Zagaja.com

At Code for Boston I keep a backlog of projects that are ideas for the organization. Many of these tasks are not exciting or interesting to a large group of people, but they are valuable ways to move the organization forward. Usually I try and delegate these tasks to folks with varying degrees of success. Recently I delegated a task and it worked better than I expected.

In building organizations two of the toughest activities are raising capital and user acquisition. Since this is not a fun activity I have often tried to delegate it (up or down or left or right) but this usually does not work for me. In some cases I have found successful partnerships like working with CTNewsJunkie to build my voter guide app. Nobody would care about my voter guide if I just put it on my own site, but with a news organization behind it the voter guide gets much more use and it provides a useful tool for readers. The partnership works because in the end both sides win.

Over the weekend I continued updating vote.ctnewsjunkie.com which is the voter information site that I launched it with CTNewsJunkie two years ago. The site began with the idea that we wanted to provide a utility for people to find the candidates running for office and then read surveys that these candidates would fill out. No other media outlet has attempted to compile information about all the candidates running for office in the state, nor interview them all. We have learned a lot from doing this over two years.

Yesterday I went for my last long practice run before the B.A.A. Half Marathon. It was an entirely different experience from the first practice run a week before then. The difference in that experience translated into a material improvement in my pace. I went from an 8’34” pace feeling miserable to an 8’04” pace ending feeling comfortable. I learned an important lesson: fuel matters.

One of the biggest challenges I have seen in the development of technical projects is finding good product management talent. Product managers can have different roles and responsibilities depending on the organization. However they are generally responsible for helping the team build the right product. They typically do the translation of user needs into tasks for software developers. They often also serve as product owner and manage the work of the development team as well. Good product managers have technical and people skills, which is why they are hard to find.