Who am I?
The Dude is a product manager in the classical sense. He began his career back in the last millennium, in a world where there were far fewer concrete ideas of what product management was, and thus it became a jack of all trades. Analytical marketing, requirements gathering and documenting, stakeholder management, sales enablement, outbound market messaging, and general research, we did it all back then.
Over a career spanning two and a half decades, he has seen a lot. From a meagre beginning, through the rise of frameworks, methodologies, the rise of specialization, and a huge pivot into software as a service, cloud infrastructure, and massive scale.
Yet, at the end of the day, product management is still product management. It is a high stress role with an endless stream of out-of-left-field pressures that drives consumption of cocktails and cannabis products.
In real life, The Dude is Geoff Anderson. Currently he is the product manager for training products that support information technologies. This is his persona of Snark. If you prefer a more serious take on the art of Product Management, check out his Substack at The Product Bistro.
For fun, he is a guitar player, video game player, RC car driver, and the dog-father of Lizzie and Cerberus (check out their own page, GreytBros)
What we do here
Product Management used to be a semi-exclusive club. It required technical acumen, a good feel for the needs of customers, an understanding of the market, an ability to broker peace amongst warring factions, and the humility to spread success out while absorbing the blame for foul-ups.
As such, The Dude has observed a literal ton of malfeasance, shitty companies, awful executives, and communal insanity. This is his unbuttoned, unvarnished take.
There will be profanity.
What we do not do here
We do not monetize this. A few reasons, but mainly because this is a hobby, and an outlet for some of the frustrations I experience in my life.
We do not do any advertising. I use Buttondown as the newsletter that will send these posts to subscribers. I do track email openings and the like, and I use (and pay for) Plausible for analytics over the default use of Google, because fuck Google.
If you do provide your email to receive notifications or the newsletter, we will not use it for any other purposes.
How to keep up?
There is a newsletter that you can sign up for. When there is a new post here, it magically is picked up there and sent to subscribers. Sorta like magic.
Or you can check back here periodically.
What I do not do anymore is use any of the main social media platforms, so I do not share these posts anywhere.