Quora
I spend a great deal of time perusing Quora for knowledge. I find it to be both personally and professionally rewarding. I’ve asked and answered questions on a number of topics ranging from cooking to entrepreneurship to technology. Before the holiday break Quora released a new Boards featureset which allows users to do what people do on boards: create topics for discussion based and build a community within that topic. Quora did this before boards by helping people find or ask questions and then contribute, curate and follow the answers other provide. In addition to that, users can vote up or down answers and comment on each. You can even sign up to be a moderator for any topic if you feel so inclined. I find my best contributions are in working behind the scenes to help answers find their way to questions be it through clarification of a particular post or encouraging others to join in.
Today I created a Product Development board on Quora so that I can curate the topic more closely. I invited a couple dozen of my followers to follow the board and encourage anyone who does follow it to post links, ideas, and questions freely. Part of my rationale for doing so is tied to this feeling I have as a product guy in the organizations I’ve joined: isolation. The Product Person’s Dilemma is one I plan on writing more about but it boils down to this: Product Development requires that the product person be multi-disciplinary and weave themselves easily into technology, marketing and design groups within their companies. By doing so, Product people generally stand alone in their company with few others they can talk with to learn from and grow. On the one hand we are social working with many people from many backgrounds. On the other, we generally do not work with other Product people. Unlike CEO’s, CTO’s and CFO’s which have their own groups for managing companies, Product Managers (who are essentially the CEO’s of their products) find few dedicated resources online to compare notes and share best practices with other Product Managers. What resources do exist are often dedicated to Product Managers whose products exist offline. Where does that leave us who develop products for the Web? I have an answer for that….