Bill Arconati

Current

Product Marketing Manager at Atlassian
Product Manager at BEA Systems

Past

Customer Strategy Manager at Siebel Systems
Product Management Intern at PeopleSoft
Sales Controller at Plumtree Software

1 more...

Education

University of California, Berkeley - Walter A. Haas School of Business
Northwestern University

Recommended

8 people have recommended Bill

Connections

284 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

Bill Arconati’s Summary

Having managed a number of software releases, I’ve developed some rules of thumb that describe my approach to product management:

SET CLEAR GOALS – This seems obvious but I’ve seen projects with nebulous goals like “increase customer satisfaction.” Clear goals make it easier to measure a release’s success and protect against scope creep.

FOCUS ON THE USER – Web software (especially enterprise software) all too often provides a sub-par user experience. Today, anyone with an internet connection can choose from a host of applications that compete with yours. Winning at software requires winning the hearts and minds of end users, not just of the IT department.

DON’T LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS – Customers will happily tell you what features they want added to the product. But a product manager wouldn’t be of much value if all he did was throw a list of customer requirements over the wall to engineering. I listen to customers, but I take an empathic design approach where I strive to understand their use cases rather than blindly implement their feature requests.

DO A FEW THINGS WELL – Some software can make you feel like you’re trapped inside the Winchester House. Features after feature has been added over time to the appeasement of customers but without any master plan. Eventually the product becomes a disjointed bucket of features and a usability nightmare. As a product manager, I err on the side of simplicity over functionality. Sometimes it’s better to forgo features for the sake of maintaining overall usability of the product.

PROTOTYPE AND ITERATE – In an ideal world, a product manager writes a requirement, dev implements it, QA tests it and everyone is happy. The real world is not so clean. What sounds good on paper doesn’t always work well when implemented. How do we avoid this problem? Prototype! If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a million words. Plus, it’s a rare chance for me as a product manager to write code!

Bill Arconati’s Specialties:

Product Management
Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0
PHP / MySQL
Javascript / CSS
AJAX / JSON / XML
MS Excel / VBA
Photoshop
Software Development
Financial Analysis
Quantitative Analysis
Sales Operations

Bill Arconati’s Education

University of California, Berkeley - Walter A. Haas School of Business

MBA , Business Administration , 2003 — 2005

Activities and Societies:

Co-President, Partners for Entrepreneurial Leadership
Graduate Student Instructor for Leadership Speech
Fund Raising Committee for the Berkeley Business Plan Competition
Northwestern University

BA , Economics , September 1993 — June 1997