Portfolio project

God, has it been a week since I last blogged? That's unforgivable. My sincere apologies to the 2-3 of you who are still reading this blog.

The reason for my delay is yet another project. This time, it relates to my portfolio.

You see, I think Product Managers ought to have a portfolio the same way that artists do. Nobody hires a painter or sculpter or even a home-improvement contractor without seeing something of their previous work. Why not expect the same of Product Managers?

One obvious reason is that PM work is usually highly sensitive and generally not suitable for showing other firms once one's employment has ended. However, this can be overcome with judicious redaction -- changing names, altering data, modifying results, all while maintaining the basic form and insightfulness of the effort. Sure, it's extra work, but worth it, I think.

Another reason is that, well, nobody's done it. Well, that's not a reason. That's an opportunity.

I've been doing Product Management a long time and I've done some projects that I thought were wicked awesome. Unfortunately, a) I don't have copies of those results and b) I don't have a good way to associate them with my name.

So, I spent the better part of last weekend putting together a model for an on-line portfolio. This is essentially a small-business, read-only web site. There are lots of vendors that offer such things. I started with Intuit - they have a great set of online templates to choose your look and feel. They have templates for "Resume", but those all felt pretty generic. I ended up choosing one for a Modern Architectural Firm, which I think, is a pretty reasonable metaphor for Product Management.

Next I built the site. Intuit has great templates, but their editing tool blows. And their site was sloooooow. So, once the initial design was in place, I moved over to some local web site editing software we have here at home (properly licensed, thank you), built the actual site, and then chose Fat Cow to host it. Why Fat Cow? Because a) they were really inexpensive (~$45/year), b) they included a domain in the fee, and c) my wife had done lots of research on this sort of thing for the kids' school and my wife is a very smart and thorough woman. If she likes them, then so do I.

Now that the site was up, the much larger project was to create the content. I made a list of the things I wanted: win-loss analysis reports, competitive analysis reports, feature prioritization exercises, market opportunity analyses, etc. Then I created the content for each one. In some cases I redacted work that was already done. In others, I created stuff from scratch. This took several days.

But now I have a place where a) I can show others my work and b) I can store new projects as I complete them. I'm pretty happy with the results. Have a look at www.markwood.biz and let me know if you agree.