Welcome to What and Why

Telling stories about product management

Welcome to What and Why.

In October last year, Thoma Bravo, during a buying spree of identity management companies, scooped up Forgerock for $2.3B. 

I quickly analyzed the acquisition for some colleagues, which became a story about my involvement in that journey.

In 2005 I was the product manager for a struggling web access management product at Sun Microsystems. We reimagined the product strategy around making a very simple-to-use open-source product offered free to the world as OpenSSO.

Been there, done that, made a t-shirt.

A few years later, when Oracle bought Sun, some enterprising folks forked the OpenSSO project, created OpenAM, founded ForgeRock, and built a thriving business, which they eventually took public.

I am very proud of that period in my career. Through mostly instinct and intuition (I hadn’t been a product manager very long and didn’t yet know how to get or interpret the data I needed to make decisions), I devised an innovative, risky product strategy and built a foundational product that endured nearly two decades, two acquisitions, and an IPO.

This reminded me of two things; I’ve been in product management for a long time, and I’ve accumulated many stories along the way that may be helpful to others on their product management journey.

I am starting this substack to tell those stories. 

My goal is to help product managers recognize what does and doesn’t work when creating product strategy and building great products. By no means is this prescriptive. Product managers match patterns, and this is my way of contributing to those patterns.

Enjoy what you find here. 

-eric

Connect with me on LinkedIn.