Episode 305: Inside Baseball: Getting What You Need From Product Managers

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This week’s transcription is brought to you by Alectrona

James Smith:
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Tom Bridge:
Hello and welcome to the Mac Admins Podcast, I’m your host, Tom Bridge. I’ve almost forgot how to say those words out loud together, I’ve been on vacation this week, nothing has made sense. I miscued the timing for all of this one by a whole day because I didn’t realize I was coming back on Saturday and not Sunday. Time has had no meaning, how are you all?

Marcus Ransom:
I haven’t been on vacation, I’ve been traveling for work, so I totally, totally get where you are, Tom. It’s good to not be living out of a suitcase for a couple of days, but my battle station here was set up, it was perfect, everything was where I needed it to be. Then I packed everything up and put it in bags and took it to Brisbane, which was great, it was awesome to see some folks up there in Brisbane. But now I’m plugging everything back in, and as much as I’m pretty sure it’s where it was, it’s just not the same.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, you did not get to see me running in with my microphone in-hand, reattaching it to the-

Marcus Ransom:
I did see that.

Tom Bridge:
… the arm here.

Charles Edge:
Did Alfie move your paperclips while you were gone?

Marcus Ransom:
Yes, yes he did. There is stuff everywhere. The person who was traumatized the most when I was not at home was in fact, Daisy, who is now having to cope with there being nobody at home and being left with her own thoughts, which for a kitten is pretty dangerous.

Charles Edge:
Truly.

Marcus Ransom:
And how are you, Charles?

Charles Edge:
Oh, fantastic. We got another snowstorm, the snow pack is maybe four feet tall in the backyard.

James Smith:
Oh, geez.

Charles Edge:
So whenever I let the dog out, now I can’t leave him unattended. I have to watch him because it’s high enough where he could, if he so chose, leap over the fence and go get that squirrel who’s chittering on the other side of the fence. And the poor squirrels, he got a few last summer, but during the snow they can’t move as quick as he can. So he has a pretty much a 100% hit rate on that, you know what I’m saying? Poor squirrels.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, well, yeah.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, the cats just watch him like, “We wish we could do that.” And you’re like, “You’ve never been outdoors.” Especially not with the snowpack like it is, they would just disappear in the snow.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, man. Well, it’s just the three of us this week and there’s been some news over the last couple of weeks and we thought we’d go over some of the big pieces of it, especially as we’re getting on into the springtime here, I was going to say, I think it probably makes sense for us to start with the dot three betas that dropped this past week, and that is macOS 13.3. Of course, I said the dot three betas. What I mean is the spring release cycle betas, because that’s iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, as well as macOS 13.3. Was there anything that surprised any of you in terms of what’s there or what’s not?

Marcus Ransom:
Not really. It-

Tom Bridge:
It’s just like a lighter spring release.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah.

Tom Bridge:
Yay?

Marcus Ransom:
I mean, yeah.

Tom Bridge:
I think I speak for everyone when I say-

Marcus Ransom:
And that was the sound of Tom exhaling very slowly with a look of relief.

Tom Bridge:
Correct.

Charles Edge:
If you use group, there was something weird in Xcode. I got an alert that if I’m using group IDs, I need to do something. But other than that, it’s been completely almost unnoticeable. And I like updates that are that way because when you’ve got an update that has a lot in it, it makes life harder.

Marcus Ransom:
It was interesting, there were more mentions about things that may be coming soon, things to look out for, it’s always good to be on top of understanding things that you’re being asked to look out for because that may come soon. And I know there was a reference to using managed Apple IDs in the future instead of configuration profiles for accessing the betas. And so that was an interesting one where there was a little bit of a kerfuffle with lots of people concerned that managed Apple IDs have a really important place in education and in BYD, but some concern about being forced to be signed in with a managed Apple ID in a beta, which would maybe not be so great if you’re wanting to test things that happened on consumer Apple IDs. And so like everything, the recommendation is to lodge feedback around that because the teams we know are very interested in what we need to be able to do.

Charles Edge:
You can still install an update with a managed Apple ID and log in with a non-managed Apple ID, but there are plenty of organizations that I’ve talked to who haven’t set up any kind of managed Apple ID infrastructure yet so I would guess that those are the ones-

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, federated, I’m guessing, but everybody should have at least one managed Apple ID. And if you’ve got one, you should have two for access to Apple Business Manager, Apple School Manager. And probably don’t use those for AppleSeed for IT, use other ones for AppleSeed for IT. But I think what this illustrates as well is being advised to use a certain workflow for testing betas, impacts on our ability to use a certain workflow we want to use. You want to test betas using as close to your production workflow. And if you are not signed in with a managed Apple ID on your production workflow, I know I would want to not be signed in with that when I’m testing. And we know Apple understands what we are trying to do and the fact they’ve created AppleSeed for IT shows how much they value the work that we do.
We saw the real benefits from feedback in last year’s WWDC with managed login items. So I think the recommendation there is if you are concerned something is not going to be doing what you think it’s going to be doing, put feedback in, if only to clarify internal decisions at Apple to say, “Yep, see, we were right. This is going to be something.” I suppose it’ll be great if we can use managed Apple IDs for betas, where if you are doing some rapid testing, if you’re a developer, you’re just wanting to see how the new operating system works, to be able to just sign in with a managed Apple ID and bang, there, you get the betas through software update would be fantastic. But if you’re wanting to test software update for muggles in your system, that’s something where we’d love to be able to do that without managed Apple-

Tom Bridge:
I mean, there’s also a fair number of features that rely on iCloud Keychain, features like passkeys features like the continuity based features that use an iCloud Keychain set of keys to do the interactions. I certainly can’t see them limiting beta access to that, not without blocking off their ability to test a really important part of the environment, unless this is a big spoiler alert-

Marcus Ransom:
I was going to say, can we go on a tangent here.

Tom Bridge:
[inaudible 00:09:07].

Charles Edge:
To me that’s just a matter of time, it’s always been just a matter of time because you can’t use passkeys in our corporate environment without it, yada, yada, yada. And also, any watch app that actually has a secure connection back to a phone, the watch doesn’t have a secure enclave. So it communicates through iCloud Keychain or security keys. There are so many places where you’re like, “That doesn’t make sense.” But again, though, you can install an update and then log in with a different user. So it doesn’t preclude you from testing your workflow, it just impedes the ability to have a single user machine if your machine is, that isn’t doing that. And again, any change that you have to introduce into your environment is not good just to test, because to Marcus’s earlier point, you want it as close to your production as possible.

Tom Bridge:
Absolutely.

Charles Edge:
So yeah, feedback there, and I guess that’s something we’ll be talking about in a little bit. But first, there was a really good pun that I am pretty sure that Marcus put in here about maids. So do you want to use your pun?

Marcus Ransom:
The future’s so bright, we got to use maids, I don’t know.

Charles Edge:
I didn’t want to skip it before we moved on.

Marcus Ransom:
Am I dating myself there, possibly?

Charles Edge:
Oh, if you don’t know that song, I don’t know.

Marcus Ransom:
You have good taste in music?

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, I was going to say, if not, we’ll make sure it ends up in the show notes someplace or we’re going to have James splice about five seconds of it into the audio track right here.

Speaker 5:
(singing)

Marcus Ransom:
Maids. Maids.

Tom Bridge:
So thanks, James. I appreciate that. And you can also hear him on this track cursing me out, it’s really amazing. He’s not in the room, but I can hear him in my ears. And then-

Charles Edge:
It’s weird because I think I know what time he cuts the podcast because every now and then I wake up in the middle of the night hearing my name cursed from all the way in Australia.

Marcus Ransom:
He’s about, I don’t know, 20 K’s from where I am here. And I can actually hear him curse from here, it’s that loud. And we deserve it, sorry, James.

James Smith:
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Charles Edge:
Marcus, you should tell us about X World, right?

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah. So if people want to want to hear James in person, he will be presenting at X World, here in Melbourne at the end of March on 30th to the 31st of March. So for those who are not aware, X World is Australia’s Mac Admin conference. It’s actually the world’s longest running Mac Admin conference, it’s been going for a long time this year. It’s moving from where it’s traditionally been hosted in Sydney down here to, well, I was going to say sunny Melbourne, but it’s currently raining here, which everyone in Melbourne will know and love. We have some awesome guests coming over for X World, don’t we, Tom?

Tom Bridge:
Oh yeah, I’m excited. I bought my ticket, I’m packing my bag. I will be headed down to Melbourne for this year’s conference. I’m going to be given the keynote, which is called Running After the Ice Cream Truck. It’s a talk about managing the annual cycle of development and IT testing and all of these kind of things, and keeping your sanity. Maybe I’m not the best person to talk about keeping your sanity part because I was not always expert at keeping sane amidst all of that-

Charles Edge:
I wasn’t going to say anything.

Marcus Ransom:
Does that mean we can pay-

Tom Bridge:
I certainly have some coping strategy.

Marcus Ransom:
Can we pay a little bit extra and get the developer previews dipped in sprinkles or something like that?

Tom Bridge:
Money solves many problems.

Marcus Ransom:
Exactly.

Tom Bridge:
Now I don’t think it solves the problem of keeping up with Apple. I think that part is something that you’ve just got to keep running. Sometimes you get close enough to the ice cream truck to get ice cream though. And being the right person at the right time who can tell your organization that they need to keep on their toes and that they can’t drag out old processes forever is going to be a really key part of this process. And so I’m really excited to be talking about that. Also got to talk on software update, which I have been told it can be all cursing, I’ve told that’s not against the law. It will not be all cursing, I’ve decided to make this a family friendly talk.

Marcus Ransom:
Well, Ben Griner I think set the… I don’t know if it’s the high bar or the low bar for cursing a couple of years ago. So there we have-

Tom Bridge:
I’ve heard that story. So I was going to say, the adventure there is certainly the cursing will be implied, how’s that?

Marcus Ransom:
I think that’s great.

Charles Edge:
Don’t think I’ve ever cursed on stage at a conference or on a podcast episode for that matter.

Tom Bridge:
I don’t know.

Marcus Ransom:
I’ve cursed on a podcast.

Charles Edge:
I mean, I think about it a lot, with you two, it’s hard not to, but-

Marcus Ransom:
You’re not the first person to have said that chance. Now the other great thing about X World this year is, so AUC, the organization that holds X World also runs a couple of other conferences, one of which is Dev World, which is an Apple Developer’s conference. And so part of the change this year is they’re actually going to be held in conjunction this year. So as well as a bunch of Mac Admins, there’s also going to be a bunch of developers in the room as well. So it’s a really good opportunity to have a hallway track and also be able to go and watch a couple of sessions there and get an insight into the sort of challenges they face, which a lot of them are. Maybe there’s some technical difference, but technical differences to what they go through, but I think philosophically their challenges are quite similar to ours as well. The cadence that things keep changing. The changes may be not being, well minimum viable product and what that means to your workflows and those sorts of things. So I’ve always really enjoyed going on to Dev World because it’s always been hosted here in Melbourne, so I’m really looking forward to catching up with those folks again and seeing what sort of crazy things they’re having to deal with on their side of the Apple ecosystem.

Tom Bridge:
As we go to press on this one, it’s really exciting to see the lineup here, and I’m really ecstatic to be coming back down. So maybe not to be in the back of an aircraft for 12 hours between LA and Sydney, but I don’t think there’s any other better way to get there that doesn’t take a week on a cruise ship.

Charles Edge:
I wrote a book on that-

Tom Bridge:
I don’t have that week.

Charles Edge:
I wrote a book on that one time-

Tom Bridge:
You wrote book on that one.

Charles Edge:
It’s quite lovely. I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve never had 12 hours to myself without being bothered.”

Marcus Ransom:
Except now you have high-speed internet on a flight, so the not being bothered bit is a whole other-

Charles Edge:
I choose not to use high-speed internet on flights because I want to be left alone.

Tom Bridge:
It’s one of the last socially acceptable places to be totally disconnected.

Charles Edge:
Even though, and it’s free to use chat apps for most of them now, I’m just like, nah, I’m just going to leave it in airplane mode.

Tom Bridge:
I will say I did use the new Delta, T-Mobile satellite wifi on the flights back and forth to the West Coast this time for free. And I don’t know how they both made it free and faster than whatever they had before, but they have succeeded in that regard. I don’t know if that’s just really good Edge caching, really good traffic manipulation or a much deeper broadband, but count me a big fan of that. Thank you T-Mobile and Delta.

Marcus Ransom:
I was going to say star-link arrow darted to the wing or something like that.

Tom Bridge:
Very possibly. I mean, there’s always been satellite internet, it’s just been a little bit slow, a little bit fiddly. It’s nice to see them get a better band.

Marcus Ransom:
So there’s going to be plenty of friends of the podcast at X World as well as members of the actual podcast. Really looking forward to seeing Eric Dreyer. Eric’s presented multiple times at X World. So Eric and Weldon are coming over. Bart Ridden from Soro, Stuart Lamont. We’ll put a link to the sessions, there’s some really awesome sessions. And what I can see as well is there’s a few people there who haven’t been on the podcast, which is maybe we are letting the side down and we need to actually have some people onto some more people onto to speak to us.

Charles Edge:
Absolutely-

Tom Bridge:
I’d be thrilled to.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, I love hearing from New Voices. I personally think that Greg Nagel should be on annually. There are a few recurring guests that it makes sense to have a lot of times. And then anytime anyone has something that they think is a cool project, they should reach out to one of us-

Tom Bridge:
Oh, 100%.

Charles Edge:
Whether you’d been on or not. If you’ve only been a Mac Admin for a year. I love hearing the stories as they’re being, the barred songs as they’re being written in the D&D type of terminology.

Marcus Ransom:
I was going to say also to go along with that as well, where sometimes when you’re starting out, the cahunas is required to actually reach out and say, “Hey, I’d really like to come on the podcast and talk about it.” If you see someone who’s starting out and has a really interesting approach to what they’re doing, let us know. Because we’d love to speak to them even if… I suppose, especially if they have the mindset that, oh no, I’m not ready to do something like that, or I don’t have anything of value because I’ve found that the people who think that they don’t have anything of value and the people who think that they’re not ready yet are the ones that have actually got their awesome stories. And hey, if the three of us can talk on this podcast without listeners tuning out on mass then… The bar’s pretty low, so you’ll be just fine. And we want to help you get those stories out because I know how valuable those stories were to me, hearing those different ways of doing things and the new ways of doing things, and then not being stuck in the paradigms of this is how IT should be done. So we want to give you a platform and do whatever we can to help you be part of this community.

Charles Edge:
And there are other conferences as well. So Objected by the C is coming up from-

Tom Bridge:
That’s October?

Charles Edge:
Yeah, October 9th to 13th. OBTS six, I guess. And then I noticed the PSU call for proposals or call for P, whatever they choose to make P being.

Tom Bridge:
Yep, papers.

Charles Edge:
Papers. Is open as well. And we’ll include show notes to both of those. And then things are moving along from access admin. I know a few of us are bound back for another session. We did have-

Tom Bridge:
I am determined to be there. I am determined, come hell or high water to go because in my consulting days that always happened. I made the promise to myself starting in 2017, that I was like, okay, this is going to be the year that I go to Mac Admin. And then the anthem set their opening date the same week. And then the year after that, it was another major event. And the year after that, it was another major event. And so then I was all set, I was ready to do it in October of 2020. And we know that that didn’t work out. And then each of the last two years have been virtual. So come hell or high water, I will be at the Chalmers with everybody having fika at break and I cannot wait. So I don’t know if I’m going to talk yet, I just know I’m going.

Charles Edge:
And the macad.uk or Mac ADUC episode or Mac Ad. Is there a proper terminology here?

Tom Bridge:
I’ve heard it said both as Mac Ad and Mac ADUC. And I feel like Mac ADUC is more colloquially enjoyable to say. And certainly-

Charles Edge:
[inaudible 00:24:10] is colloquially.

Tom Bridge:
… I have a rubber duck somewhere.

Charles Edge:
I mean I know you can make an adverb about it pretty much anything, but that one is mostly used as an adverb, but it is fun to say. And then-

Tom Bridge:
It’s fun to say.

Charles Edge:
And then Mac DevOps, which is I think the only one I haven’t been to yet-

Tom Bridge:
Ooh, Vancouver’s great.

Charles Edge:
That’s a barely. I love Vancouver, to make things worse for having missed that. But I don’t know why, it’s just never worked for my schedule. And then JNUC, and will include all of these things for show notes, but conferences are back and they’re all in person. I think the only one I haven’t seen anything for yet is Mac Tech. I know ACEs is also back, I saw something about that recently. But we’ll include links for all those things in the show notes. And then there’s one other piece of news that I wanted to talk about, which is Tim Perfitt released Automation 2.0, little box, you can plug into a Mac and make it do stuff automatically, run scripts-

Tom Bridge:
Oh, it’s the automaton.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, yeah. And I couldn’t help but order one this morning. He doesn’t even have to send it to me, I hope you didn’t hear that, Tim. Just to be supportive. But I love where he’s going with this. The ability to just include a bunch of scripts and say Ready, aim, fire at the click of a button is pretty rad.

Tom Bridge:
Yeah, I’m excited by those. I mean I used the previous one occasionally, and so I’m really excited for one that has support for multiple workflows on connection, all sorts of great little buttons and status indicators on the widget. It’s a really great 2.0 product if you’re in the market for a configuration tool, this is definitely one to go take a look at.

Charles Edge:
And I guess there’s always news, and we talked about that for a hot minute, but now we’ll talk about how to get the most from products that well don’t do everything we want them to do, or at least the ones that don’t do what you want yet. So in other words, let’s chat about how you convince product managers and we have a product manager on the pod and I guess a product manager alumnus to build what you need. So before we get started, I would say there’s no accounting for a knowledgeable and smart argument that you need something. The more deeper you can discuss the workflow, the more likely no matter which of these routes to get your way that we talk about, the more likely you are to get it done. Wouldn’t you agree, Tom?

Tom Bridge:
Oh, 100%. If you can talk a little bit about the why, because that’s always the thing I want it to do, blah, it’s always great to know when somebody wants to do something that isn’t in the product today, wanting to wanting that indicates usually, hey, there’s a job to be done here. You’ll hear that particular phrase get bandied around a lot, jobs to be done. It’s a famous opus in the product management library and all of those things. But really what they’re after here is understanding why the consumer are hiring for this particular job, either because it cuts out time that you were going to spend on other things or because it’s a convenience or because it makes things better just on its own prima facie. As you go through that process, being able to explain not just what you want but why you want it matters a great deal.

Charles Edge:
And I think also what is lacking. As access admin, I spend X number of hours a day doing Y. Or it takes extra amount of time to get something to all my devices no matter how much time I spend on it, then would if this new thing were there and both of those make everything safer, more secure, more enjoyable, more pleasurable for the end users. But I do think sometimes we get lost in the quote unquote what problem are you trying to solve or the why? Because we’re just not using the same words when the words are there, they just weren’t used in the way the meeting someone where they’re at type of way. But when you can say, definitively, I spend two and a half hours a day doing regression testing for software updates, therefore automated software testing tools. And that that’s not something that any of the vendors that I work with, I do mostly development these days. So I’m not doing as much of that specific testing.
But I would say that was one of the last things that I was thinking about building was adding automated regression testing to something like auto package, because to me that just makes total sense. But being able to explain the why to your point, but then a little bit of the how, how do I want that to look, what would make that easy? Because a lot of companies will take requirements from let’s say a product manager, give them to let’s say a UX research team or a UX designer who’s going to draw it out. And that’s where things like customer stories and low fidelity or even high fidelity mockups kind of start coming into play. And it’s like, okay, yeah, you built that thing, but it actually doesn’t do what I needed it to do because the communication channel between those different parties was lossy for whatever reason. So I also personally just like to write down what I want because the written word, since the days of Hammurabi, make communications a little more permanent.

Tom Bridge:
Well, and that’s exactly it, never depend on one conversation over a bar napkin where you’re drawing stuff out. And because life happens in the intervening time, if you can point at things to go back to… And this is one place where I feel like every product ought to have some method of providing feedback to the developers, some method of saying, “Hey, look, I really want this to get better, this is why I care about it.” Because for example, at JumpCloud, we have what’s called a PIM system. And before I forget, it’s like product idea management I think is what… It goes to a Jira board. And so when you’re logged in on the product, you can go to the help section and submit an idea. Tell us how valuable that idea is on a scale of one to three. Tell us what you want. Tell us why. Tell us the other things. Tell us the who does it better than us? Tell us who does this differently than us? Tell us who does this in a way that you really like. And then that’s going to influence how we go and look at things.
And then thing is, those come to my email, they come to an email, they come to multiple Slack channels, they come to all sorts of different places, and we spend time going through those, every corner. If I know that’s already in flight, the first thing that I do, that’s always the best feeling, customer is asking for something that you’re already building. That’s the best feeling because that’s like the most immediate feedback loop that you can build at that point. And we have a system to essentially say, “Hey, we’re associating your MRR, your Monthly recurring revenue to the business to this feature request. And I’ll tell you the number one is no surprise to anybody, smart groups. And so you go and you look at that and the revenue associated with that is high. And it’s a big tool that folks really, really want-

Charles Edge:
And it’s just a sequel trigger-

Tom Bridge:
You hear it.

Charles Edge:
Like code level, it’s not actually all that hard, but that’s aside from the point. So that’s a really good point. And I would say getting to know your product managers or product management team, because it’s not usually just one, is kind of a crucial piece to getting what you want. And you mentioned your PIM, and I would say those are common, most companies have some kind of submitted idea board. And one way to go about this is to check and see if someone’s already filed something and if it’s possible to do so to vote that up. And that just adds flame to the fire.

Tom Bridge:
One great system I love is the system that they use at Simple MDM for example, they have a public facing feature request system where anybody with an account can go and vote. And that’s a great way to drive an external campaign amongst your fellow customers to push things forward.

Charles Edge:
And on the product manager’s side, it’s a great way to get other people to do your fricking job.

Marcus Ransom:
Yes.

Tom Bridge:
Well, I’m not going to lie, I always need help, but that’s a part of it.

Charles Edge:
And I would say this is one of those places where most companies have dozens, hundreds, thousands of feature requests that are active at any given moment. And learning how they prioritize those updates, when you voted up, does that actually hit their metric or is it having a second one? Or does the second one actually kind of semi count against it because you’re not voting on the first one? I’ve seen both situations where companies just don’t look at the number of votes that they’ve had and instead they try to clump them together like simple machine learning tools that can do kind of cane nearest neighbor type of operations. But yeah, learning how people prioritize those.

Marcus Ransom:
Something that’s been really fascinating for me going from being a customer to now being on the other side, being part of the MDM vendor, it’s made me approach. So we’ve got our Jamf ideas portal. At Jamf is something that I really should have known was happening is yes, as a publicly facing side to this where there’s comments, things are up-voted, there’s status changes from implemented under consideration, those sorts of things. So you can actually see that something’s something has publicly changed in how it’s been communicated by the organization. But then there’s the non-publicly facing side of that where the product teams, the subject matter experts are also adding information and having discussions about what’s going on in the impact. And I think realizing that a lack of a visible solution in the publicly facing side of things does not necessarily translate to not being heard by the organization.
There can be many reasons why something is not being publicly updated other than we don’t think this is important. In fact, what I’d often come to look at now is when something is being marked as not being considered, that’s a pretty good in indication that this is not a functionality event or can see value in or it may be something that would cause a conflict with other processes or other things, or there’s something else coming that’s going to mean that that’s no longer required. But having that conversation with the people that you work with, that vendor or with the open source team that’s working on that product to provide context and also to understand how to submit feedback, what information can I provide you? What’s the sort of information you need so I can help you do your job or better understand what we are trying to do here. And realizing that, especially if it’s a commercial tool, they want you to be happy and they want you to enjoy using the product.

Charles Edge:
And if you’re not sure who the product managers are, I think it’s worth noting that most product managers end up getting pulled into, whether they’re blog posts or webinars here and there. And if you just look at the emails that you get from different vendors about webinars, normally you’ll see product managers being mentioned by name and most companies also use similar email address. Not that I’m saying spam Tom, that you want a feature, but-

Tom Bridge:
We know you want smart groups, we’re working on it.

Charles Edge:
Squeaky wheels get WD40.

Tom Bridge:
This episode of the Mac Bins podcast is sponsored by Data Jar creators of datajar.mobi, a cloud-based managed MDM solution that redefines Apple device management. Developed from the ground up by Apple admins for Apple admins. Datajar.mobi is the first solution to truly extend the capabilities of Jamf Pro. The undisputed leader in Apple device management. Datajar.mobi superchargers Jamf Pro through a managed MDM service that delivers simplified zero-touch workflows, fully automated patch management, centrally managed EDR, and a scalable multi tented view with centralized reporting for global and distributed fleets. Designed to provide IT teams with the best of both worlds. We have developed a true MDM as a service platform for Apple admins that is fully managed and scalable, but can also be controlled through a rich but simplified web interface. Backed by the unmatched experience of the award-winning Data Jar engineering team, it is no surprise data jar dot mob is consistently ranked in the top 10 highest rated solutions in the G2 grid for mobile device management. Want to learn more? Come and say hi in the Data Jar channel of the Mac Admin’s Slack. Or visit us at datajar.co.uk/macadminspodcast. Thanks so much to our friends at Data Jar for sponsoring the Mac Admins Podcast.

Charles Edge:
So you mentioned something really insightful, Marcus, that if it doesn’t work for them, they might just go in and close it out. And I think it’s key to also understand a little bit or as much as they make publicly available, the strategy of vendors and how your needs align. So as an example, if you submit a feature request for a MDM product that you would like for it to check the grammar on all your Word documents, that’s probably not a strategic alignment for a feature that you would like to have created. And in fact-

Marcus Ransom:
Well, Charles, well, it’s funny you say that, actually no. I have nothing to announce-

Charles Edge:
I was going to say-

Marcus Ransom:
… nor am I in a position to announce anything.

Tom Bridge:
Some products are in fact diverse and their platforms and they do a bunch of different things and sometimes you have, is this a dessert topping or a floor wax kind of moment when you’re looking at a product? And that gets to be its own challenge. But I will also mention that most product managers are focused on one area of the product, or they’re focused on one part of it. And there’s a shell, you’ve just kind of got to break your way into the shell a little bit and figure out who belongs where. And I would say that the other piece is, everybody’s really open to feedback in our product group. I hope that’s the same every place else and some places have not invented here kind of problem. And that’s famous about IBM, if they didn’t invent it was crap. And so they missed out on some great adjustments.

Charles Edge:
The old IBM, to be clear.

Tom Bridge:
The old IBM, right. I’m talking about-

Charles Edge:
We’re not saying anything-

Tom Bridge:
… the IBM from ancient times, in the ancient times, the not invented here problem was substantial. And so I think that in a lot of groups it’s going to be okay to get that feedback and just be like, you know what? That’s a really great feature, but maybe not for us, is a perfectly fine answer to have there. There’s one class of feedback we get a lot, which is, “Hey, why don’t you guys support SMS for multifactor authentication?” And the answer is, “No, we’re not going to do that.” And due to various reasons, it’s just not a part of our product that we really want to get into. And we have no problem saying that publicly and we’ll get those feature requests and saying, “Yep, we’re not considering that one.” But it’s not anything personal against the people asking, certainly not personal against the use case that they may have. It’s just not something that we feel like we can do appropriately. And when there’s so much indication that sim jacking is a thing, it’s yet another thing that we have to start to collect around individual admins or individual users that say what the code generators are where it’s at.

Charles Edge:
And here’s your route to get a second factor. Thank you. It is important, like table stakes, table stakes, we need a second factor to continue with your example. And then dessert toppings to use your metaphor. Yeah, you want the SMS, but this is why we’re not doing it. And understanding the strategic alignment there is one piece, but also understanding the why behind a rejection if it’s able to be communicated because it’s not always. But the other thing I would say though is the more of the job of the product manager that you can do, the better. So one thing that most product managers have to do is write customer stories. And it can range from a sentence at some companies or with some product managers, to pages of here’s how this feature and it’s according to if it’s an epic or a very small feature, whether it’s just a bulleted list, a sentence, or if it’s pages and pages with low fidelity, mockups included and all kinds of other stuff.
And the more of that text that I would say you could give a product manager pre-written so that they can paste it into Jira, and most do use Jira, the better. Or Aha! Or something like that. But if it’s Aha!, maybe with a chair integration. But there are product management tools that pipeline that information to software developers, because most of the software developers aren’t domain experts in what they’re writing. So at an identity/MDM company, you might have a product manager who is just amazing with writing go modules that encapsulate data of some kind. That person is almost never going to understand the ins and outs of MDM or OIDC or some of the other pieces that you’re trying to put together.
So as we’re pipe-lining that information to that human who’s going to be writing that code to render what we need on a screen, that becomes that historical artifact that can be looked at and say, well, is this feature complete? Did this feature do what that human asked for it to do? I’m not going to get into… I don’t think we should probably get into things like where a lot of product management teams want to write a customer a template of this is what our model customers look like and have three or four of those.

Tom Bridge:
Oh, sure. I mean, having a good understanding of your ideal customer personality or persona is key to the job. Have a good idea of what your market’s at because I mean some MDMs are aimed at the very large market. Jamf is an excellent example there of somebody who’s really aimed at the Fortune 1000. Whereas JumpCloud and simple MDM are maybe aimed a little smaller. And the difference in the needs between those environments goes back to that table stakes versus dessert toppings kind of conversations because they need different things and they need them in different orders and that matters a lot.

Charles Edge:
Yeah, the order of operations, I think anytime a vendor says yes, we want to build that, but then it’s three years later and it hasn’t been built, then there are just other priorities. In the MDM case, every single Apple software update has to be dealt with and the big ones have to be dealt with more annoyingly and more promptly. In identity, you’d have a new update to OIDC or WebAuthn or some SAML change and you’re reacting to ongoing changes to the protocols that you have to support. So there’s always going to be that kind of stuff.

Marcus Ransom:
I was going to say, the other thing that I’ve also found is really helpful to understand, is the amount of development time that it takes before you see a beta. With Apple for example, they don’t start working on macOS 14, two weeks before WW. I would be extremely surprised if there weren’t already rough versions of macOS 14 in some areas of the building at WW last year, knowing where the puck is skating to and what the future manifestation of some of the things that were introduced are hopefully going to look like. And when MDM vendors receive notice of what those new features are, when the beta comes out for everyone, the amount of time that’s required to actually deal with the development pipeline to then get those new features to a state where they can be released in a beta so that their users can then test them and provide feedback is also important to understand.
So the idea that something may be incredibly actively under development and being worked on, but you’re not seeing it in the betas yet. Or Apple release a beta with a wonderful new feature and a beta comes out from your MDM vendor a week later, that’s probably why you haven’t seen it yet. Sometimes you do because it’s a really simple thing to implement or that’d already been some exploration into it because people were hedging their bets on directions that organizations may go or anything like that. But there’s a lot of work to get something to the point where it’s available in a public beta.

Charles Edge:
Since you mentioned Apple, it’s worth stating that Apple’s unique and I would say not included with any of the things that I’ve said thus far. They somehow may-

Tom Bridge:
There’s rarefied air up there where they do things very differently because they have very different timelines and very different controls-

Charles Edge:
And it’s very much working for them.

Tom Bridge:
It totally is.

Charles Edge:
They have to have different timelines to different controls because they’re dealing with, I can’t even fathom the scale or the reach of accidentally putting a copy, pasting a specific block of code and showing the root password when someone… It’s the password-

Tom Bridge:
Or a butterfly flaps its wings and suddenly you’re at recovery lock during the update. I mean, these are all the things, the systems that they deal with are massively complex. And so I cut them a lot of slack on getting there.

Charles Edge:
And if they had a product manager sitting or a small team of product managers sitting between them and customers in the same way that most enterprise or B2B software companies do. Those poor humans would probably be inundated with everything from kindergartners who are upset that they can’t remove the MDM profile. Which is if you look at the ratings on the app store for most of the MDM company’s software that gets distributed, it’s not great because of teens. But Apple’s quite different. Another way Apple’s different, I’ve never really come across impact through a customer advisory board.
So before all the companies started building their submit a feature request here buttons, they all had customer advisory boards. And they would invite, we mentioned personas, they would invite a few of each type of persona to join them. And then they’d go through and say, well, what do you like about our stuff? What do you not like about our stuff? And invariably I think it becomes a collection of your largest customers if you aren’t careful because those are the loudest. But asking around and seeing how you might get involved in a cab would be another way that I would list.

Tom Bridge:
Absolutely.

Charles Edge:
And Jamf has their heroes program. I don’t know if you have a similar type of thing, but they’re also not customer advisory boards, but evangelist type groups within companies that can be used. And sometimes being part of that is a route to get a little more influence I think. One thing I don’t want to mention is just taking to Twitter or whatever and just complaining that you haven’t gotten the thing you wanted built, because in my experience, it tends to worst case send companies into a defensive posture that then they design rhetoric on why they haven’t built it, that becomes intergenerational with the employees. Which is extra dangerous to never get what you wanted built ever at that point. And at the worst case, just once or twice, I think for people, it might get a little bit of squeaky wheel action, but after three or four times, then they just shut down listening to that human or fake Twitter account, whatever it is.
One other parties. So support when you’re on the phone with support, “Hey, it’d be great if they could do this.” Is there asking around about is there a form to fill out or can you, because a lot of support teams get listened to by product managers because they’re on the frontline supporting products. And then also sales, they’re quota carrying reps are motivated to try to get customers in. And the only caveat I can say there is some sellers will just tell you anything to get you to sign a contract to buy a thing. So they might say, oh yeah, we’re working on that. That’s on the roadmap.

Tom Bridge:
We’ll have that next week.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. Or tomorrow, tonight even, I don’t know. As soon as you signed this, it will magically appear.

Marcus Ransom:
The other thing that support have got is visibility over lots of other customers and seeing lots of patterns with things that are going on. And I know most modern companies do have structure that allows support to provide feedback and an impact of things that they’re seeing. But it’s interesting, a great story from Apple. Back in the day when I was working in the Genius Bar and the iPhone, 3G and 3GS had this ongoing issue with the little ringer switch that would start working loose and rattle. And we were replacing them over and over and over and over again. And there was even a dropdown in the replacement for ringer switch issue.

Charles Edge:
Oh no, that’s never a good sign.

Marcus Ransom:
Except nobody had ever told engineering that there was a problem. So they were just building more and more and more and going, “Wow, a lot of people, people must be dropping these phones on the ringer switch a lot or something like that.” And it was just interesting seeing organizations where there wasn’t that communication between we’re seeing an enormous amount of these happening, is there anything you can do about it? And anecdotally may not be the case, whatever in this scenario, but we were told that it was something that they were really easily able to fix because it wasn’t like they had enormous inventory of these ringer switches because they were depleting that inventory pretty quickly with a number of them that were getting replaced. But sometimes it’s just letting the right person know. And getting that information through. And sometimes what may seem like a really big problem is, “Oh wow, yeah, I just need to tick this box here and that works.” Or, “Oh wow, look, that’s actually happening to lots of customers, we need to prioritize that and get that fixed.” So I think there would be very few modern organizations that don’t have that ability now to-

Charles Edge:
You’d be surprised.

Marcus Ransom:
… receive that information. Yeah.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. I mean I think up until you hit three or 400 people at most companies, that is a tribal thing that happens. There’s not an official route in your ticket management system or CRM that has ticketing capabilities to send feedback to a developer or a product manager or both. A lot of times it takes size and scale in losing that communication for those routes to be officially built. And regrettably, it also happens to often coincide with when there’s a director and a manager between the two humans who need to communicate and they’re not actually allowed to communicate officially anymore. So it’s like they’re out on their smoke break or they’re getting coffee or whatever, they’re doing that those communications actually occur until those routes get built.

Tom Bridge:
Breaking down the boundaries, even though in those circumstances is so important. I know that that’s been one of my focuses here is starting to break down the boundaries. Because we used to be organized in such a way that there was a lot of infrastructure between some teams. And engineers couldn’t know things that were known by product or in some cases other places like that. And to be able to go into more detail and to be able to shuffle things around that way, and to just be able to knock on somebody’s virtual door through the Slack channel and say, “Hey, you got five minutes for me sometime this week, next week, I got a thing?” And just being willing to do that and figuring out that breaking down those barriers is what is the strength of your product in a lot of ways.

Charles Edge:
And I’ve never actually seen this one work. And I don’t know that it ever has, but I’ve heard a lot of people say, well, I emailed Tim Cook and then my feature showed up, and you’re like, or the old, I emailed Steve Jobs or I emailed insert name of CEO of any other company here. That that’s a tough one, I’m not going to ever say don’t do that, because I personally think that any customer or prospect even should be able to have that capability to send that email unless it’s got a corrupted HTM file with a bunch of base 64 that’s actually a fishing attack, then maybe not so much. But that is a route that I’ve seen, I feel like it was worth mentioning, but I can’t say that I would try it.
Another thing that I’ll do, and I’m kind of weird this way, is I’ll just build a proof of concept myself or do a low fidelity or high fidelity even mockup myself. I use pages for a lot of mockups. I can take a screenshot of a product and I can replace a table very easily in pages like this or numbers or a combination of. There’s kind of just a whole bunch of simple ways to do the graphical look. But then also if the product’s got an API, I can build my own Lambda that does the thing that I’m asking for and say, okay, here I’ve done it, I’m doing it in a way that I don’t feel is secure or right, or I don’t think your customer should have to do this. Or I’m hammering your API and I’m actually wasting your Amazon money, so you might want to fix that.

Marcus Ransom:
Even process diagrams showing what the current state looks like in terms of a workflow and what you’d like the future state to look like. And I think those come down to communication where as admins we are describing what we’d like to happen or what feature we need often from the point of view of someone using the product, whereas someone designing the product, getting them to understand specifically what you mean can sometimes be a real challenge. And then passing that across to the developers who many times, as you were saying, don’t actually have that hands-on experience of using the product, which is why they’d do their job and not our job, because no one would want me to develop an MDM in any way, shape or form. So making it easier to articulate what the actual problem is that you’re trying to face. So that they can find the best path to how to implement that with whatever tech debt they’ve got, whatever backlog they’ve got, whatever resources they’ve got available to them.

Charles Edge:
I know very few product teams that don’t have at least a year of stuff in the pipeline. So when anyone asks for something, then unless it’s one of those magic things like Tom mentioned earlier, that it’s already in there and they’re like, “Yes, I did good.”

Tom Bridge:
That is the best feeling because I was going to say, that’s not rule, it’s the exception.

Charles Edge:
Yeah. So anytime any of us are asking for something, I can ask Artifactory to build me a thing like I did earlier this week, but they can just be like, JFrog has this many products and we’ve got two years. Because I did actually talk to a product manager and he’s like, “Yep, we got two years, so we’ll throw it on the back of that.” In technology, at the rate we move two years is pretty much, yeah, that’s not happening.

Tom Bridge:
I think the last thing that I’ll mention specifically is that sometimes it’s not great to come with a preformed solution in those cases, and sometimes it’s better to come with a problem statement. And some of the examples, “Hey, I really wish it did this.” When really what they’re trying to solve for is a different problem entirely. And it’s not always a place where if you prescribe the solution, and I’ve learned this talking with our engineers. If I ask them to build that instead of to state the problem to them and let them come up with the solution, I’m short-circuiting their job in some cases. Isn’t there some places where, I mean, I want to guide the direction of the product. But I mean, I also think that there are some cases where it really comes to make sense, how do we solve this, let’s do this together.

Marcus Ransom:
Having both can be helpful because if you’re like, I want to see a button that does this and I’m not prepared to accept anything other than that solution can set yourself up for not getting what you want, but can also make it really difficult to have that communication and engagement and relationship with the various teams. And I’ve certainly found the value of being able to understand both in my mind, as you were saying, Charles, with mockups, I would like to see. But also providing that with a distillation of what the problem is that I’m trying to solve. Because that’s where on many occasions I’ve been surprised by the, all right, so maybe if you want to check the beta forum maybe next week, and then you look there and you realize that the problem is actually going away. So I now no longer need that button to do the thing. Or it’s been dealt with in a way that I could never have imagined a solution looking like.

Charles Edge:
I think another one of those great, “Yes, we did good.” Is that problem went away. To your point, Marcus, like, oh, we don’t need to build that feature anymore because that’s not a thing. It was a thing, sorry about that. And I would say anytime you’re coming up with the why and the how and a little bit of what. The first thing that good software developers are going to say is, okay, you want this thing and then list out all the reasons that, not that it can’t be done, but the barriers. Which is a little bit of someone who’s new to dealing with that type of communication might think that it’s them saying they don’t want to do it, but it’s really them trying to break down the barriers in their head. Because if you’re thinking about it kind of in an object-oriented fashion, you’re like, “Well, okay, that’s not going to work because of this. That’s not going to work because of this.” But then if you find the ways around it.
And it can be a little bit of scope creep sometimes, but then once you see it in your mind’s eye, kind of, you’re like, okay, I can build this. But that’s definitely a journey learning to communicate with software developers. But that’s why we’re talking about how to present this to product managers and not how to present it directly to software developers, because also software developers typically do not appreciate you reaching out directly to them because they have this firewall called the product manager.

Tom Bridge:
That’s what we’re here for.

Charles Edge:
The other thing I can say, we alluded to this earlier, but the vote up, the strength and numbers thing, finding friends or colleagues or other people who want or need the same thing. And if you can’t, then you’re doing things weird, period. Or at least in my experience. And then the last thing, which was the very first thing Tom said when I brought up doing this episode was, what Tom?

Tom Bridge:
Well, if you’re a big enough customer, you can always threaten to leave. And that certainly can change a development cycle in a really quick hurry.

Charles Edge:
And big customers do threaten to leave.

Tom Bridge:
Yes, all the time. And sometimes they’re bluffing and sometimes they’re not. And honestly, you got to take those conversations very, very seriously. And you go in and you have the conversation, “Is this really something you’re going to leave around?” “Yes.” Okay. Then we have to make a choice. And sometimes that’s all these other things that we were going to build, we can’t build right away now and that’s okay.

Charles Edge:
And that’s straight up in the innovator… I mean, the innovator’s dilemma, there’s so many books that kind of talk about this type of issue, but they know that they represent X amount of a company’s revenue. They pay the bill, whatever communication channels there are there. But all the books tell us as product managers that a thousand smaller customers are worth far more. And you just can’t build only what the biggest customers want, or you’ll end up Controlled Data or [inaudible 01:06:34] or one of those ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, 2000s companies that went under, because as market shift, those big customers will invariably go to the more innovative companies which aren’t building features just for big customers.

Tom Bridge:
Correct. You’ve got to keep your play in mind and you’ve got to look at what you really need. And sometimes that’s, “Hey, do you need this immediately or do you need this a year from now? When do you need this?” And then that gives us flexibility to kind of program as circumstances warrant. And I’ve certainly had roadmaps disrupted by those kind of conversations, and it’s never fun. But it’s how do we build the best product for the best number of people for the future of the business? And that’s where having a really clear set of, and I know a lot of folks think these are hokey, but having that mission and vision alignment of what am I trying to build? Why am I trying to build it? Who am I building it for? Gives you things to go back to and to fall back on. If you don’t know why you are building things, you are building possibly for no good reason.
You may have a good reason in the moment, but are you going to have the good reason to build over the long term? So that kind of mission, vision, values of those conversations. And it’s why I go back to my company values all the time, I actually like them, it’s weird. I’ve certainly been involved in what I consider to be a large amount of yack shaving around these kind of things in other organizations because it’s really shaving the yack at the end of the day. And I’ll make sure to put the definition of that, but I mean it’s essentially, it’s bike shedding, there are all sorts of other methods of describing this.
But what it comes down to is, are you doing what you need to do or are you doing something that is avoiding keeping you from doing something you need to do? Are you procrastinating with it? And so I love that conversation around, Hey, think big, build connections and be 1% better every day. Those are three pretty solid, easy sets of values that anybody can remember. And then I look at it and there’s a bunch of things that I build because it builds connections, there’s a bunch of things that I build because it’s thinking big, and there’s a bunch of stuff that we build because it’s all right, this makes us one step better today.

Charles Edge:
Successful products are successful mostly because of the thousands of 1% better every day, it’s not the big innovative features.

Tom Bridge:
Exactly.

Charles Edge:
And those things that make them better every day might not be something customer facing. It might be, oh, this now integrates with the CRM better, or the help desk software or whatever, privacy be damned kind of a little bit with all that. But it’s just a more efficient company who then can build products better.

Marcus Ransom:
It may also be efficiencies to the back end. So that 12 months down the track, new features are able to be implemented a lot more rapidly and with less technical debt getting in the way, stopping you from doing all of the things that your customers want to do. I remember back in design school we’re always taught about the British motorcycle industry as an example of what not to do. And the British motorcycle industry owned the world. The car industry was the same, they were the best, they were the best made, they were the fastest, they were the desirable ones. And then the Japanese manufacturing industry came in and copied exactly what they were doing. And they’re like, “We don’t need to worry, they’re just copies of ours.” And Japanese manufacturing’s not so good because there’s this colonial idea of what good looked like. And the Japanese manufacturing industry didn’t just copy, but also improved and overtook.
And the British motorcycle industry was just sitting there resting on its past and it doesn’t exist anymore. There are still some of those brands out there, but they’re not really made in the UK anymore, they’re not designed in the UK. A lot of them are owned by a lot of those Japanese or other European countries that just really use it for the badge and the history. And it’s great to see organizations listening to their customers, focused on the future and what’s required. Because we’ve seen too many device management solutions come in and think that it’s easy and think that you can invest in a bunch of development to get a product to market and then just focus on selling and using, and completely forget to chase the ice cream truckers, as Tom tells us. And realize that ice cream truck is driving pretty quickly.

Tom Bridge:
And that’s where we live. And the thing is it’s never just one ice cream truck we’re chasing. As IT pros, we are out chasing a fleet of ice cream trucks every week.

Charles Edge:
Especially if you’re a company who makes a portfolio of products. I mean, yeah, whether it’s identity and MDM or MDM in security or what have you. As you increase your SKUs, for lack of a better term, or your products, now you’re spreading your teams thinner. But you have to, because I think in the modern enterprise, you just can’t be a one trick pony anymore. I feel like I hate to see when vendors that I love expanding, but I also love to see it. But it’s just a natural progression that investors expect, so anyways.

Marcus Ransom:
There was a comedian here in Australia in the ’90s, and I think he was actually American that came to Australia, and he was a juggler. And I think he would probably make a good product manager because as well as juggling balls and juggling pins, he would juggle cats and chainsaws.

Tom Bridge:
At the same time?

Marcus Ransom:
At the same time, yes.

Tom Bridge:
Oh no.

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah. Does that feel like what you do, Tom?

Tom Bridge:
Yes. And every cat is Alfie.

Marcus Ransom:
Yes.

Charles Edge:
I mean, one last thing that I’ll say is the product management role, especially when it’s new to a company or beginning when it’s new, but increasingly later, is the most political role in a company because you’re sitting there between sellers, between supporters, between customers, between executives, and you’re getting pulled in all those different directions. And that’s a really tough spot to be in unless you’re able to just go bury your head in the sand and write your own code for a little bit. So anytime I approach a product manager with a feature request, I try to do so with empathy for all the things that they’ve already got on their plate because they’re also sitting there on webinars, it’s a very interesting position in a company.

Tom Bridge:
Honestly, it’s been the most fun I’ve had in a job because you both can see the future, you’re steering the future, and there’s no shortage of problems to work on. If you are a board as a product manager, your company has larger problems, you need to deal with them. Or maybe it’s time to look for a new opportunity, but there’s no shortage of the future to build and I think that that is a really wonderful thing.
You’re at the Mac Admins podcast, we want to say a special thank you to all of our Patreon backers. The following people are to be recognized for their incredible generosity. Stu Bakka, thank you. Adam Selby, thank you. Nate Walk, thank you, Michael Sti, thank you. Rick Goodie, thank you. Mike Boylan, you know it, thank you. Melvin Vivez, thank you. Bill Stites, thank you. Anush Doorville, thank you. Jeffrey Compton, M. Marsh, Stu McDonald, Hamlin Crusin, Adam Berg, thank you. AJ Petrepka, thank you, James Straci, Tim Perfitt of Two Canoes, thank you. Nate Sinal, will O’Neill, Sebash. The folks at Command Control Power, Steven Weinstein, Chet Swarthout, Daniel McLoughlin, Justin Holt, bill Smith, and Weldon Dod. Thank you all so much and remember that you can back us if you just saw head out to patreon.com/macadmpodcast. Thanks everybody. Do we want to head to the bonus question, Marcus, do you think that’s a good idea?

Marcus Ransom:
Yeah, yeah, let’s do it. Best current feature request?

Tom Bridge:
And I don’t know if this is a feature… My general thought is, let’s open this up broadly, not just for the products that we all have seen and loved. But the idea here is what is a product in your life that you have written a feature request for in your head at a bare minimum and go to from there?

Marcus Ransom:
Well, I’m the king of feature requests, so I can’t develop anything. So my service to the MAC Admin community is by letting people who can know what they should do. And sorry, Mindy, not sorry. And thank you for adding in all of those features. I don’t know. My favorite one is when I suggest a stupid name for their product and they go, “That’s awesome, I’m using that straightaway.” So novelty feature request, lighthearted feature requests are often a great way of engaging with a developer to let them know that it’s not just being Veruca Salt stomping my feet and demanding Oompa-Loompas now. So yeah, maybe a dumb name for a feature request. What about you, Tom, what’s been your favorite feature request?

Tom Bridge:
Well, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of days because I mean, obviously be moving into the product role has changed how I think about Lord knows everything. And the things that I keep coming to is feature requests for day-to-day objects. I have a feature request for my front door, as a user, I would really like it if it was a silent operating door and did not squeal like a large stuck pig when you open it. And of course, obviously the answer to that is some lithium grease and some elbow grease and into the hinges and all of those kind of things. But I think that the feature that I have is for my own stupid body. And that is as a human being who walks around and lives, I would like my knees not to hurt so much after sitting on an airplane all day.
And of course the solution for that right now is drugs and weight loss. But I think that overall, there are so many feature requests I have for my stupid brain, for example, which is I would really prefer it if my brain was not useless in the months between November and February, give or take, due to the lack of daylight. So I have a very long list of feature requests for the human body that I’m looking for the product manager on. If anybody knows that person or that group of people, I would be thrilled to sit down for an exit interview at some point because I’m looking forward to being a consciousness in a jar someplace. So Charles, we’re talking about current feature requests, what’s your best current feature request?

Charles Edge:
Anything that improves my quality of life or lets me do things faster or anything. Or be more secure in general, that’s kind of the litmus I’ve always used. How much time does the save? Because after all, that’s what computers are there for. And in fact, all technology through the course of human history has been about letting us consume more energy via what we eat or how we live or whatever, in a faster way, on an assembly line. I don’t have a specific one, that’s just my rubric.

Tom Bridge:
I love it. Well, it’s been another fantastic episode of the Mac Admins Men’s podcast. And of course, thanks so much to our wonderful sponsors this week, that is Kandji, Kolide and Data Jar. And thanks so much to our transcription sponsor Alectrona, and thank you so much for helping us describe this episode for folks who maybe want to read it instead of hearing it. So thanks everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

Charles Edge:
See you next time.

Marcus Ransom:
See you later.

Charles Edge:
And hopefully next time your feature will have been created.

Tom Bridge:
All right, thanks everybody, see you. The Mac Admins Podcast is a production of Mac Admins Podcast LLC. Our producer is Tom Bridge, our sound editor and mixing engineer is James Smith. Our theme music was produced by Adam Kudiga, the first time he opened GarageBand. Sponsorship for the MCAD Men’s podcast is provided by the macadmins.org Slack, where you can join thousands of Mac Admins in a free Slack instance. Visit macdamins.org. And also by technical evolutionary LLC, technically we can help. For more information about this podcast and other broadcasts like it, please visit podcast on macdamins.org. Since we’ve converted this podcast to APFS, the funny metadata joke is at the end.