Articles by Tanya Bragin
Strategies for open source product managementTanya discusses different types of open source projects, licenses, and governance models. She also outlines the different roles that make up an open source community, including users, contributors, customers, partners and competitors. The article then provides advice for open source product managers, emphasizing the importance of marketing through word-of-mouth, engaging existing users for feedback, and experimenting with new ideas since the software is free to use. It also stresses understanding a company's commercial goals in order to decide which features should be open source, commercial, or not introduced at all. Notably, Tanya suggests that while support and services are important, most modern successful open source companies aim for them to be less than 10% of business, focusing more on commercial distributions, features, and hosted offerings.
- How to move to product management from technical roles
Tanya provides advice for technical workers who want to transition to product management. She recommends first exploring internal transfers if possible, as you have an established reputation within the company. Successful transfers to PM mentioned include from sales engineering, consulting, development, and design. For field roles, Tanya suggests helping define requirements for new features and connecting PMs with customers. Those in engineering should ask for more customer exposure by joining calls or answering open source questions. The goal is to understand customer needs and build prototypes. If no internal role is available, Tanya says to directly apply to PM roles, possibly in ecosystems or partner management if from engineering. Technical PM roles may also be a good fit for those with recent hands-on experience. Designers could target products with complex user interactions.