The Fiberglass Plant and the Photomask Writer
Everyone's calling the AI buildout 'industrial.' A fiberglass plant and a photomask shop are both industrial — and only one of them can fund itself.
Latest
Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 5: "The Reckoning"
AI isn't disrupting product management as a category. It's disrupting the execution layer of it specifically. If you've been telling yourself you're on the strategic side of that line, this post is about whether that's true.
The Role That Hollowed Itself Out: A Eulogy for Product Management
The title survived. The ceremonies survived. The Jira boards are still getting groomed. What didn't survive: the function that made product management worth having in the first place. A diagnosis.
Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Post 4: The Ticket Queue Is Not a Career
Part 4: The promise bifurcated, and many were sold a bill of goods. For most, the grind of the feature factory was lived experience
The Deskilling Machine: How We Hollowed Out Product Management — and What AI Is About to Do to Everything Else
Or, this is the removal of the Cargo Cult technocrats, hired to work, but not to have a purpose. You surely have come across these drones.
Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 3: Golden Handcuffs and Hunger Games
We've been tracing an argument across this series. Post 1 went back to the industrial-era construction of the white-collar professional identity. Post 2 followed that architecture into Silicon Valley, where it got turbocharged with founder mythology and libertarian individualism. Today we get to the mechanisms that
Übermensch in a Cubicle Farm Pt 2: The Valley Mythology Machine
Having set the table in the first installment of this, let's talk about how the California environment paved the way for an anti-organising mindset
Ubermensch in a Cubicle Farm pt. 1: The Collar Color Was Never Quite What It Seemed
Tech in general is very resistant to organizing. As we enter the AI age, it seems like this missed opportunity will haunt the industry. A look at how this began (a series)
The Farm League, the Judas Goat, and the Bill That Always Comes Due
Or: how the AI ecosystem is running the oldest con in tech, and why so many product managers are apparently fine with that
Who Killed the Product Manager?
(or: how we quietly dismantled the one role that understood the whole business)
The True Religion of American Pricing Psychology
What a gallon of gas can teach you about anchoring, asymmetry, and the stubborn math of consumer behavior
A Pragmatic PM's Guide to Generative AI
What it gets right, what it gets wrong, and how to use it without getting torched. There is no doubt that AI can greatly augment your work, and help you get to defensible positions without getting bogged into the tactical morass
Product
The Craft of Product Management
My near three decades in the product management trenches has reinforced that product management isn't a recipe, it is a craft, and it is a craft honed by repetition and practice.
Product
How We Got Here: Three Decades of Product Management's Identity Crisis
Product management has transformed significantly in my 3 decades of experience, but it has still remained true to its original goals: how to meld business context to solving customer problems
Product
The Toolbox Doesn't Make the Carpenter
Having been in product management as long as I have, the evolution of the tools that do product management tasks, and while they are slick, they don't make you a product manager.
Product
The Old Dog's New Trick: AI as a Force Multiplier in Building Technical Training
For a long time, I was a sceptic, someone who resisted the use of GenAI in my day to day. I thought that it wouldn't be able to deliver the goods. That changed when we pivoted our development process, and the tools became an essential part of the workflow.
Newsletter
Do I keep this alive?
At a crossroads, is the Product Bistro worth keeping alive, or should it be allowed to slip into the long goodnight. Help me decide!
OpenAI's Problem
OpenAI's ChatGPT is impressive, but the competition is catching up (and surpassing them in places). That is making their lack of a defensible moat an Achilles Heel.
MBA? Nah bro.
A change is needed in the business, and instead of calling a consultancy, I turned to AI, and it was not disappointing. Is it good enough? No, but it is enough to prime the pump on the business transformation needed.
Product
AI and the Enterprise
Corporate AI projects are not yet driving expected productivity gains, but don't read too much into it - yet.
The Coming (web) Traffic Apocalypse
The shift to AI summaries in searches leads to fewer click-throughs and thus a drastic fall off of ad revenue for media sites. This is driving a trend to the "newsletter" model.
Why Amazon, oh why
A recent purchase with a Trade-in is leaving a sour taste. For a retail giant, their customer-fu is weak
News
Shit, there goes 9 years…
No, I am not out of work, quite the contrary, I am about as indispensable as I can be. The good news is that means they keep throwing buckets of RSU’s at me. Over the past 8 years, I have assiduously avoided all the pressure to be elevated to
Executive Coaching
Now that I have re-joined the ranks of management, I am finding that access to a coach is immensely helpful in slaying some of my inner demons.