How To Interview A Product Manager?

“A great product manager is both trusting and trustworthy.
She knows the difference between trust and blind faith, and invests in building a working environment where people have each others’ backs.
She sets an example with her own behavior and works from the assumption that people have good intentions. She listens and always strives to understand others’ context, point of view and perspective.”

— Lawrence Ripsher

An interview – like yoga on the water – is a tricky thing.

An interview is always a challenge.

It’s far from a perfect solution but in many cases, it’s the only option you have in order to decide if a person will be a good fit to your needs.

In some roles you will need more technical skills and in some it will be more about the leadership and strategic thinking.

The main aspects you wish to have in a product manager for a technology company:

1. Intellectual ability
2. Great Communication skills
3. Leadership
4. Culture Fit
5. Deep understanding of what users want
6. Strategic thinking
7. Analytical capabilities
8. Technical knowledge
9. Entrepreneur at heart

Below are some ideas for questions that will help you identify if the person have some of these aspects. It’s still “work in progress” so if you find something ‘funny’ please let me know.

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Do You Need A Binary Repository?

Any developer knows that you must have a source code repository (e.g. Git) but from time to time I get the question “why do I need a binary repository”?

Here is the short answer:

Faster and more secure software development – Any company is a software company these days and the best companies release updates on daily/hourly bases. The ability to push updates quickly is a real competitive advantage. The minute you have few engineers on your team you wish to avoid ‘fetching the all internet’ with every ‘npm install’.
A binary repo will give you the option to cache these libraries and make sure you are working with the correct ones (vs a hacked one). From the developer perspective, it is a big boost for their productivity as it saves time during development and on each build. Even better, from the DevOps perspective, the ability to control all the packages/libraries (and scan them for vulnerabilities) is a huge advantage. It enables the internal engineering team to control the releases better as they have full transparency (e.g. quality, performance, security, licenses, etc’) on everything the ‘compose’ the release version. Check the 12-factor app manifesto for more on dependencies (declaration and isolation).

Raspberry Pi As Security Camera With Motion Detection

It was a fun weekend project I did with my kids. We started with a new Pi Zero and in a few hours (of many ‘paths’ to nowhere) we got into the point of having a useful security camera. The useful part is when the camera sends you alerts (email or Telegram messages) when it detects movements.

We open the package and connected the Pi Zero to a USB power, a keyboard, a mouse and monitor. We cut a bit a corner by buying an SD card with NOOBS on it but it wasn’t working (nothing was coming up on the screen when we boot the Pi). So we downloaded a new version from Raspian Jessie 4.4 from NOOBS and install it. Now when we boot the Pi we got a new screen. We open the terminal and typed:

Hey Google, Talk To Crested Butte Powder

It was another amazing conference in Crested Butte – The Winter Tech Forum (or try the short version of its name).

It’s been over 11 years since I first came to learn about it. The quality of the people and the venue with the passion to hack and learn, make it an experience that is unique and amazing.

The first couple of days are composed of sessions and lighting talks at the evenings. But on the 3rd day, we have a hack day where people can go wild and build something fun.

This year, my hack was a Google Assistant App that tell you if it’s a pow day.
You can just say something like: “Ok Google, talk with Crested Butte Powder” and you will be able to ask it if it’s time to run for the mountain.

You can see it in action with the code at: powder-day-cb.glitch.me or if you are on a mobile device (Android or iPhone with the Assistant App installed) – click here.

Of course, you can just say it to the Google Assistant…

May you have lots of powder days with sunny sky!

 

Actions On Google – GDD Europe

Google Developer Days (GDD) are global events showcasing the latest developer products and platforms from Google. It’s like Google I/O but not in California. It was a fun event and we had the chance to meet many developers and talk about interesting challenges and opportunities.

We just finished this talk on “Actions on Google – Why? What?” at Google Developer Summit and you can find the slides and the video recording below.

 

 

Like with any new platform, the first question you might have is why?
In this case, it will be something like “Why do I need an assistant app? I already have a native and a mobile app”, right?

Here are few points to keep in mind:

Share Location On The Web With Waze

If you have a website that contain ‘just’ your (business) address you can do better.

How?

You can use the links below to help your users navigate to you with one click.

This will save them the trouble to ‘select’, ‘copy’ and open their map app in order to get to you. Waze supports an API which enables developers to open the Waze client application through an external URL. The URL can be accessed from within your mobile web page or web app.

The following are the available parameters you can insert to your ‘a href’ tag:

Online Editors For Web Developers

One of the most powerful aspects of the web is the ability to share your ideas and work with others quickly.

Over the years, I tried several options to share code and do demos. It’s true that you can always start your own server and serve your site, but in many cases, you want to focus on your demo and not do administrative work again and again. Here are some tools that I enjoyed using and I still find myself returning to check them from time to time. In most of them you got a nice ability to move (even) faster and to use GitHub for your code.

Browsers And Their Capabilities

The web is by far the biggest platform out there.

It’s everywhere or at least it’s on the way to be everywhere. From powerful cutting-edge devices down to devices that can do nothing more then send few bytes of information.

However, this pluralism of ways to consume this information bring a challenge to web developers. We need to understand what are the limitations and what are the capabilities of the browsers that will run our work of art.

Here are set of tools that will help you with that challenge.

Research

• chrome status – Web platform feature support and examples. It’s a great way to see what is coming up… and try to test it today in Chrome Canary. You can also check blink-dev forum. Blink is Chromium’s rendering engine so I found some very interesting discussions.
• status modern ie – Like Chrome Status but for Edge and Internet Explorer. It gives you the current status and the roadmap.
• ES6 compatibility – From server side to browsers. Learn what will run and where. After all, the common technology to ‘run’ things is javascript. OK – ECMAScript, fine.
• caniuse.com – Mobile and desktop browser capabilities.
• what web can do today – Stuff that your browser can do, with links to demos and information about browser support.
• mobile html5 – A table that contain features per mobile browser.
• If you testing a new browser for its CSS3 support this tool will do the work for you – css3test.com