It all started when I was younger, almost 15 years ago. As a rebellious child, I decided to publish my own newspaper to share my opinions about products I use daily. I wrote critics, future notes and reviews almost about everything — from plugs to kitchen tools. Reviewing was boring, but manufacturing was very costly, and my cheap implementations would be looking very ugly. So, I gave up fast.
I was introduced to programming and computing technology very long time ago. I was pushed to it and fascinated by the flow of bits and bytes. But everything was embodied in 1996, the day I met the Web. Finally there was an easy and cheap way to distribute products. And to be able to ship products, I had to learn programming. This is how I started.
Now as a professional, I still couldn’t understand why I’m not also responsible for budget, strategy, concept, ux et al as a developer. I’m a products person, I want to code for beautiful products to change mindsets and push the limits for more market visibility. I’m driven by breakthrough concepts, user interaction improvement, performance, cognition and reasoning. If you cant convince me, I perform bad. To be honest, I’m not sure this is how a developer should act but this is my formula. My time is valuable and if you want me to invest it in your project, you have to convince me. I never remember myself applying for a company to work on a product I dont believe that I can dedicate myself to.
Most probably this makes me an inefficient developer. I get angry when we don’t make enough revenue and we ship features that turns into invisible toys that 80% doesnt even use. I find myself crazily analysing the logs where available and trying to understand how users think.
Now ask me how many companies I started. Actual the number is “one” — the sector was totally out of technology business. We had great recognition from major industry players in the USA and our main service was quite profitable for college students. I made some huge mistakes in the past two years with losing the entrepreneurship I have inside. Now I decided to be a half entrepreneur and half time&energy investor.
To become a product person is simple. Just take a hammer, and hit yourself in the head until you loose all cognitive capacity. In my humble opinion, “product people” are dumb-asses. No really… They love buzzwords, and they love simple schemas that show with a big arrow where the “product” is supposed to be placed in infrastructure, in case they forget what the product was for.
I also really love stuff like changing the outlook settings of product persons and watch them get all confused.
Anyhow, you should not pay attention to any of those. If you want to learn things like budget, market visibility, commerce, etc, just sit down with excel and plan the stuff.
I also recommend all the developers to listen to Scott Adams audiotape `MBA in 30 minutes` – once this material is digested and understood by the developer, next day she/he can go to work with a ceo’ish attitude.
(25 Feb 2010)",