March 1st, 2007 - Interview with Matt Mullenweg
I had a great chat with Wordpress co-founder Matt Mullenweg the other day. Matt’s a pretty amazing guy - he’s done more at 23 than many could hope to achieve in their entire career. I certainly owe him and the Wordpress team a note of thanks for this blogging software as well as the Akismet service I use to block comment spam.
I’ll share most of the good stuff in upcoming articles, but for the time being here’s a few highlights from our discussion.
- Matt’s keen on solving problems, and he finds many problems in today’s crop of software. He specifically mentioned multimedia, forums, project management and task management software as areas where huge improvements could be made. I was certainly nodding when he mentioned forum and multimedia software. I’ve been quite frustrated trying to create a good user experience while integrating forum software and multimedia content with a blog. It’s certainly do-able, but not nearly as easily as it should be.
- Matt believes that an internet company shouldn’t have product managers. The closer engineers can get to the end user (with less go-betweens), the better the product will be. A good part of the work I’ve done at Quarry has been in this area, helping connect engineers, marketers and product developers to the end user. And I’ve noticed that those who are most eager for this connection tend to create the most successful products.
Back to Matt’s point, I believe product managers can offer far more than just acting as a funnel for user feedback, particularly in areas like market analysis and competitive analysis, and I believe they could be of value to any company. But certainly you don’t want to see a situation where the product management function has the effect of inhibiting the development team’s contact with the customer.