brettinlj

I have a counter to the emphasis of getting to the top. I used to work for a much larger company (definitely "enterprise") and as a product manager I was often the decider of a vendor to use. There were times where the vendors' sales teams wanted to make an end-run and get to someone on the upper management/executive level to influence the decision.

If anything, that became more of a negative because it meant that I had to spend more time managing those conversations rather than analyzing the fit for their product.

I would change "getting to the top quickly" to "identifying the decision maker and getting to them quickly".

The problem with older founders... often their needs are different (financial burdens, children etc), though they also often have more life and career experience, which make for a different set of challenges to success.

Fixed that for you.

Great idea. This would have helped me with my morning commute today when SF Muni had a bit of a meltdown. Have you put the source up on github? Also, if you're already playing around with APIs and frameworks like Flask and get the itch to create a REST API, check out flask-restful https://github.com/twilio/flask-restful.

Disclaimer - I work at Twilio.

Apparently as per their docs (http://docs.clustrix.com/plugins/viewsource/viewpagesrc.acti...) this is true specific to end-user transactions: "Note: serializable isolation not currently available to end user transactions."

The Serializeable isolation level is used for data moves within the cluster according to the table referencing isolation levels and row visibility rules.

It would be nice to see a "NewSQL" database like Clustrix in this comparison. From my understanding of their white papers the transactions are ACID.

Regarding this quote: "I’ve lived in a country that had a period of 'full employment' and now has 14% unemployment, and I don’t see how anyone can be so misanthropic to claim that those 14% of people just got lazier."

I hesitate to take someone's radical economic ideas too seriously if they either can't do math or does not know the econ 101 definition of "full employment".

Recipe for disaster. Spoken from a product manager.

Depends on the company sometimes. I happen to come from a strong engineering background (good school, worked as an engineer at companies from Qualcomm, to small startups to Disney) and got into product after working with a good one.

I am the minority at my current place of work but given the companies most of us reading this are interested in, I think having an engineering background is an advantage. It can be substituted for other analytical backgrounds, but you really need a strong product lead that can spend the time to be the voice of the customer (and their unmet needs) while also getting into the gritty details (ex. hey, have you thought about how Hadoop could be helpful here?).

Most on here that are badmouthing product managers have worked with bad ones. I was there once.

As a mobile software engineer turned product manager I can echo what the first to replies said. Skip training/certification as real product management skills are built on doing it and the mistakes you make along the way. If you're interested in a good way to go about developing product I recommend Marty Cagan's book Inspired and Eric Reis' Lean Startup. That will save you some bux you should spend bootstrapping your startup versus a course or useless certification.