A while back, Ephox restructured product management to better focus on developing new products and directions. As with most things, it rarely turns out the way you originally plan and we’ve morphed the team into something quite different to what we originally envisioned. It’s always good to adapt roles to best fit people’s talents, but while it’s happening it can make it difficult to know that you’re doing a good job or even the right job. We’ve reached the point now where what people’s roles are stable but involve a lot of “yeah I really should do more of that” kind of comments. Normally that means the things you’re not doing are either outside your comfort zone or outside of your interest – in my case mostly both.

Specifically, I’d been doing a lot of short term product planning, focussing product visions and demanding that we go in one direction at least long enough to see how it works out instead of lurching at every shiny market opportunity we see presented and doing a whole lot of technical research. However, I hadn’t been doing any real work on developing long term business plans and creating the actual marketing collateral and detailed business cases. So we’ve redefined the roles around what we’ve actually been doing and cutting out most of the things that we haven’t gotten around to.

I spent some time today drafting my new position description based on the discussions we’ve had and it feels really good to have a concrete set of things that I know I’m responsible for. There will probably be a few changes before it’s finalized but nothing too major. The only major missing component at the moment is the actual job title – I’m somewhere between a number of classical job descriptions so it’s hard to find a title that explains what I do properly.

Essentially I’m responsible for:

• Acting as the XP on-site client for our new product (stay tuned). I’ll still be involved in the longer term planning and business case development for the new product but not personally responsible for it which suits my talents a lot better.
• Research and development of that new product. There’s a lot of research and experimentation to be done as well as the normal development roles so I’ll focus in on that.
• Community building and evangelism of the solutions Ephox provides. This includes the work I’ve been doing around LiveWorks! and encouraging blogging for a while now as well as expanding that focus to try and spread “conversational marketing” for want of a better term company wide without actually doing it all myself.

So far the suggestions for titles are:

• Technical Evangelist (despite previous jabs at Robert Scoble)
• Project Manager – I’d rather leave resource management and all the boring stuff this implies to our engineering manager.
• The Great Overseer
• Mr Awesome (ok, these two were me just wanting to get people to comment…)
• Chief of Confusion
• Director of Employee relations and cool stuff
• Chief Technical Monkey – Ephox has a thing for Monkeys…

We’ll see what gets settled on….