton-candy content, and if you start letting any of it in, eventually it will overwhelm whatever nutritional content used to be there.

Totally. That's a very valid point. It's much easier to upvote an amusing BBC2 video than to digest, upvote and participate meaningfully in a discussion around a serious technical article.

However Hacker News has remained remarkably tonally consistent in my opinion:

December 2007 frontpage: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229130614/http://news.ycombi...

December 2008 frontpage: http://web.archive.org/web/20080701051131/http://news.ycombi...

And it looks like the group nostalgia for the glory days of reddit is a little overblown as well: http://web.archive.org/web/20071229144532/http://reddit.com/

Ok, maybe not entirely overblown. Most of that stuff looks like it was at least submitted by people who could drink legally.

My current concern with HN is actually not fluff content, but the preponderance of inane business and personal development blog posts. If I have to see one more "how to find a technical co-founder" post... ;)

Oh c'mon, have you looked at the front page of reddit lately? Hacker News is hardly in danger of becoming indistinguishable.

We come here to interact with a group of people with some sort of shared ethos and sensibility, submitting and voting on content we collectively find interesting. If you don't enjoy seeing this on the front page, vote something else up.

Everyone sounds more nebbish when translated through a reporter.

In Portland, yes, nearly every bar. Although you probably can't pull off a beer and dinner for $1 anymore most places.

I think this might be a bit harsh. ;)

However I do agree it would be much better to set up user expectations for the benefit of linking their account: explain to me why you need this information in a simple, preferably visual way.

Also, would be great to have a way to unlink my Twitter/Facebook credential from the app.

The guy who founded the company, and with whom I've been working closely for over 5 years, is technical with a design background, but also happens to be a bizdev god. He's in SV (I'm in Portland, along with several of our other employees), and knows a lot of the right people. We do some startup builds, but also a lot of projects that add directly to people's bottom lines - for example, an admissions and course management system for a university, which will contribute directly to them being able to get an accreditation rating they're seeking, and which will return the cost of the work to them (conservatively) at a 10x multiple.

Of course, these aren't lump sum, flat bid projects - they're paying for an agile team over the course of a year or so.

How have you had success finding larger corporate clients? I've been working at 20 person agency as Director of Engineering for 5 years, but we generally run $500k+ year long webapp builds in Rails, not $12k corporate sites. I'm trying to catch up on some debt, and have the client and team management experience to put together some "mini-agency" projects like, but am not sure how to go about finding the sort of client who needs this type of site.

Totally offtopic, but m company did the site for Third Way earlier this year and I love the S3 CNAME'ing I added at the last minute before launch: http://content.thirdway.org/publications/335/Third_Way_Idea_...

Always fun to see a project you were involved surface on NPR. ;)

I've met a few talented web designers who don't grok html, javascript and css, but (so far) no product ux designers. Depending on the type of product you're building, someone like this may be exactly who you really need.

Working with a good ux designer will completely change your understanding of the role of design in product development. They can play a pivotal role in defining and shaping your product. And yes, a person with these qualities almost invariably can also code. Understanding the underpinning technologies of the web remains nearly inextricably entwined with understanding the design potential of the web.

As an aside, I think a platonic ideal founding team would have 2-3 people who share varying degrees of business, design and technical acumen. Each person has a defined role, but they also relate to their co-founders' roles in a meaningful way. Really understanding what it means to be GREAT at something often requires educating yourself enough to become mediocre at it. Completely partitioned specialization is for companies big enough to need HR departments.

Alternatively, Google says "net neutrality is is great for everybody else, bitches."

"Don't be evil" is officially dead at the hands of a lust for control. Compare to Google in 2006:

"Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can't pay. Creativity, innovation and a free and open marketplace are all at stake in this fight." -- Eric Schmidt

http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality_letter.html

+1 for consideration of a Constitutional amendment.

Proffering a system where it's perfectly ok for one random dude in Australia, who is beholden to no one, to make choices about the distribution of information directly impacting the lives scores of millions of people as some sort of acceptable alternative to fixing the structural defects of the current system is INSANE.

It's a false dichotomy between leaving the current system untouched and disowning the need for a system at all. It's like choosing between optimizing the world financial system and returning to an agrarian barter economy.

What would make this truly epic would be if they offered a secure hosted subscription service that allowed you to upload a script you built with the desktop app and either:

a) run it on a hosted Mac Mini at a specified frequency, with a billing rate based on number of actions/frequency of script execution (aka, someone with a 30 step script who wants their script to run once an hour pays more than someone with a 5 step script who wants their script to run once a day)

b) execute the script on their hosting via a callback url, so I can hook this up to my CI server

This plus flexible notifications (email, SMS, Campfire) would be huge.