Steven Sinofsky, very famous for retiring in November of last year after years of incredible work at Microsoft, specifically with the Windows Division, has launched a new blog using WordPress focused on product development and the art of shipping, which is one of the things that Matt Mullenweg is incredibly passionate about.
Sinofsky shares a few thoughts about the future of the blog and it’s content:
The title comes from something impressed upon me early in my career, which is that learning as an engineer comes from the process of starting, then finishing, and iterating on products–getting products to market and putting the broad feedback loop to work.
The teams and processes used to create products are critically important and fun to talk about relative to shipping and learning as we search for the best approaches to use at a given time.
Sinofsky, to his credit, is not just responsible for development and marketing of Windows, he’s also been a big part of Internet Explorer, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive.
To say that Sinofsky knows a thing or two about shipping product and getting concepts through production and into the hands of consumer would be an understatement and it’s neat that he’s continuing the legacy of the shipping mentality by launching a new blog. To be sure, Sinofsky is not new to publishing online content – he regularly bogged about the feature set and process of developing Windows 8 on the OS Blog at Microsoft.
So we can expect some great updates and some wisdom from a product legend.
One of the fascinating things, though, is that his particular philosophy around shipping products isn’t what many people may believe. Instead of a hard and fast “let’s get the product out there” in a typical Eric Ries MVP fashion, Sinofsky’s particular philosophy is not to make any promises about the product or even discuss anything about the product until Microsoft was sure it felt like it was quality.
This was a radical departure from Microsoft’s historical expression of marketing and product development for previous versions of WIndows. Sinofsky also wouldn’t use terms like “major” or “minor” and instead just called them “releases.”
Much of this is shared in his book, One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making, that has gotten some press but probably not enough.
I think his blog is worth subscribing to if you’ve got some space in that RSS Reader.
[via Matt]
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