Data is a Product

Before you start to visualize tents, camp fires and sing-songs; Product Camp is none of those things. Well, maybe the last one will be true later on. I'm blogging live from the 3rd PCampLDN in Smithfield and so far my experiences are that everyone is happy to share experiences and that Product Managers are a diverse group. The Twitter feed for the day (#pcampldn) features a great breakdown of the key points. I'll also summarize my thoughts here later. Later on I'll be giving a talk on my earlier post about Hack Days. Should be interesting to find out other Product Managers experiences of these. In the meantime, keep an eye on Twitter! Ging, gang, gooley gooley....

Or 'How to turn a Hack Day into something commercial' Anyone who has worked in an IT company or has been a developer will have been involved in a 'Hack Day' at one time or another. For the uninitiated, these are events that involve the 'techies' and usually involve them spending the day 'off project' working on some kind of tool that will help them develop more easily. Now, before I get loads of comments from you lovely development people, I'm certainly not trying to belittle the work you do on these days as I know the results can be valuable to you and in turn, to us Product Managers. So, as a Product Manager, I'm going to be far more interested in a Hack Day if I can get involved and come out of it with something properly useful to me. During normal projects, I never get chance to mess around with new ideas as all of my projects have to be done to deliver a commercial product on a tight budget and carefully considered commercial requireme

Hello there! Welcome to my first Blogger post about Data and the important role it plays in Products. I'm a Product Manager for a successful software house in London focussing on address, location and contact data tools. What I'd like to do here is pretty simple: 1. Talk about my experiences of Product Management 2. Highlight the value of good quality Data to your Products 3. Share stories on how data and products combine to help people and organisations Obviously, it's important to start by saying that any views contained in this blog do not represent those of my employer so please don't make any assumptions! So, why is Data a Product? It's something that I'm constantly striving to define to people who focus on the software that they see and use. For example, when you use a mapping service like Google Maps on your phone, you're focussing on the user interface, speed of lookup and quality of result. All of this is surely down to clever software dev