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Crowd Sourced Product Management Declaration

It’s a well known Silicon Valley strategy to be “product led” and “community led” when it comes to building the world's best products. At RoboShadow, we have a world class software development capability. Our pedigree comes from years in investment banking, where we learned to “cloud whisper” microservices technology. Building and releasing world class-tech is a comfortable place for us.

Product managers, on the other hand, we are not. Thankfully, it seems our user community provides just the right amount of product feedback and encouragement. So this is our official announcement that we are officially stepping down as product managers!

We will continue to do what we do best, and ensure the product is secure, available and integrated at a data level. But when it comes to the roadmap (What features to build, where buttons should go, what bloat to strip out) we’re relying on all of you. From here on, we’re officially community-led on the product front.

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How we’ll use Crowdsourced Product Management at RoboShadow:

Alpha: We will put the technology together in a useable, secure, and basic form for users to test with some common-sense caution.
Beta: We will polish the technology based on feedback, and release to a wider audience ready for further feedback.
Production: Once it's gone through 3 - 4 cycles of user feedback, we will promote as a production release.
This probably sounds like a “normal thing” tech teams do, and you're not wrong! The key difference to us is that we are doing it in public. The traditional Project Management overlay often helps mask the shenanigans underneath what’s really happening, which is wonderful but it gets in the way of our call to reduce the cost and complexity of cybersecurity for the world. Thanks to our state of the art DevSecOps microservices platform we now release code daily. This is where we are different to almost all the other platforms out there and its this capability we will obsess about, with support from the users to guide the product management. 
Don't worry, anything major which affects the agents or anything substantial in production, is treated completely separately under never-fail principles. We like to do agent releases very rarely (currently 2 per year), so for anything agent-related, we have built a hellfire rig to simulate every use case relevant. Most of the updates we release daily are cosmetic/internal platform stuff, so the worst case with our daily releases is that we break a report or make a page non-responsive (which, as you know, we fix very quickly). This allows us to move fast with the updates that make you smile, and super slow with the grown-up tech that we have to handle more carefully.

 

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You may have noticed in the menu we have an "Experimental Features" section, where we will hide early stage tech. Depending on the item, it will ask you to enable the Alpha versions yourself so the features don't confuse our newbie users.

A huge thanks to my team and our CTO for their perseverance in building this DevSecOps process—it has taken 5 years. A quick internet search will tell you that the teams that can release daily and give you buttons to enable new Alpha/Beta features are the Silicon Valley Y-Combinator-type platforms that make their customers the happiest on earth because they can iterate fast with the users, and build tech people really want.

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Terry Lewis
CEO

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As always, please feel free to get in contact with us if you have any questions! hello@roboshadow.com 
 
Posted by Terry Lewis

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I’m lucky to have worked in technology all over the world for large multi-national organisations, in recent years I have built technology brands and developed products to help make technology that bit easier for people to grasp and manage. By day I run tech businesses, by night (as soon as the kids have gone to bed) I write code and I love building Cyber Security technology.

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