In 2023, I became a part of the fantastic local community of business analysts, product owners, and product managers who recently relocated to Warsaw. I soon joined the OrgTeam, and we made about a dozen meetups and coffee talks last year. In 2024, we started expanding our media presence, so now we have a blog with the first post available!
After a long break, I return to book reviews in the form of an internal dialog. That time it is one of the most valuable books I have read about Product management: "Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software" by Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines.
OK. I am glad you are finally talking about this book. It is an obvious question, but I must ask it. What this book is about?
The title is self-explanatory enough: the book is about being a Product Manager (PM) in a B2B Enterprise organization.
Sounds fair. What is so unique about working in the Enterprise compared to other PMs?
First, let's agree that Product management is a vast discipline. Every organization looks at it from a different angle. So, a PM's responsibilities and role definition might vary for similar products but from other businesses in the same market.
Enterprise PM differs from a startup PM in that the first needs to survive in a complex hierarchy, build relationships, and comply with an Enterprise's restrictions. Also, it depends on whether it is B2B, B2C, B2G, B2B2B, etc. That impacts a lot on how products are developed and sold.
I will paraphrase the book to not expand on this topic further. What makes PM in the Enterprise different:
That piece was quite difficult to write. I started it as a more personal story of overcoming burden of moving and adapting business logic from one system to another. I spent multiple days trying to shape and structure but every time that ended up as a whinning on the past experience with no particular clue.
So, I decided to follow the formal approach of listing some general difficulties and humble options how to resolve them. If they can be resolved at all.
Next time I will try not to overthink for 3 months in a row.
Before 2020, I dealt with API as a Consumer with intergration purposes, using only such tools as Swagger UI, Postman, and Insomnia. Since 2020, I have changed my side. And not as an API Producer but one who gives the Producers tools to build APIs. It's about the API Platform.
So, back then, I started my journey to learn more about API and Platform design. And it is far from being over. I can say that I know more than an average person with business analysis background about that topic. But I can't call myself an expert anyway.
During the recent webinars, there was a question about what I can suggest to learn about APIs. With this article, I address that question but in a different form. Instead of a reading list, I decompose the last three years of my career and describe what I did and keep doing to learn about APIs being an API Platform Product Manager.
Following a theoretical Part 1, I was glad to talk about more practical API-related things and ways they can be designed.
While preparing for the webinar, I expanded my knowledge of the FastAPI Python framework to design mocks. Some of them were not only displaying docs in Swagger UI but also worked kind of. My overall purpose was not only to talk about APIs from the Business Analysis perspective but to show them.
Following a theoretical Part 1 of the "Requirements & API" webinar, the second part will come on November 9 at 18:00 (GMT+2). Here is a LinkedIn event with a Zoom link.
We will dive into API design-first, OpenAPI specification, and related tooling. Also, we will review a few practical cases and API patterns.
See you there!
As I mentioned, the entire webinar is based mainly on my API Design series, which I have worked on throughout this year.
I will publish the recording as soon as it is available.
Stay tuned!
On October 26, 2023, I hosted a webinar for Business Analysts about API and the requirements specifics about that (announcement).
I was very excited about that opportunity. Even that part was based on my previous materials published here in my blog, and from the offline API workshop, I spent a lot of time polishing and re-structuring the content to fit a remote audience with different backgrounds.
I am proud to announce that I am hosting a two-part "Requirements & API" webinar for the IIBA Belarus Chapter.
Part 1 will happen on October 26 at 18:00 (GMT+2) - a LinkedIn event link. The second part will come two weeks later.
That is an online version of the workshop I made in Warsaw this February. There was great interest in the event. However, many folks could not travel to Warsaw for this specific event. So, there was an idea to transition it to online.
Along with my blog, I have several sources where I publish my materials. Recently, I started posting a new "Replacing Legacy" series of articles. That idea initially derived from my BArsawa (a.k.a Business Analysts Community in Warsaw) speech. In its turn, it derived from my lecture about Legacy monolith decomposition I made in 2019 (I will share a link later).
Last year I wrote a short essay summarizing my first 365 days as a Product Manager. One more year has passed, and it is time to share more insights or learned lessons.
Important notice: It is only about my experience, so some things may not apply to what other PMs are experiencing. Product Management is a vast discipline with different responsibilities across different companies and industries.