May 5, 2015 / Posted in  Product Management, Technology

Product Management professionals have a lot of unique challenges which make the job interesting. An important Agile Product Manager skill is to effectively demonstrate how a feature will evolve, before it even exists. With Agile, a product is in various states as it grows from minimum viable experiment, to minimum viable product, to minimum marketable product to name a few. Product Managers need to communicate this evolution precisely, or else you introduce risk. Complex features with many dependencies make this more challenging. Once I learned (thanks Kevin Callahan) and implemented story mapping for complex epic size features, many of these challenges became a lot easier.

One problem with PRDs (product requirements documents) is that they show a lot of how something will look when i...

March 18, 2015 / Posted in  Cars

I’m happy to say the most annoying sound in the world is finally fixed. If you had the same problem as me, your interior HVAC fan would make a tiny, annoying squeal or squeak or cricket sound or noise or whatever you want to call it when on the lowest two or three speeds. It wouldn’t always squeak, but when it did it was annoying, especially since the car is usually so quiet and refined. You’ll be happy once you too eliminate your BMW X3 fan noise.

BMW X3 HVAC blower motor update:

Unfortunately, my first attempt to fix this failed. It turns out the true fix for this issue is photo documented here...

February 17, 2015 / Posted in  Cars

Here’s a quick video on the side marker and reverse light LED upgrades I did. I also tried changing the front and rear turn signal lights to LEDs, but always got a dashboard warning light something was wrong. Those lights seem to do a lot of fading on and off with the lock/unlock cycles so perhaps they aren’t meant to be LEDs. I guess all that’s left is to change the license plate lights but that might be a bit overkill. Comments welcome below as usual, thanks!

Recommended Back up: Parking Light LED Light Bulbs 3157, 19 LED White 2-pc Set

Recommended Side Markers: LED Light Bulbs T10 Wedge, 5 SMD LED Amber 2-pc Set

How do I even get to my reverse lights to change them? Click here

February 15, 2015 / Posted in  Reviews, Technology

Tablo TV is an interesting method of adding a DVR to over the air television. It’s also pretty reasonably priced at under $200 to start. Instead of your TV receiving the decoding the signal from your antennae, the antennae connects directly to your Tablo TV box. You also connect a USB hard drive that you supply. Tablo supports WiFi and a LAN cable, so I used LAN with my ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router just to make it a little faster and more responsive.