If you’re a Quest Software Foglight user, check out the Foglight community that’s recently launched. (where was my heads up Tyler and Greg? š )
Greg Crow has a post sharing some insight into Quest’s thoughts on the Business Service Management (BSM) space and Tyler Jewell shares some of Quest’s thoughts in the Performance Management space.
Congrats to Quest Software and the Foglight team for opening up some and sharing your thoughts and ideas with the community. To my knowledge, there are ZERO IBM Tivoli, HP, CA, BMC or Compuware Product Managers blogging outside the firewall or actively participating in public forums. Keep it up Tyler, Greg and crew. Post often!
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Ooops, my bad Doug for not giving you the heads up on our blogging. Of course, it WAS published in a Quest press release, so we can see that you are CLEARLY reading every one of those. Ha!
The blogging thing is new for most of the product managers that are posting. So, we are still getting our feet underneath us, learning a rhythm, and making sure that we are talking about the topics that people really want to hear about.
Along those lines, this is making me realize that I need to get my next post finished. Back to it…
Tyler Jewell
Sr. Dir, PM
Quest
Thanks for responding. I’m sure it was there in the 10,000’s of emails I have in my Gmail account!
My advice –
* publish the roadmap
* encourage all of your customers to provide feedback (not just the CAB clients or those that spend the most $$$)
* give your community direct input into some percentage of your roadmap or investment/maintenance budgets and show them publicly where they’re investing
* rank/prioritize all of your content on the roadmap and who asked for it (client, competitive, bug fix, win new business, etc.)
* expose the documentation
* share your strengths and weaknesses
* post on your blog frequently
* don’t use it as a sales and marketing channel only
* share real world scenarios on how clients business has benefited (let them be the guest author, share the code, configuration, etc. so others can follow)
There are some really good blogs out there for product managers you should read as well. I wish more of them did!
Man, I think I’d be a great product manager!
Happy blogging!
Doug
Thanks for the advice, Greg. Oddly (or is it comically), my previous job was general manager of a company that had many online properties totally 500K users and now am an investor in C4Media, publishers of InfoQ.com – which is a media property in the software development space.
While none of these properties are vehicles of a software company, their business model is fundamental to the development of quality content, enablement of an open community, and collaboration of like-minded concepts. Openness, openness, openness with credibility is the mantra to good business in this space.
So, you’d think it’d be natural to apply many of those concepts to the blogs that we’ll write. Certainly, the culture inside of Quest promotes those concepts, though there are historical guards and barriers based upon competitive beliefs that exist in organizations of this size. Getting Foglight.org operating well will take experimenting with the right mix of openness to the business plans, while protecting the elements that are can threaten the achievement of targets if revealed.
In the case of Foglight, don’t think that will be too much. I expect that our PMs will share:
1) roadmap information
2) direction and vision, even prior to dev commitments
3) surveys or other research information that we collect that influences the roadmap
4) case studies
5) some aspects of our personal lives – makes for a more human connection
In terms of how we’ll actually influence the roadmap, that’ll be community, strategy, competitive, CAB, executive input, and some level of market prognostication. If our community becomes a solid voice of the Foglight user base, then it’d be a great vehicle for additional feedback. But I don’t think we’d treat feedback that we collect from customers differently than we’d treat community feedback. We are pretty balanced in how we handle input into the roadmap, and Quest rarely creates a roadmap designed to satisfy the largest customers. In fact, one of the things I have to sign yearly at Quest as a product director is a document stating that I’m not aware of any “side deals”, which are licenses sold by sales (with my permission) that include obligations to create features not currently in the product. It’s difficult for recognition purposes – and doing that means that you probably have something wrong with the business plan and it’s likely not going to scale – so rethink it.
So, looking forward to what we will continue to publish on the site.
Keep the feedback coming.
Tyler
Typo! Not sure where it got in my head, but that’s, “Thanks for the advice, DOUG!” Why don’t these things let you edit for embarrassment?