It has been a little while since my last post. Many have asked me for an update on my job search and life in San Francisco.

I am still on the job search, and getting closer every day. Still learning as much as I can about my industry. Still expanding my network.

I have found some very good networking resources on meetup.com. Yesterday I attended an event called Best Practices in Startup Product Management organized by  StartUP Product Talks SF. The speaker was a professional named Dan Olson who has worked in product management for companies such as Intuit, Friendstar, and and consulted for companies such as Boxnet and yousend.com.

It was an excellent talk and he diffinetly showed his expertise on the industry. You can tell he has fought the battles as a PM and grown and learn from his experiences.

I want to share some take aways from his presentation. If you want to check out his slides head to slideshire.com. (This link is not the exact presention but contains almost all the same content.) The actual video is listed on the bottom of the page.

1. What is a product managers role? He defines product management as the person who is ultimately responsible for a successful product. Simple as that. You have no one to blame but yourself if the product is not a successes so you should be ready to do what it takes.

2. The best product managers are ‘ninjas.’ Why are good product managers Ninjas? Because PMs are self sufficiant, use a wide array of skills, and they need to know a lot to fill in the gaps.

Part of Dan Olson's presentation

3. Metrics must support product development to identify a need in a marketplace and test the solution that your company is proposing.   Here is a slide from Dan’s presentation that visually represents different opportunity lanscapes. The sweet spot for a new product is when the importance of the product to the user is high + satisfaction with current alternative is low.

4. Lastly how does one measure the success of a new product iteration? The answer is if your test users do not voice an objection.

Or said another way the absence of a complaint is sometimes the only affirmation you’ll get that your product has improved from the last version. Addition by subtraction.

Live footage of the actual presentation Dan Olson gave on June 13th.