onvural.net – melih – builder

I started at TokBox six years ago today. It’s been an amazing journey to say the least. I interviewed with 20 companies my 5th year of college. I got a ton of first round interviews because I’d worked my ass off to build a killer internship resume. I just couldn’t close the door though on […]

This blog post is 6 days late. It all started when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings. Yesterday we went to wine country as a product team, and it was fantastic! […]

Getting out of email, and being able to solve real problems is hard. Fighting technology as basic as wireless router vs. cooling system is frustrating. Feeling like no matter what you’re 2 days behind is just depressing. So tonight I just hit the reset button. Micky and I let the kids stay up late. We […]

This week we lost both Betsy and Byrne to true start ups (venture backed companies as opposed to our corporate backing). The lovely Nicki Dexter is in town, and we’ve been jamming about what it is that makes TokBox tick. The combination has led me to think quite a bit about how we can fight […]

My promotion to Director of Product Management has been announced to the team. I set as a goal for 30 to be promoted. I’ve wanted this for two reasons: 1) External validation that I’ve contributed to the story of TokBox. I’ve been here for almost 6 years now. I’ve had two careers. One in engineering. […]

The goal of this experiment is whether we can be smarter about building product because we pay more attention to how we do it. Everyone I know out in the Valley is quite process averse. Folks write against it, preach against it, and fight against it as much as possible. We’re not big enough to […]

I met with a cool cat today for some coffee. We were introduced by Jason (check out this post), and talked about being a PM, what that means, how to represent oneself well on a resume, and the like. I told him about a role we’re looking for that involves a lot of storytelling, and […]

I jammed with Jason Monberg today who is a really cool cat who came into my world view through Ian. Jason and Ian worked together at MarkLogic. Jason has a consultancy that’s quite cool. They do both product development as well as product strategy, process consulting, and the like. He’s got a cool office space, […]

I had an absolutely superb meeting today with someone on the team about the tidal wave that has swept product development – data. We talked a lot about how it has become a must have skill set in the Valley, and where we land on that scale (read: way behind). I kept the conversation going […]

We’ve just stated a new weekly lunch event on the product team where we pick a relevant topic and jam on it. We talked about a new strategy at one, and design process at the one today. It’s an attempt to cross pollinate across the team best practices, new ideas, road map pitches, and the […]