Alexander Lowe - The Craft of Product Management by Alexander Lowe

Product Ideation Framework

Success cannot be achieved by a singular moment of inspiration. Success is achieved by discovering and executing on one idea after another, over and over, while having more successful ideas than not. To do this, you need to have a system that when combined with your creativity, insight, and wisdom

Product Management History

The History of Product Management - Part 1, Inception

The modern Product Manager role can be traced through a chain of events starting in the early 20th century when an enterprising young economist asks, "How can I sell more soap?" ͠ *This is a story of how industry moved from manufacturing-centric to customer-oriented, the moment product management duties

Data Presentation Learnings with Edward Tufte

I had the opportunity recenlty to attend a lecture by Edward Tufte in San Francisco. I entered not knowing what to expect, and I suppose my expectation was that I would be taught a set of practical tactics I could use in my day to day work. I was wrong.

Making Slow Work, Embrace the Slow

Slow is the persistent constraint of product development. Engineering teams move too slow, customers move too slow, finance and legal move too slow. So how do we combat slow? Let's change our perspective and look at slow as an attribute that forces us to be better. We can't change the

Selling Product Ideas Internally

Before you can solve your customers problems with a great product offering you have to sell the idea internally to varied audiences with sometimes competing priorities. There is a lot of guidance for how to design, build, and go to market but for the sake of this post let's assume

Distributed Computing Papers

My career has been building platforms and products for distributed systems. Early in my career, much of my focus was on distributed networks of (what are now called) IoT devices: tens of thousands of systems distributed across the globe, backed by a SOA control plane. Today I work building platforms

Lean Learnings with Eric Ries

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Eric Ries on the phone for an hour. He is the author of the very much recommended Lean Enterprise and Lean Startup. I had the opportunity to pick his brain about validated learning, applying lean startup principles to a large organization, and

Product Lifecycle for Engineers

Working with engineering teams is part of the product managers core job. Aligning customer and business needs with engineering capabilities and motivation can be a challenge. If you're a product manager working with engineers or if you're an engineer that wants to increase effectiveness, this is for you. A tool

Approach to Patent Valuation

I was recently awarded a patent that I was a co-inventor of. Immediately the board asked me to come up with a valuation for that patent. Being a private, early stage company in a nascent market it did present some challenges. After much research and consultation with those who went

Data Science Specialization by Johns Hopkins University

The first MOOC I've ever taken is the Data Science Specialization by Johns Hopkins University and the classes have exceeded my expectations thus far. I've always had to analyze business and product data and metrics, run experiments, and do A/B tests but wanted to get into deeper inferential and

Finding Solutions: The Problem Space

I'd like to talk a bit about a structured approach problem solving. Generally speaking, a problem solving approach can be divided into four steps: Define the question Explore the problem space Design a solution Challenge the solution Every step is critical, but for this discussion I will focus on exploring

Self Service Technology Evolution

I'd like to distill my experiences into a simple trajectory of the space. I hope it will help inform other self service developers to build better products. It sums up quite simply... self service technology lags behind the technology of the web. I have a long career in the self

Project: Image Chart

Since Google Image Charts is no more, I needed an easy way to generate and embed charts into my emails. I present Image Chart - a self hosted web service to generate charts from URLs. Google Image Charts was a great way to generate a chart image using only URL

Continuous delivery of value.

At iSnap we have a strong core value of innovative product development. It's something I am very passionate about as I believe all aspects of the business extend from a desirable product. iSnap has a catalog of hardware products, data analytics professional services, and software subscription tools. I want to

Social Media Today Interview: iSnap, selfies, and connecting offline and online worlds.

iSnap Uses Selfies to Seamlessly Connect Offline, Online Moments published on Social Media Today, written by Shay Moser. Thanks, Shay! I like the article. I'm very excited about the things we are doing at iSnap and our grand vision to bring or offline experiences just a little closer to our

A CEO Job Description

I have been a founding CEO of three companies; two successful, one crash and burned. The greatest personal development for me was learning to delegate. My time would often become consumed by adding too many tasks to my to do list. As I would find myself overwhelmed by all of

Passing the Torch

As one phase ends, another exciting one begins. This month I officially pass the torch to our new CEO and take on a new challenge as iSnap's CTO. I founded iSnap four years ago with an idea conceptualized on the back of a tiny airplane napkin. Today the company has

Forbes interview. Angel round lessons learned.

My interview with Tom Taulli of Forbes about raising an angel round.

Code

Diff and patch .Net objects.

If you need to create a diff patch between two .Net objects of the same type you can check out my object-diff-dotnet repo on github. Useful for cases such as: Retrieving user changes to a settings object and saving them to apply to another settings object. Pushing a default product

Startups

Evaluating startup ideas.

This is a slightly edited repost of a blog post I made in July of 2007 There are a lot of ideas floating around for starting a company. It can be difficult to tell if an idea is a “good” one. Are all the dominos in line? Is the idea

Startups

Love makes the startup world go round.

This is a slightly edited repost of a blog post I made in July of 2007 So, startups are hard, scary, and statistically doomed to fail or underperform. But what is it that makes the experience worth while whether you succeed or fail financially? What is it that gives you