Part of the Process

Given my interest in using R as an analysis tool and using a Chromebook as my main laptop at home and on side projects for 2 years, thought I'd take a quick  look at some options for combining the two. Option 1 - Using RStudio on AWS This has been my main usage of R at home, using RStudio on Windows 10 at work. With a couple of preset images created it's easy to get up and running. I used the image created by  Louis Aslett . There are a few alternatives around now, even the Amazon have an article that goes into a bit more depth on  Running R on AWS . THis allows you to fine tune what is setup. I have been using this for about a year now and the experience is so seamless on a Chromebook, since everything else is also running as a Chrome app. Pros:  Use computing power in the cloud, can easily share Consistent experience no matter the computer you use to access it Cons:  AWS management consoles do have a learning curve Small monthly charge for s...

The past couple of weeks have given me opportunities to reflect on what I like about my job and previous experience. Partly because we are expanding the team at 15below , partly from doing a bit of coding. I have written a bit about becoming "post-technical"  in the past, but now is the first time I have done much code in years. The thing that I enjoy most is solving problems and helping people. Throughout my career solving business problems to help create positive outcomes has always been fulfilling. Now I get to help do that, then go back and refine the solutions. You don't always get to do that as a developer or in a project focused role. Side project Code wot I wrote The first bit of coding is on my side project . Martyn has created a great architecture and I contributed the project import from LinkedIn ( almost) all by myself. It feels to brilliant to code on a side project - you get a sense of achievement from seeing an idea come to life. It also provides...

Photo by  rawpixel  on  Unsplash My journey with writing new R scripts had taken a bit of break recently. It started with exploring Text-mining. Then creating my library of reports for Product Management . Although R takes a bit of getting used to, it is like Excel x100 once you do. It is great for repeatable analysis and report generation. Saving a lot of the hassle of the export, format, and save cycle that I was going through. The problem When I needed a new report though I took the chance to expand my skills. I wanted an automated report that showed progress in the product process. This was to show the pipeline to meet strategic goals in the product ideas worked on. This should be in a suitable format to share with senior management. An be understandable especially to those outside the Product team. The solution I had been manually noting figures from the ProdPad UI when I remembered that there was an API. I took a look and it is a nice RESTful API ...

This week has been about kicking off projects at work and a major release for my side project. Because of this my reading has probably gravitated towards thoughts of design, focus and leadership around both.  Voice-Enabled Design is different enough to "point and click" that I think it will lead to some change of the profile of Product People. Interesting theory here that Drama Teachers will be the ideal people to lead the charge here.  Drama teachers may be one specialism IT could do more of. Critical thinkers is another. For example  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the largely uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling, no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. Maybe they fell foul of the issue in this great quote from  Davide Vitiello in his  Focus vs Product Team St...

Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash I never used to see the point of "end of year round up" blog posts. But the journey that I've been on during the past year has lead me to reflect on what I have learned. The beginning of the year started off with me thinking about being data informed . This was balanced by a survey that showed this work had paid off . Since then I have put in processing to help collect and report on what we guided us to detect changes. Learning R and creating a repo to share the data processing recipes  has been the culmination of this. Data isn't just an important topic for product management, combined with ethics it's a topic that is increasingly touching our lives. My interest was first piqued in my reading during April .  Later in the year as GDPR started to loom on the horizon I took a course on Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics . This was a great course that covered not only some philosophical exploration of what it m...

Photo by  Štefan Štefančík  on  Unsplash Since my previous blog post I have made some progress on being able to replace most of what I currently use Excel for with R scripts. I have also launchjed a project to collect together some useful recipes for other Product Managers on GitHub called " R for Product Management " So far I have samples that cover the following data sources: Google Analytics - to my previous learning have added analysis of browsers used by site visitors and an example Shniy app for data exploration. InfluxDB - Working with time series data generated by the product, the two examples here are API response times and feature usage. This includes an example of manipulating time series data to set missing values to 0 for plotting. UptimeRobot - Simple example of taking error data and using a pivot table to explore the data, after some cleaning and filtering. This kind of workflow can be useful with large data sets. One thing th...

Like a lot of Product Managers I use Excel with tools like Google Analytics a lot. Probably like many people I find Excel very frustrating. So having been technical in a previous life , I decided to give R a try . What is R?   R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics that is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. After taking a simple intro course, I started to look around at examples of doing more interesting things. From a work point of view Topic modelling seemed really interesting. Unfortunately a lot of the example code missed a large step (or two) in being useful!  So I forked the most complete example that I could find in GitHub called " Text-Mining ". This did lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole but eventually I had an R script that collected data, cleaned ...