Aggregating the Commentary presentation by Robertson, James
It's easy to be a product advocate if you have no practical experience using a product. It's especially easy if you spend years giving demonstrations and doing high level trouble shooting - you see all the good things about your product, and rarely see any of the real downsides. I set out to create an RSS news aggregator in 2002 as a larger scale demonstration of what Cincom Smalltalk could do. Along the way, I learned a great many things about the product - it's strong points and it's weak points. This made me a much better customer advocate. It's one thing to hear about a bug or limitation from a customer - it's another thing entirely to be smacked in the forehead with it, and have to figure out how to deal with it. As a result, I think Cincom's gotten a better product. By developing applications that are in real use in the field - BottomFeeder and Silt - I've been down in some of the same trenches that our customers live in. There have been useful side effects from using these tols as well - the news aggregator puts me directly in touch with all the commentary on the product suite (both positive and negative). This practitioner's report will explain how a product manager can improve his or her product by diving in and getting his hands dirty.
I got started in Smalltalk quite by accident in 1993 - I was in between consulting assignments at Booz- Allen, my employer at the time. Booz Allen had a training contract with ParcPlace, but had lost both of their instructors. I got picked because I had some teaching experience - 2 1/2 years of junior high and high school. They put a junior guy with no training experience, but some (about a year) Smalltalk experience, figuring that the two of us would figure it out. I spent 9 months teaching for Booz Allen, but got lured over to ParcPlace - I decided that I would much rather be where Smalltalk was being created! I spent almost two years teaching the intro class before I moved into sales - as a sales engineer. That got very hairy over the next 4 years during the PPD nightmare and the ObjectShare confusion. When Cincom took over VisualWorks in 1999, I came along, retaining my role as a sales engineer. After about a year, I moved up to Product Management, which is where I still am. I am also the author of BottomFeeder - an Open Source RSS/Atom News Aggregator, and Silt - a Web Log server. Both are implented in VisualWorks.