Weekly Journal 93 - Product Management, Mastodon

Product Management

This week I’ve been focused on planning exercises and figuring out better ways to collaborate with product management to prioritize purely technical or non-functional work. As part of my research I found two resources that really resonate with me for ensuring we have a good balance of work on new application features and improving our technical capabilities. First is an article from Martin Fowler’s Bliki on negotiating a balanced mix of feature and non-functional work. Second is a video from Dave Farley about how non-functional work shouldn’t be represented as user stories.

My takeaways from both resources is that we need to work with product management to negotiate that balance between features and non-functional requirements, and whenever possible we should map our non-functional work to user value. I’ll be looking to apply these principles soon as we begin planning for next year.

RIP Mastodon

This is just an observation, but I’ve seen references to several articles this week talking about migrating from Twitter to Mastodon. The problem is that Twitter rewards bad manners and behavior, and having a huge influx of Twitter users joining Mastodon is going to change Mastodon’s culture for the worse. On top of that, as more people flee Twitter dumpster fire, all of the trolls will eventually start to move as well. I predict it will all end in tears as Twitter users overwhelm Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse with their negative behavior.

I, on the other hand, am still happy that I dropped out of that rat race.