Update on Product Managers

Back in April a few of us at Ephox posted about some changes down under in our R&D team. I held a job interview today where the candidate mentioned she read all of our blogs and asked me how the changes were coming along with veiled concern that the word restructuring elicits from people seeking a happy, stable place to work. To reassure her and any future candidates I definitely think an update is in order.

In keeping with the continuous improvement mantra that permeates Ephox we have we have left few of the original changes in place and ended up with something a little different than we first imagined. Instead of going with the "3 Product Manager" split that we originally envisioned where they would focus on a particular product area we have gravitated more to the roles in which everyone can contribute the most. Instead of segmenting by product we have instead segmented by talent/skill and passion.

By mixing up the team's roles I had originally hoped to fire up some product innovation (i.e. new products) in addition to the terrific process innovation (i.e. Extreme Programming) that we have adopted over the past 12-18 months. The net result is that instead of looking after EditLive! product management Rob has moved to some very cool server-side development of a product we are codenaming "E2". Damien, who was supposed to be the E2 Product Manager, is now sticking with more of a traditional product management role across all of our products. And Adrian is morphing into a CTO/Evangelist role which I think suits him very well given his prolific ability to churn out both code and blog posts.

The new structure seems to be meeting our original goal of getting product innovation fired up. My only concern – which is really independent of the various roles and more to do with how busy everyone is – is that we can do this whilst keeping up the rage on the XP work that Doug and Brett have been a big proponents of (yes, I am listening).