Do I keep this alive?

Some general notes: Until recently, I had been self-hosting my ghost properties (three of them) on a Digital Ocean droplet, and it was all working pretty well. I originally moved this blog from Substack when their "Nazi" problem appeared, and the ham-fisted response by the founders[1]. As this is sorta my professional face, I moved it first.

But, the stress of managing the site had become, cumbersome and the next major version of Ghost was going to require a migration to Docker, and while that would simplify the setup and configuration, it would require me, an almost 61 year old geek to learn a new trick, and I am going to admit that I am unwilling to put in that work to get there.[2]

Thus, the reconstition to a hosted Ghost instance. The question is, will I post enough here to justify the cost (about $125 a year)? And will enough people read what I write?

The money isn't that big of a deal, but I have to admit that since the heyday of Product Management Twitter[3], it has become very difficult to promote and grow the audience.

Then, there's the low posting volumes. It isn't that I lack things to write about. Product Management, especially in tech, has become both a better constrained discipline with plenty of structure and processes, but also it still has a certain fluidity that requires adaptation, flexibility, and some true innovation:

All too often today, I see junior and early career product managers who are whizzes at using Figma, Confluence, and other tools to build slick interfaces, and define (and refine) features to dribble into engineering to execute on, but ask them the bigger picture, the "why are we doing this?" and "what about the users?" questions, and they can't answer beyond someone told them it was needed, and I get frustrated.

The rise of Generative AI is both enormously helpful in defining and tuning a strategy, as well as in the nitty-gritty details of the execution. But it doesn't replace the little grey cells between your ears:

So, I can use this space to share what I am doing, and how the current AI can augment my thinking, and improve my abilities.

Call to action:

First, you are here because you signed up from when I created this way back in 2016. Whether it was the original Wordpress site, the short time I was on Substack, or the last iteration of Ghost, you read or saw my in your travels, and said "sure, I will subscribe". If that is no longer the case, at the bottom of this email is a link to unsubscribe. That is a vote that you are no longer interested, and a signal to me.

Second, if you do remember why you originally signed up, and are still in or around product management, please either reply to this email and let me know personally that it is interesting, and you want to read more, or add a comment to the bottom of this post, and keep the discussion going, that will help me open my wallet to keep this alive.

Third, if I don't get people showing interest (or even reading the email), I will take that as a strong signal that I should let this go to the long goodnight.

The Product Bistro's fate is in your hands.

Anyhow, back to managin' them products!

1 - The founders and the algorithms have actually been promoting some of the worst white nationalist trash, actually lifting their visibility like it was Musk's Twitter (yeah, I went there)

2 - I went self hosted to save money, using minimal VM resources to host three sites, one of which had 2K plus subscribers, so email carriage was in the $50 a month range, and it turned out that I needed about double the VM to have headroom. I wasn't saving any money, and when I added in the annual subscription to Plausible to track the anaytics and I was in for more than I expected.

3 - It wasn't Musk and his raping it Twitter that degraded the PM community, alas, I can't blame him, but starting in 2017 or so, it began to become spammy and the quality of the discourse really went to hell, and most of the posts with the #prodmgmt hashtag became listicles, consultants promoting themselves, and very low signal.