Recommendation for Parnian Taidi

During my many years at Sun, I was fortunate to work with many talented individuals, many of whom got together to form a kickass team and pretty cool service. This is a recommendation for Parnian Taidi, one of the best product managers.

Parnian and I first started collaborating on Project O'Malley in the summer of 2007, during the project's initial brainstorming phases. Parnian presented our ISV and partner user community (the customer in Agile terminology), whereas I represented product engineering. Parnian demonstrated strong understanding of the problems experienced by the 3rd party users, and was able to articulate them clearly. Parnian's strength during these sessions, however, was her ability to interact with engineers who were scoping out the effort, and accurately represent our users' interests in evaluating options and prioritizing features based on rough level of effort estimates quickly, made the planning sessions quite productive. Along with Parnian's constant involvement, the team was able to prototype the concept and present to the stakeholders.

During the next 2+ years that we collaborated on the Sun Software Library, Parnian was an exceptional partner. Initially, we were tasked with building the Sun Software Library and getting the first revision implemented and deployed. Parnian was a quick learner, leveraging her technical background to help bridge the gap between what the users need versus what is actually feasible in a given timeframe. The engineering team enjoyed collaborating closely with Parnian, since she was able to translate and express the end users' issues in both terms that the engineers understood, and level of detail that the engineers wanted. When the engineering team faced an issue or problem that needed clarification, Parnian quickly learned the details, and either resolved it herself enabling the engineers to get back to work, or clearly communicate it to the users on behalf of the engineering team. This formed a strong bond of trust between the engineers and the product manager.

Once the Sun Software Library was launched, Parnian demonstrated wisdom creativity in spending a limited marketing budget to promote the site: Wisdom in using non-traditional (by Sun's standards) web 2.0 centric marketing tactics with no support from other Sun marketing organizations (blogs, twitter, facebook, forum postings on developer sites, etc.), as well as more traditional marketing approaches, such as presenting at conferences, staffing conference booths with giveaways, and so on. As a result of her efforts, the Sun Software Library usage has increased substantially (well over 2000% growth during the first few months) during the first year.

Parnian demonstrated a positive attitude to roll up her sleeves and take on responsibilities outside of her job description. A successful site, in order to build up a user community, requires a constant dialog with users. Although our executives committed resources for this activity, those resources never materialized. Realizing that our users would not be successful without this, Parnian took on this responsibility, in addition to her normal responsibilities.

In making the Sun Software Library a successful program, Parnian also demonstrated attention to the details. She routinely reviewed all the metrics (and was able to recite many of them from memory on demand during ad hoc hallway conversations, which is very necessary to turn skeptics into supporters), and constantly asked for new metrics and refinements of existing metrics, so she could better understand what it was being used for, and how it was being used. She also continued collaborating closely with the engineering team, spending many hours reviewing progress and making constant suggestions on user interface design and workflow.

In summary, through her dedication to the effort, hard work, participation at the ground level, and always supportive and positive attitude, Parnian earned the trust and respect of the engineering team. As a product manager, she is one of the best ones I've worked with. I recommend her highly.