Part of the Process

Doing background desk research for my final MSc project and I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started with looking at the different industry bodies that look after computing fields. I have been a member of the  British Computer Society (BCS) for a number of years, mainly because of their Project Management group and local branch meetings. But they are lagging a bit on modern development practices and roles, such as Product Management. Although they do have a Digital Product Management book coming out later this year! This got me to looking at associations that specifically support product roles, and building a " body of knowledge " like the project management world has. I found quite a few out there, and some names I had seen in academic research started popping up. I also fell down a rabbit hole in terms of the difference between a certificate and certification ! I have joined a couple, and ordered copies of all of the "bodies of knowledge" books I can since ...

During normal life finding time and energy for side projects can be tough, with the strange events caused by the Coronavirus it can be even harder. A short update on what we've done so far this year.  This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves, through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Adding remote jobs With more people working from home, and liking it, we thought it would be good to boost the links on our resources page to include more remote working options. This was a quick reaction to Coronavirus and the changes of the working world. It also prompted a bit of a look at the resources with some updates and tweaks. Job application tracker The next bit we tackled was a feature inspired by a tweet about using a spreadsheet to track j...

I've had this book on preview as each chapter came out and I've finally had a chance to read the full release version. So before it gets officially launch at MTPCon on June 13th here is my round-up... Formats : Paperback, DAISY, ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it?  From  O'Reilly , Amazon or .... any good bookshop, although I think there are currently only 500 physical copies left world wide!     Who is it for?  Anyone involved in a software product development team or a startup founder thinking about which roles to hire next.  What's it about?  Product management, product leadership, not just the overlap but also the differences. How to grow your career as you grow into product leadership and how to hire the role for senior management. What's the book like?  The book is divided into three sections: The Product Leader The Right Leader for the Right Time Working with Customers, Agencies, Partners, and External Stakeholders The ...

Photo by Matt Cornock (flickr) I have been messing around with computers and first started writing simple code about 30 years ago. Since then I have gained a degree that contained a large "technical" component analysing and solving problems with code.  My professional code has been experienced by hundreds of millions of people from organising school transport for special needs children, overhauling part of the British rail infrastructure, supporting the programme management of a massive bank refurbishment in the UK to more recently supplying travellers around the word with tickets, information during disruption and the chance to feedback to their travel company. I have also written a content management system in one language that I didn't use professionally and some small open source utilities in another.  I don't list out these achievements to convince you of my ability as a programmer, far from it, at my best I was merely average. My code was never truly ...

I don't usual write about my workplace directly on social media or this blog. But today I'm just going to briefly touch on some of what makes it a good place to work for me. Basically for me a good work place always boils down to two things 1) the people and 2) a general sense of inquisitiveness. Working Late by Thomas Høyrup Christensen I work for 15below a software development company that specialises in the travel industry. It's fair to say we are probably market leaders in the kind of workflow driven notifications that we do. We have internal tools that started for a particular business need and are now side projects such as Gallifrey, what I love watching here is how is allows people to play with techniques that aren't always useful in the day job - such as click once deployment in github We also have internal tools, which are part of say our build chain, that get open sourced - such as the aptly named  Build.Tools  or fixes to how packaging works in...

fishbowl jump by Kay Kim A few days ago Timehop popped up a link to Brighton: The UK's Silicon Valley or Just a Feeder City for London? that was written a year ago and the situation has changed that much (although 15below could be another name to go with Brandwatch! ;-)) The story laid out was quite familiar, very few of my friends at university stayed in the area though and I moved out for 4 years getting experience in ... you guessed it in London! It also chimes in with the effects of innovation systems talked about in the book Get off the Grass: Kickstarting New Zealand’s Innovation Economy by Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan. In Chapter 3 of Get off the Grass the authors tell the story of the origin of Silicon Valley and how agglomeration had made it successful, this area previously had an industry manufacturing valves that had powered electrical circuits before transistors. The story of Silicon Valley nicely illustrates the three key aspects of the a...