The Focus and Purpose of My New Product Management Blog

This is the inaugural post on my new blog, which I've decided to focus on project management techniques, mainly related to consumer-facing websites.

I've wanted to start blogging again for some time, but took a while to decide what area to blog about. I'm inspired by bloggers like Andrew Chen and Eric Ries who blog about things they know and have real experience in, so I decided that I'd blog about something I know. I don't claim to be an expert at product management, but it is a part of my job and I regularly get a chance to learn from my successes and mistakes. When I interview candidates for other management positions at my company, product management is the competency I'm usually asked to judge them on.

While the blog will be focused on consumer web product management, I'll also digress occasionally to post on business development topics or comment, from my viewpoint, on how other web products appear to, or could be managed. This isn't a startup blog, but hopefully my posts will be interesting to people in the startup world as well as people like me who run a business inside a BigCo.

As for the specific topics I'll post on, I've mapped out about 15 or so to begin with. I took over a team recently and these roughly follow the areas I've been coaching the product managers who work for me on. The posts will explain my approach to each. Notice I didn't say the right or best approach, just my approach. I hope my posts elicit comments from others in the product management field with descriptions on their own techniques or pointing out potential drawbacks in mine. So please comment, and please send me suggestions for other product management topics of interest that we could have a conversation about.

-@ianmcall