Also known as: richardpark31
I've been in the product management business for over years and the technology industry for nearly . I have a real fascination with how to build good technology products that people want to buy. "Cool" technology counts for something but what really matters is solving a customer need and making a product enjoyable to use. I've been following the Lean Startup movement for a couple of years now and I believe this is the right way to go. Gone are the days when we can build in a vacuum and then hope the customer will buy. The military statement about planning can be adapted to marketing "No plan survives contact with the customer." Build a Minimum Viable Product, get it into customers' hands quickly, and iterate continually until you learn what works. I love the idea that we can now release code to production multiple times per day. At the same time, I have a real interest in technology and getting my hands dirty. I installed version .. of the Linux kernel on my DX PC back in and I've been an open source fan ever since. A deep understanding of technology really helps to know what is realistic to build and what is not. Lawrence Lessig's dictum "Code is law" means that the technical reality of products is determined by the code. To this day I have a love of coding. My latest focus is Ruby because of its clean syntax but I'm slowly gravitating toward Python and R because of their popularity with data scientists. I've also developed an interest in big data and machine learning. Many functions in society will increasingly generate data and be dependent on data. Humans can't singlehandedly make sense of the terabytes of data out there we need automated tools to look through it and tell us what is interesting. I keep a blog (www.rpark.com) as a "scratchpad" to track technical things I've done. It serves as my online memory to remind me of how to accomplish certain tasks. Specialties Marketing Lean Startup, Customer Development, Pragmatic Marketing Languages Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, C Tools Apache Hadoop and Mahout
