Product Management
Bing image from prompt: “earthquake tectonic plates crack”
Take advantage of my experience with dozens of local government software systems for police, fire, public works, building safety, and finance to help you with release planning, bug prioritization, user focus groups, and ongoing work.
Designing software for government is hard. Technology change has come so quickly that software isn’t just replacing existing components… it’s creating entire new solutions. That makes it difficult to know what features will resonate, which problems to prioritize, and in what kind of environment people will use it.
Let me help by providing input into your product teams, with my combination of experience as a vendor and user, both a software Product Manager and City IT Director.
The first 20 years of my career were with the CGI Advantage program, as I progressed from project consultant (implementing software) into sales engineer (demonstrating the software) to product manager (responsible for the software). For several years, I was the CGI Advantage Financial product manager - responsible for three major releases of the flagship product.
Then I left to be a City IT Director, where I thought I would use my knowledge to help Departments deal with vendors, and get their issues resolved – but that my product ownership days were over.
Little did I expect that City IT was responsible for our home-grown Police Records Management System, used by five local police agencies. When I joined, the system was 25 years old and ran on a mainframe with an ineffective Windows front-end for police officer reports.
Over the next ten years, we convened a User Group of different users (officers, clerks, and investigators) and developed a web-based report-writing platform, a data warehouse, and hundreds of small improvements to reinvigorate the solution. In 2019, we won a grant to become a beta tester for the State’s NIBRS reporting solution (a national standard for police information extracts). Based on our work, we won another grant to migrate away from the mainframe system, which was finally shut down in 2023 – after 35 years of excellent service.
However, the Police Records system was only one of many systems I supported in my time at the City. All of the others involved working with outside vendors, and their product support organizations. I guided our City users on working with software companies after going live, both in navigating support and in aggressively suggesting enhancements for future releases.
From the fusion of my experiences, I bring experience from both sides of the vendor-client relationship. I’ve served on and run User Groups. I’ve escalated issues - and dealt with bug prioritization. I lived in the messy reality that exists between the high expectations set by sales teams (and starry-eyed clients) and the lows of known defects and “working as designed.”
Let me help your team with product discussions, client interviews, and issue prioritization. I can give you the voice of the client, which I have been, tempered by understanding of the constraints on the product team.
Here are blogs with my free advice on:
Combining data from different systems: https://blog.tectonicspeed.com/2019/08/a-data-river-runs-through-it.html
The challenge of government technology procurement: https://blog.tectonicspeed.com/2018/02/the-tectonic-speed-of-government-part-1.html