javaun

Great piece, but it makes me feel like I'm atypical in my field, and perhaps that as the product field has grown up it's become super boring. I have no doubt that some PM jobs are the way you stereotype web2, especially at big tech companies. But I would never want one of those roles.

I've been a PM by title for 15 years, longer by responsibility/scope. I've always been a 0-1, often pre-PMF, always shipping, always carrying water for ENG and UX, often writing prototype code and sometimes landing patches. PM'ing in these cases is always more art than science, there's never enough data, you have to make decisions, execute, and own it. I also currently work at Mozilla where our code, our bugs, and our community chatter is all in the open.

Product has matured a lot since I got into it. I'm grateful there are career tracks and resources for folks to grow and move companies. I have noticed that the PM role has ossified at many companies, and seen it at events. If the majority of the PM jobs are the way you describe the web2 space -- watching a graph go up and down, abstracted away from engineering and technical exploration, removed from the shipping process, writing TPS reports -- that makes me sad for the field. There will always be a need for 0-1 PMs (whatever the job title actually is) because small teams especially hit velocity (velocity = speed + direction) ceilings. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you're headed in the wrong direction.

Strategy gets a bad name because so many big companies do it so badly. Strategy is choices + execution. If a company decides to prioritize devrel (as rexstjohn suggested) that's strategy.

The "3x your salary" is a correct ratio of stock to flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_and_flow#Comparing_stock...

The direct comparison of Apple market cap (stock) to country GDP (flow) is invalid.

(EDIT: noting GDP is a flow measure)

I dreamed of working on Firefox in 2004, took some scenic detours, and got here in 2014. It’s absolutely amazing now. But my first year was extremely difficult, especially as a new remotee. The Brendan Eich thing happened on week 3. Chrome was eating our lunch, and Mozilla was focused on shipping a phone. The company was split along that fault line, with platform engineering straddling both sides. We were losing. We wondered if we’d survive. Some of the Glassdoor reviews reflect what was indeed a tumultuous and uncertain time.

The culture was in tumult too, “old guard” vs. new. Some reviews were written by people who made terrific contributions at one time, but couldn’t turn the corner and took that anger out the door with them.

We re-org’ed (so many re-org’s!). We have an amazing executive and director-level team. We’re well-run, in great financial shape. Our culture has changed (inevitable), and I like where we’re going together. We’re lined up behind Firefox, and we’re doing terrific work again.

I tell interviewees that working here can at times feel like living in a Reddit thread. There are amazingly thoughtful, generous, and mind-glowingly smart people working on the hardest problems across continents and time zones. Sometimes there’s acrimony or trolling. We’re all here because the things we create together can only be made here. We go head-to-head with competitors 50-100x our size. I could go to those companies, and I wouldn’t have a fraction of the impact and the responsibility I have at Mozilla. No company is a fit for everyone, but for someone like me, it’s hard to imagine being happy anywhere else.

In summary.. The best way to become a PM is to start doing it.

This is great practical advice. If you're trying to cross over within a company, put yourself in the line of opportunities. Tell your boss to look out for new initiatives where you can contribute from the beginning. Try to get yourself invited to new meetings. Offer actionable advice on making current products better. And never neglect your day job when working on your side projects. Otherwise you'll be perceived as someone who dreams big but can't get things done.

Currently PM on Firefox, formerly PM at NPR Digital and other past companies. Breaking in to PM is hard because it's such a squishy a role, and therefore hard for hiring directors to know they’re getting someone who can deliver. There's general agreement on what engineers, UX, analysts do (and how to screen them in hiring). Companies hiring for PM want something harder to quantify: people with a demonstrated track record of getting things done. The best way to ensure that is to 1. hire an internal candidate in another role with a demonstrated track record, 2. Hire someone who was a successful PM elsewhere. Some companies (or some roles) specifically look for MBAs in roles that require more market or pricing analysis.

Breaking in as an MBA is one way for positions that prefer it. The other, more common way is to come into PM from another role. I was a mediocre developer, but a great generalist. I bounced around a lot of ENG roles and shipped a lot of stuff. I was deeply interested in how things got used by real people. I went to research. My first true PM role at a dotcom had a job title of "Producer" (a lot of folks came from media and imported the title). I worked for a Fortune 500 CMO and watched every aspect of the consumer experience. I've come to really really love the role.

My .02 on how the role should work: PM is about service. You are in service to your team, to your execs, as you build for the user. You lead the process of defining the product but you also carry water and do whatever it takes to ship. You carry the narrative and the vision for the team not because wrote it (sometimes you do), not because you're a visionary (sometimes you are). You carry it because as a practical matter, you are the only person on the team who can, because everyone else is building and in the weeds. You're the one person with the luxury to look around. You are the voice of whomever isn't in the room. The team gets the credit when you succeed, but you get the blame when you fail. This “single, wringable neck" philosophy hasn’t been the official policy at places I’ve worked, but it keeps one humble. Especially since as a PM you will mostly rely on soft-power, which is the most powerful kind if you can convince your teams and execs to trust and follow you.

(EDIT: adding a few soft-skills )

Communication: the most important PM skill. You'll write a ton of briefs. You must to be clear. You also need to be good at verbal communication. You're a storyteller, you'll pitch and ask to be greenlit. You have to fight for resources or to keep your project alive. You need to get ahead of bad news and also remember to trumpet your team's successes.

Empathy: it goes with the service mentality. The user doesn't live in Silicon Valley, they barely understand how their PC/phone works. They're important, they're human, and they have needs. You also need to be empathetic to your teammates, if you want the most out of them.

Discipline: PM's generally overindex on blue-sky thinking, may struggle with discipline. You often have to kill your baby to ship on time.

AP is a member-owned organization (owned by national/regional papers), that's why they can't really go direct to consumers. NPR is the same way. NPR's board is owned by member stations, which is why you only hear Morning Addition and All Things Considered either on terrestrial radio or co-branded with the stations on NPR One. You won't see NPR distributing a full podcast of either shows. The governance model is tied to the old method of local distribution and at odds with the way the Web works.

Hey Touche, I work on Firefox at Mozilla. We launched EME on Win32 (Vista+) first because that is by far the biggest share of Fx users. We will keep rolling out new platforms, the work will be long and hard. Streaming providers want to move off of Silverlight and Flash but will still support them for the foreseeable future, so content is still available.

My brother worked at Questbridge for a few years. They place low-income and disadvantaged (but brilliant kids) at top schools, for free rides. The top schools can't get enough of students like you, but they're hard to find. Questbridge's model is similar to executive headhunters. I believe they do approx. 20400 students a year. The challenging part is scaling what they do, since it's very manual labor intensive.

The rank and file and core management stay the same, at at agency, it's the political appointees at the top that change for new administrations. This can be dramatic -- at the EPA, Republican leaders tend to dismantle the agency and cease enforcement, while Democrats do the opposite. I'm not sure USDS or 18F are politicized yet, they're making government more efficient. Then again if you hate government and want to dismantle it, getting rid of the all-stars would be a good play.

I spent 7 years in Washington and can attest the change has been incredible. Civic-minded hackers, non-profits, and startups went from being outsiders to permeating agencies. Much was organic, and some was top-down mandated. Obama saw what happened in 2 elections and these new agencies are peppered with the people that used agile tech to great advantage on the campaign. Agencies like HHS and FCC were pioneers in open data -- not just for government, but for anyone. Look at cfpb.gov - an example of what an agency can look like when it starts from scratch. 18F and USDS are now tasked with bringing that innovation to the rest of government. If you can get to DC, consider attending the Sunlight Foundation's transparencycamp.org this May. It's the biggest event of it's kind, bringing 600 folks from across the globe.

EDIT: changed this sentence: "Much was organic and some top-down mandated" to reflect what I think was mostly due to popular upswell, though there were key executive decisions. The O'Reilly network has a lot of influential folks in DC too.

Thanks schoen! This EFF document was invaluable to Mozilla's legal team and helped us get this project to approval in record time.

We haven't made a decision on either running a hidden service or exits. We do plan to come back and do the analysis and legal review, however we don't have a timeline for this yet. Right now, we're just wading in and will see what we learn.

I work at Mozilla, and the folks at Torservers.net were extremely helpful in helping us get up to speed quickly. We're hoping to contribute to the public body of knowledge on how to operate servers efficiently, both in terms of effort and cost.

That's right. The Mozilla platform technology is great, we are still working out a few kinks. The blocklist we're using is a customized version provided by Disconnect.me. Mozilla's UX for Tracking Protection needs a lot of work, it's just not done yet. We need to do a lot of work to understand what users want. Hence the experiment.

There are also many third-party add-ons out there: NoScript, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery, etc. I don't think we want to compete with them but rather give them all more powerful tools to create more anti-tracking options for users. (EDITED to remove pronouns, fix misspells)

Hi, I’m on the Polaris team at Mozilla. I understand your reticence on tracking. The news and other content we all enjoy on the open web is mostly underwritten by ads, as are the social networks activists use to coordinate. These sites need to get paid or they can’t keep doing what they do. It’s not the ads, it’s the tracking. While many users love seeing personalized content, an increasing number don’t. We’re trying to get to a place where websites respect users self-declared preferences on tracking, and users have better tools to enforce those preferences. It’s going to involve not just building tools and working with privacy advocates but also working with advertisers and publishers to help them benefit when they respect individual user wishes.

Agreed. I think it wasn't just his humor and his knowledge, but his approachability and willingness to share. I worked at NPR for 6 years. I never met either of the brothers, but we were all a gog the day Doug the Old Grey Mare came in to talk to pick our brains about web analytics, of all things. Here is this person who I think is an absolute genius, but can listen to us talk about a seemingly banal thing earnestly. They listened, they shared. They cared.

I love the intention of making the shows affordable and peg costs to a per-user basis. The reality in the U.S. is that big urban markets like NY, Boston, SF, LA, Washington, etc. are flush with cash, while stations in in small rural markets struggle to make ends meet. If federal assistance to CPB dried up, it's these largely underserved rural markets that would go dark, not big cities.

I was going to put this into a thread below re: public vs. private NPR APIs, but it seems more relevant here.

Content programming fees are NPR's main form of revenue. When your station WXYZ holds a fundraiser, you donate to them, not to NPR. WXYZ pays NPR on a sliding scale. A station with 1 million listeners pays roughly 10x what a station with 100k listeners pay. NPR is actually barred from accepting donations directly, again "bypass". (NPR can take big one-time gifts, like the Joan Kroc $250M).

Stations pay the biggest dollars for the big "tent pole" shows (Morning Edition/All Things Considered) and this supports many other program and functions. In the FM world, stations have basically had exclusive distribution right. Digital changes that, of course, and creates the "bypass" I mentioned below. This is why you've never seen a ME/ATC podcast (I'm the anonymous answerer here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-NPR-not-offer-All-Things-Consi...)

It's very possible (and was being discussed) that since listeners are logged on, NPR One could know if you're a supporter and suppress the pledge drive.

The challenge is that NPR and it's stations are still tethered together by the governance model. No one can "go it alone" without some changes, they'll either weather disruption together or fail together.

These are public NPR API endpoints, most have changed little since their launch in July 2008: http://dev.npr.org/

There are about 2 dozen endpoints that aren't public, either because they have little use outside the building, they may contain sensitive info, or they are valuable but only available with licensing. I'm going to explain NPR's finances a bit more in the above thread.

EDITs: I'll add that off the top of my head, some of the private APIs that power NPR one are used in at least one connected TV app that may not have launched, and also in some car partners. We built a great API on top of NPR's internal library database a few years back. Librarians tag the people, movies, songs, etc. used in every NPR radio story going back decades. That one isn't yet robust enough to handle outside use, but if they release it it's really interesting.

The story API (public, above) is the workhorse. Literally every mobile/car/web app and all stations and other websites syndicating NPR content use that one.

They have to play all sides. Replacing FM listening is like replacing oil: there's no one platform that big. Half of listening occurs in cars, and as the fleet turns over to TCP/IP listening over the next decade, NPR has to be there wherever. There will be branded apps, they will serve third-party apps and car specific apps, etc. Another audio provider (i.e. Pandora) could license NPR content and have access to the same APIs. I am not suggesting this is in the works, just a pure hypothetical argument. I haven't worked there since February but I did work on APIs and worked on this listening app a few years ago.

Both can. Every service that runs under the hood (recommenders, raters, story fetching, login, etc.) is an agnostic API that can be used elsewhere. Some of the auto manufacturers and TV apps were already using a scaled down version, albeit without all the features and services of NPR One

Concerns around disintermediation and what they stations call "bypass" ( NPR delivering audio direct to consumers and bypassing terrestrial FM) is what prevented this from launching earlier, not the tech or UX concerns. They had to launch with a plurality of stations, localizations was required, and they had to work donations into the mix. Donations is particularly challenging since there is no one donation form (every station is independent, each has their own form/account, and no one would agree to a central account powered by, say Stripe or whatever). They couldn't launch an MVP like Swell, they had to go live with way more. That said, public radio has its strengths, one of which is that they own their content.

I worked on this at NPR back it when it was called the Infinite Player. We'd envisioned NPR branded apps as well as integrations into other platforms (mobile, connected cars) and potentially other apps. We architected the underlying APIs with this in mind, so what you seek will probably happen at some point. At launch though, NPR wanted the pop of a branded offering, and I think they've got it.

First, I'm so sorry. We were broken into in October 2012. The big fear as we waited outside for the police to say we could enter (they dusted for prints) was that we'd lose photos of our kids. They took laptops, but not the backups. I now have offsite backups.

Security is an antiquated industry. I went with Simplisafe.com. It's a self-installed system, it uses wireless over t-mobile to call home. It has a 24/7 call center monitoring the alarm and they do call 911 quickly. I know this bc we had a few false alarms after installing.

Simplisafe has great service and there is no contract, but as a practical reality you don't have many choices in the space anyway. So yeah, you can cancel, but there's not too many places to go. You can also buy a brinks/ADT yard sign on eBay, since to my mind that's scarier than a startup most thieves haven't heard of.

The only part of home security Simplisafe reinvents is the installation. I thought they were coming out with a networked fire alarm, but they're not moving to be a total home automation or internet of things play. You can't add third party hardware, like the Foscam or GE home automation stuff I have. I see why Simplisafe doesn't want to just support any HW, since the result of a false positive is their call center calling the police .

I am not a fan of their motion sensors. That was the cause of both false alarms. It wasn't the cat, they later told us that the air mass coming out of forced air heating looks like a person. This is a big deal and I screamed at them for not disclosing this. The police where I live are very helpful, and we cried wolf twice. The first time, the neighbor unlocked the door and an officer entered our home gun drawn. That must've been incredibly tramautic for that officer. And of course we were fined twice.

Hang in there. That first night, my family slept w/ the neighbors. I was at Home Depot and a man starting his late night shift cut a perfect piece of plywood for me. I used it to board up our broken door like you might before a hurricane. I was so grateful to have that help, to have the help of police, and neighbors. It was a temporary euphoria because, as you mention, you're going to be on guard for quit a while.

tl;dr. Do not sign the document. Beyond this case, it could also affect your future employability. VCs fund good teams, not ideas, which are cheap. If your partner doesn't realize that, she also has a hard lesson in front of her. Another great HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3844893

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IANAL.* This is mostly based on my personal experience with NDAs, employment docs, and patent applications. NDA may also go by the name of a "confidentiality agreement" or a "proprietary information" document. You should also refuse to a non-compete agreement that says you can't pursue a related business or anything barring you from recruiting someone from this business. She may also ask you to sign a "work for hire" agreement that assigns your work product to her, which would also give away your ownership claim. Obviously, this work-for-hire contract is typically signed when you're getting paid as an employee or contractor.

More to beware: You may also be presented with documents assigning away all "inventions". Be especially wary of this, as you may be signing away your idea and your right to pursue something even vaguely related later. You may also be giving her what she needs to file a patent.

As others have suggested, company uses of NDAs are all over the place. Many companies do require them. Many don't. Strictness is all over the place, as is validity by state. For example, non-competes are almost unenforceable in California. Some companies who ask you to sign such an agreement will offer to compensate for the time you're under a non-compete -- for example, you can't work at a competitor for 2 years, so they pay your salary for 2 years after separation. If you had to sign a document like this to take a job, sometimes this stuff is negotiable, though not often at big companies or at the entry level. You may see "in perpetuity" given as the timeline for some of the things she's asking you to sign. Consider that as well. The "unpaid intern" part may not even be legally valid. There are stringent employment rules governing interns, generally an internship is supposed to benefit the intern more than the mentor and it is generally illegal to just use interns as a cheap/free alternative to paid labor. That said, this often goes enforced.

Again, don't sign anything. It's better to be in an uncomfortable position where you haven't signed than in a position where you have signed and have to hire a lawyer to even get back to where you started. You need to think about future employers. They may ask you to sign general HR documents or NDAs, and one of the things they often ask you to legally acknowledge is that you aren't bound by other documents you've signed. This is why I really hate these things. Lawyers can't read code, and engineers can rarely understand the convoluted nonsense of a document than can come back to bite them later. You don't know who's going to be running the company 10 years later, when you're long gone but the documents you signed are still in force.

As sjg007 suggested, you may consider going to the professor.

Finally, the cliche is that ideas are cheap. (If she doesn't get that, send her this Onion video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q) The reality your partner is going to learn is that even if you signed 100% of the code away, it's not much good to her. She can't maintain it and iterate it to a winning product. Anyone who can is either going to want money, or more likely equity. If the idea is truly a good one, as soon as another good dev sees it, or hears her talk about it (and isn't under NDA) could rewrite it. The source is irrelevant, there will always be clones for good ideas. VCs don't expect a perfect product, but they will fund a team that they think can get to one. Teams without technical founders don't get funded.

(*though I spent considerable personal money to hire a human resources lawyer specializing in NDAs when a former employer presented me with a very lopsided NDA. I considered that a small expense to protect my career.)