javaun
I've been a PM by title for 15 years, longer by responsibility/scope. I've always been a 0-1, often pre-PMF, always shipping, always carrying water for ENG and UX, often writing prototype code and sometimes landing patches. PM'ing in these cases is always more art than science, there's never enough data, you have to make decisions, execute, and own it. I also currently work at Mozilla where our code, our bugs, and our community chatter is all in the open.
Product has matured a lot since I got into it. I'm grateful there are career tracks and resources for folks to grow and move companies. I have noticed that the PM role has ossified at many companies, and seen it at events. If the majority of the PM jobs are the way you describe the web2 space -- watching a graph go up and down, abstracted away from engineering and technical exploration, removed from the shipping process, writing TPS reports -- that makes me sad for the field. There will always be a need for 0-1 PMs (whatever the job title actually is) because small teams especially hit velocity (velocity = speed + direction) ceilings. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you're headed in the wrong direction.
Strategy gets a bad name because so many big companies do it so badly. Strategy is choices + execution. If a company decides to prioritize devrel (as rexstjohn suggested) that's strategy.
The direct comparison of Apple market cap (stock) to country GDP (flow) is invalid.
(EDIT: noting GDP is a flow measure)
The culture was in tumult too, “old guard” vs. new. Some reviews were written by people who made terrific contributions at one time, but couldn’t turn the corner and took that anger out the door with them.
We re-org’ed (so many re-org’s!). We have an amazing executive and director-level team. We’re well-run, in great financial shape. Our culture has changed (inevitable), and I like where we’re going together. We’re lined up behind Firefox, and we’re doing terrific work again.
I tell interviewees that working here can at times feel like living in a Reddit thread. There are amazingly thoughtful, generous, and mind-glowingly smart people working on the hardest problems across continents and time zones. Sometimes there’s acrimony or trolling. We’re all here because the things we create together can only be made here. We go head-to-head with competitors 50-100x our size. I could go to those companies, and I wouldn’t have a fraction of the impact and the responsibility I have at Mozilla. No company is a fit for everyone, but for someone like me, it’s hard to imagine being happy anywhere else.
This is great practical advice. If you're trying to cross over within a company, put yourself in the line of opportunities. Tell your boss to look out for new initiatives where you can contribute from the beginning. Try to get yourself invited to new meetings. Offer actionable advice on making current products better. And never neglect your day job when working on your side projects. Otherwise you'll be perceived as someone who dreams big but can't get things done.
Breaking in as an MBA is one way for positions that prefer it. The other, more common way is to come into PM from another role. I was a mediocre developer, but a great generalist. I bounced around a lot of ENG roles and shipped a lot of stuff. I was deeply interested in how things got used by real people. I went to research. My first true PM role at a dotcom had a job title of "Producer" (a lot of folks came from media and imported the title). I worked for a Fortune 500 CMO and watched every aspect of the consumer experience. I've come to really really love the role.
My .02 on how the role should work: PM is about service. You are in service to your team, to your execs, as you build for the user. You lead the process of defining the product but you also carry water and do whatever it takes to ship. You carry the narrative and the vision for the team not because wrote it (sometimes you do), not because you're a visionary (sometimes you are). You carry it because as a practical matter, you are the only person on the team who can, because everyone else is building and in the weeds. You're the one person with the luxury to look around. You are the voice of whomever isn't in the room. The team gets the credit when you succeed, but you get the blame when you fail. This “single, wringable neck" philosophy hasn’t been the official policy at places I’ve worked, but it keeps one humble. Especially since as a PM you will mostly rely on soft-power, which is the most powerful kind if you can convince your teams and execs to trust and follow you.
(EDIT: adding a few soft-skills )
Communication: the most important PM skill. You'll write a ton of briefs. You must to be clear. You also need to be good at verbal communication. You're a storyteller, you'll pitch and ask to be greenlit. You have to fight for resources or to keep your project alive. You need to get ahead of bad news and also remember to trumpet your team's successes.
Empathy: it goes with the service mentality. The user doesn't live in Silicon Valley, they barely understand how their PC/phone works. They're important, they're human, and they have needs. You also need to be empathetic to your teammates, if you want the most out of them.
Discipline: PM's generally overindex on blue-sky thinking, may struggle with discipline. You often have to kill your baby to ship on time.
EDIT: changed this sentence: "Much was organic and some top-down mandated" to reflect what I think was mostly due to popular upswell, though there were key executive decisions. The O'Reilly network has a lot of influential folks in DC too.
There are also many third-party add-ons out there: NoScript, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, DoNotTrackMe, Ghostery, etc. I don't think we want to compete with them but rather give them all more powerful tools to create more anti-tracking options for users. (EDITED to remove pronouns, fix misspells)
Content programming fees are NPR's main form of revenue. When your station WXYZ holds a fundraiser, you donate to them, not to NPR. WXYZ pays NPR on a sliding scale. A station with 1 million listeners pays roughly 10x what a station with 100k listeners pay. NPR is actually barred from accepting donations directly, again "bypass". (NPR can take big one-time gifts, like the Joan Kroc $250M).
Stations pay the biggest dollars for the big "tent pole" shows (Morning Edition/All Things Considered) and this supports many other program and functions. In the FM world, stations have basically had exclusive distribution right. Digital changes that, of course, and creates the "bypass" I mentioned below. This is why you've never seen a ME/ATC podcast (I'm the anonymous answerer here: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-NPR-not-offer-All-Things-Consi...)
It's very possible (and was being discussed) that since listeners are logged on, NPR One could know if you're a supporter and suppress the pledge drive.
The challenge is that NPR and it's stations are still tethered together by the governance model. No one can "go it alone" without some changes, they'll either weather disruption together or fail together.
There are about 2 dozen endpoints that aren't public, either because they have little use outside the building, they may contain sensitive info, or they are valuable but only available with licensing. I'm going to explain NPR's finances a bit more in the above thread.
EDITs: I'll add that off the top of my head, some of the private APIs that power NPR one are used in at least one connected TV app that may not have launched, and also in some car partners. We built a great API on top of NPR's internal library database a few years back. Librarians tag the people, movies, songs, etc. used in every NPR radio story going back decades. That one isn't yet robust enough to handle outside use, but if they release it it's really interesting.
The story API (public, above) is the workhorse. Literally every mobile/car/web app and all stations and other websites syndicating NPR content use that one.
Security is an antiquated industry. I went with Simplisafe.com. It's a self-installed system, it uses wireless over t-mobile to call home. It has a 24/7 call center monitoring the alarm and they do call 911 quickly. I know this bc we had a few false alarms after installing.
Simplisafe has great service and there is no contract, but as a practical reality you don't have many choices in the space anyway. So yeah, you can cancel, but there's not too many places to go. You can also buy a brinks/ADT yard sign on eBay, since to my mind that's scarier than a startup most thieves haven't heard of.
The only part of home security Simplisafe reinvents is the installation. I thought they were coming out with a networked fire alarm, but they're not moving to be a total home automation or internet of things play. You can't add third party hardware, like the Foscam or GE home automation stuff I have. I see why Simplisafe doesn't want to just support any HW, since the result of a false positive is their call center calling the police .
I am not a fan of their motion sensors. That was the cause of both false alarms. It wasn't the cat, they later told us that the air mass coming out of forced air heating looks like a person. This is a big deal and I screamed at them for not disclosing this. The police where I live are very helpful, and we cried wolf twice. The first time, the neighbor unlocked the door and an officer entered our home gun drawn. That must've been incredibly tramautic for that officer. And of course we were fined twice.
Hang in there. That first night, my family slept w/ the neighbors. I was at Home Depot and a man starting his late night shift cut a perfect piece of plywood for me. I used it to board up our broken door like you might before a hurricane. I was so grateful to have that help, to have the help of police, and neighbors. It was a temporary euphoria because, as you mention, you're going to be on guard for quit a while.
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IANAL.* This is mostly based on my personal experience with NDAs, employment docs, and patent applications. NDA may also go by the name of a "confidentiality agreement" or a "proprietary information" document. You should also refuse to a non-compete agreement that says you can't pursue a related business or anything barring you from recruiting someone from this business. She may also ask you to sign a "work for hire" agreement that assigns your work product to her, which would also give away your ownership claim. Obviously, this work-for-hire contract is typically signed when you're getting paid as an employee or contractor.
More to beware: You may also be presented with documents assigning away all "inventions". Be especially wary of this, as you may be signing away your idea and your right to pursue something even vaguely related later. You may also be giving her what she needs to file a patent.
As others have suggested, company uses of NDAs are all over the place. Many companies do require them. Many don't. Strictness is all over the place, as is validity by state. For example, non-competes are almost unenforceable in California. Some companies who ask you to sign such an agreement will offer to compensate for the time you're under a non-compete -- for example, you can't work at a competitor for 2 years, so they pay your salary for 2 years after separation. If you had to sign a document like this to take a job, sometimes this stuff is negotiable, though not often at big companies or at the entry level. You may see "in perpetuity" given as the timeline for some of the things she's asking you to sign. Consider that as well. The "unpaid intern" part may not even be legally valid. There are stringent employment rules governing interns, generally an internship is supposed to benefit the intern more than the mentor and it is generally illegal to just use interns as a cheap/free alternative to paid labor. That said, this often goes enforced.
Again, don't sign anything. It's better to be in an uncomfortable position where you haven't signed than in a position where you have signed and have to hire a lawyer to even get back to where you started. You need to think about future employers. They may ask you to sign general HR documents or NDAs, and one of the things they often ask you to legally acknowledge is that you aren't bound by other documents you've signed. This is why I really hate these things. Lawyers can't read code, and engineers can rarely understand the convoluted nonsense of a document than can come back to bite them later. You don't know who's going to be running the company 10 years later, when you're long gone but the documents you signed are still in force.
As sjg007 suggested, you may consider going to the professor.
Finally, the cliche is that ideas are cheap. (If she doesn't get that, send her this Onion video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q) The reality your partner is going to learn is that even if you signed 100% of the code away, it's not much good to her. She can't maintain it and iterate it to a winning product. Anyone who can is either going to want money, or more likely equity. If the idea is truly a good one, as soon as another good dev sees it, or hears her talk about it (and isn't under NDA) could rewrite it. The source is irrelevant, there will always be clones for good ideas. VCs don't expect a perfect product, but they will fund a team that they think can get to one. Teams without technical founders don't get funded.
(*though I spent considerable personal money to hire a human resources lawyer specializing in NDAs when a former employer presented me with a very lopsided NDA. I considered that a small expense to protect my career.)