It's about one year I started working for Embarcadero as Delphi Product Manager. It has been a very interesting experience for me. I spent time on many activities: from defining the specification of future product features to product evangelism and conference presentations, from development (not much, though) to customer meetings, from scrum meetings to R&D planning sessions, from preparing slides and documentation to logging and tracking issues in the product. As you can see, the job is quite varied, interesting, and quite challenging.

Working from remote (at a 9 hours time zone difference from other colleagues) has been a bit complex to master, but it can certainly be done. Good I share the same timezone with many in R&D and Q&A people, beside many of our international managers, evangelists, sales, and partners. I made 6 trips to our office in California, a good average but visited also several other Embarcadero offices in Europe. In terms of technologies I mostly was involved in the database area (including FireDAC and DataSnap), language and RTL, but also in the FM platform and the new operating systems we started supporting.

I spent a lot of time talking with actual developers, at conferences, customers meetings, "focus groups", trying to understand better what we are doing right and what we could do better, and reporting all of my findings to different groups within the company. Honestly, there are still many things I need to learn, given my past experience was more on the technical side of Delphi.

A couple of things I hope to be able to improve this second year: get back to blogging and communicating more, and get back to writing (in my free time). This has been an incredible year for Delphi (with the new mobile tools), and it was a honor and a pleasure to be so deeply involved in the product and to work with so many great developers and managers. Thanks.