The Changing Face of DotNetNuke Product Management

DotNetNuke has undergone many changes over the last 8 years in the way the product is developed and managed.  Having been part of the main engineering and product teams from the early days of the Open Source project I have had a number of roles on the team.  Last year I moved from being focused on application development as part of the Engineering team to being more focused on product management.  A big part of my role on the product management team was handling release management.

With the release of DotNetNuke 6.0 my role has once again shifted.  Over the last year the Product Management team has grown.  Will Morgenweck, Ian Robinson and Cuong Dang have joined the team and have greatly expanded our ability to manage product features and the product roadmap.  As a result I have handed over all of my product management duties to Will and Israel.  This means that I am no longer involved in triaging bug fixes, or managing releases.

One of the challenges over the last couple of years is that Shaun and I have been actively involved in day to day product management and we haven’t had the bandwidth to spend as much time as we wanted on the bigger picture.  With recent changes on the team, I have now moved over to working on more strategic initiatives.  Rather than focusing on what features should be in the next release or the next couple of releases we now have time to start looking at major technology trends and competitive landscape to better determine where we need to go as a platform over the next 2-5 years and beyond.

Some of the projects I am working on may become part of the product and some may never see the light of day.  Some are going to be targeted at our commercial customers and some at the broader Community Edition platform.  I am excited to get more time to focus on projects with longer time horizons and work closely with Shaun on more strategic efforts which better position us for the future.  I’ll still be actively involved on the community side and look forward to showing off some of the cool stuff we are working on that might become part of the platform someday.