Business

This section covers foundational business concepts, including competitive strategy, product and service management, and the practical mechanics of how businesses operate day-to-day.

Industry Structure

Understanding the competitive landscape is essential for any business. Michael Porter's Five Forces model provides a framework for analyzing the forces that shape competition within an industry:

1. The power of suppliers to increase prices.
2. The power of buyers to reduce prices.
3. The strength of competitors.
4. The threat of new entrants.
5. The threat of substitutes.

These forces determine the profitability and attractiveness of an industry, and understanding them helps organizations position themselves strategically. See Industry Structure for a deeper look at applying the model.

Product Management

Product management sits at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. A product manager is responsible for defining the why, what, and when of a product, while the engineering team determines the how.

Key areas of product management include:

• Product strategy - Defining the vision, identifying target customers, and establishing how the product creates value.
• Discovery and validation - Understanding customer problems before committing to solutions. This involves research, prototyping, and testing assumptions early.
• Roadmapping and prioritization - Deciding what to build next, balancing customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints. Frameworks like RICE scoring, cost of delay, and opportunity scoring can help, but judgment and context always matter.
• Go-to-market - Launching a product is not just a development milestone. It requires coordination across marketing, sales, support, and operations.
• Metrics and iteration - Defining what success looks like, measuring it, and using data to inform the next set of decisions.

Product management is not about having all the answers. It is about asking the right questions, making informed trade-offs, and keeping the team focused on delivering value.

Service Management

While product management focuses on what you build, service management focuses on how you deliver and support it. For many organizations, the product is the service, and the distinction blurs.

Key areas of service management include:

• Service design - Defining the end-to-end experience, including how customers interact with the service, what happens behind the scenes, and where handoffs occur.
• Service level management - Establishing expectations with customers through SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and internal targets through SLOs (Service Level Objectives). This ties closely to SRE practices.
• Incident and problem management - Responding to service disruptions, restoring service quickly, and identifying root causes to prevent recurrence.
• Change management - Coordinating changes to production services to minimize risk and disruption. This connects directly to DevOps practices.
• Continual improvement - Regularly reviewing service performance, identifying areas for improvement, and making incremental changes over time.

Good service management is often invisible. When it works well, customers simply experience a reliable, well-supported service. When it fails, the impact is felt immediately.

Meetings

Effective meetings are a fundamental business skill that many organizations get wrong. A meeting should have a clear purpose, the right participants, and a defined outcome. See Meetings for principles on running effective meetings, and Robert's Rules of Order for formal meeting governance.