relief: I know what I do now

Thanks for your patience over the last week. It's been busier than normal - so much so that I had to choose between blogging and sleep.

Sleep won, but barely.

And like the ass I am, I took the red-eye again to get home. With predictable results.

But the best news from this week was the Pragmatic Marketing class I took. Mr. Foxworthy was, as promised, excellent, and I'm happy to report that the class has become even more focused over the five years since I last took it.

For those of you who are not familiar with Pragmatic Marketing, visit their home page for an introduction to their mission.

When I say I know what I do now, I mean that in two ways:

I know what I do - the class defines the discrete activities required to market software products. The last time I took the class, the company I worked for had not explicitly embraced their methodology. We have. Having everyone "on the same page" is powerful voodoo. As a result, we all now know what is expected of us at a gross "process morphology" level. Cool.

I know what I do now - setting priorities is always difficult, but it has become even more challenging for me now that I have multiple products that I manage. The class helped me to understand what needs to come first - what the relative sequence of activities needs to be - so that I don't spend all my time doing tactical one-off work as opposed to more strategic tasks that will advise all of the subsequent tactical tasks that I can farm out.

So once we get our gap analysis done, we can start having some real fun.

I'll get back to my regular rhythms of posting now.