Sue Raisty

Sue Raisty

Born-again software engineer, former product management geek, adoptive mother of boys, trail runner, tinkerer, wannabe writer, soccer mom & compulsive researcher.

Caring for Elders

The day after the last day

Buzz Lightyear

Super Powers

Growing Pains (for me)

Q&A About Agile Product Management

Below is an online Q&A from a presentation I gave on Agile Product Management.  Just wanted to share…. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How do you deal with a management team that is entrenched in the Waterfall method and a development

The Joy of Big Data

The enterprise software landscape has shifted away from the big BI and RDBMS monoliths and toward startups with awesome new “Big Data” technology. These technologies could solve customer problems that were previously assumed to be unsolvable. What is “Big Data”

A Quote from a Wise Man

Pros/Cons of Product Management Reporting Structures

The Cranky Product Manager received a boatload of intelligent comments on last week's post Why It Doesn't Matter Where Product Management Lives in the Organization. Check out the comments if you got the time. Shockingly, a

Return of the Product Management haiku

Remember this?  The Product Management Haikus (originally inspired by Pivotal PM)? I am inspired to once again dust off my quill pen and write some more poetry. Poetry that no one but you, a reader of a product management blog,

The Value of an MBA in Product Management

A question from a reader: Q: Is an MBA necessary to advance in Product Management to the Senior level, Director level, or beyond? Or can one compensate for the lack of a Masters with strong analytics and high-level strategy and

Why you need a Product Strategy (even if your boss doesn't care)

I read too many blogs that say "ALL product managers should do X". Having worked with so many companies, I can usually think of plenty of cases where it makes sense to break the "rule." But

What to Do When an Employee Dies

This post is about a serious topic - how a DECENT company deals with the death of one of its employees. My husband and I have both had some first-hand experience with this. Both incidents were long ago, but the

Don't be so focused on customer needs that you ignore the competition

Every now and then, I hear some asshat say that they are not concerned about their competition, and intend to only focus on satisfying their customer’s needs. I think this is incredibly stupid and naive. After all, your customers

Quora: Is there a market for fractional or part-time product management?

Quora: Can you push out a founder before stock is issued?

*Question was originally posted to Quora on 2 Mar 2014. As a startup, if no ownership shares have been issued and no documents have been signed by any founder yet, but a lawyer has incorporated the business and drafted the

Quora: Why aren't there more female programmers?

The percentage of programmers who are female has dropped significantly since its peak in 1985 (37%). In 2015, only 15% of coders were women. I'm going to discuss why so many women are basically driven out of tech using my personal experiences as examples.

This amazing product management magazine concept was inspired by the literature in my dentist's office

Don't know about you, but I'd read it....

Where to get information about competitors

Don't just look at your competition's website and read a few articles. For a fuller view, try these information sources: 1. The competitor's website -- including hidden pages, all images, and any uploaded documents

The Veteran Software Engineer: Hard Proof At Last

I received an email from a reader regarding this blog's recent guest post, The 7 Types of Engineers [https://blog.sueraisty.com/humor-7-types-software-engineers/]. > To Whom I May Concern, > I have attached a picture of the real