Matt-DNASTAR

In a software company, the "Product Manager" role sits at the intersection of Development, Marketing and Sales and has to act as a conduit of information between these teams and to the company stakeholders. In addition, the PM must have an overall product vision and maintain a product roadmap. The PM in smaller companies may also help with QA, project management and supporting Sales.

At DNASTAR, we use a modified scrum style development and the JIRA platform to manage different projects. We use Slack to communicate between different subgroups within the company. My daily tasks involve monitoring development progress and making sure that what gets developed is what the customer wants and meets the criteria for the satisying that customer need. I also have several lines of communication with the Sales team who pass along all customer feedback that I process and place into the appropriate JIRA story. I may also assist with customer technical support as part of this feedback (again, small company). I also work with Marketing to review materials and in some cases, create some of the materials they need to promote our products. Marketing also collects user feedback that is incorporated into development decisions.

So, I think the main skills are really a willingness to be very transparent about the process, so that everyone sees the benefit in participation in reaching a common goal - a better product.

Sorry to hear that you are having issues with the latest software. The Mac platform has been especially challenging the past year with Catalina and now Big Sur, both of whom presented significant changes requiring a lot of updating on our end. DNASTAR is releasing a patch this week that addresses Big Sur compatibility and fixes many new and remaining ssues with Catalina. Also, with respect to Sanger data assembly and analysis, much of the functionality in SeqMan Pro has now been migrated to SeqMan Ultra.

I think everyone has their own unique career path, and mine was no different. In the mid-1990s I was working in a QA food products lab and was getting bored with it so I took a couple molecular biology classes in the evenings. A year later, I started grad school so I could learn as much as possible about molecular biology and really enjoyed developing new lab techniques and running experiments (not so much with writing papers and grants!). It was in grad school that I really learned how to use computers and DNA sequence analysis software and my career path took this direction. So, my advice is to just get your feet wet with IT/Bioinformatics. Take a class, see how you like it. Get some experience and find an internship where you can learn on the job and then grow into the higher level position that you can settle in to.

I think real time single molecule sequencing (PacBio and Nanopore) provides a means to directly detect nucleotide modifications and is a significant improvement over previous methods for epigenetic analysis. I do not have much personal experience here, but the DNASTAR development team is focused on supporting long read analysis tools and this is an area where latest generation of sequencing provides many advantages.

Yes, we use the concept of product owners as well. We're a small company, so product owners have dual titles. Product ownership is essential so that there is a single person that has responsibility for a product, even when it is not part of an active development cycle. Without POs, products can fall through the cracks.