The Post Modern Product Manager

For all of its design ethtetics at Apple, they care more about the form rather than the function.  Take iCal.  Ive been trying hard to use this in my last job (previous startup was all based on Google Apps).  Did anyone in Apple UI do a usability study and watch people use this product?  For all the criticisms that Google is an engineering driven company (vs Apple design) Google Calendar takes down iCal with ease.  Here are some examples:

iCal doesnt know what time it is…
When I shortcut to create a new calendar event, iCal chooses some random time – 9am, 3am… how about looking at what time is is today, and rounding up to the next hour or half hour?  Google does.

iCal doesn’t have a date picker
Man, what year is it?  If I schedule an event for the first tuesday of next month… well your SOL.  And how about supporting the notion of entering “3d” for three days from now?

Only 28 tabs until your done
Im a keyboard fanatic – and I counted that you would have to hit tab 27 times to fill out this dialog box.  Google?  10, plus a shortcut to save whenever you want.

Shared Calendars?
Hah – try it.  Just try it.  Let me know how it works

Overlapping Events
Hope you dont have more than one appt at the same time… can you read this?

Well, I made my point. Hey, its not only me, go check it on Google search results.

PS – Ok, I should just keep this blog post open… here is another one.  I have an appt that starts at 12, and goes for 12 hours… now lets say you want to add another appt at 2pm.  Sorry – no can do.  Only open is to create an appt at 11am, then change it to 2pm.  Fail!

Just over two years ago I was at a big tech company, and the only people who used Macs were the UI/UX department.  They used something called Entourage, complained about MS Exchange, and sent me stuff in PDFs.  (What, no Word?).  Then I started to see the infestation – esp VP level engineering starting to get Mac Candy.  But alas, I didn’t notice much.

Moving to bootstrapped startups (BSS) – amazingly enough everyone is on a Mac.  Actually, they should have a welcome kit for new startup hires that consists of:

1. 15 in Macbook Pro
2. iPhone 3GS
3. Moleskin notebook

The only people who choose to use a PC are the finance geeks and their Excel ‘07 install.  As for me, after three weeks of detox migration from a PC to a Mac, Im not going back – after 15 years on being a PC guy.

Why?  Well, there are three reasons for this:

1. Its cool (like, hipster) to be a Mac. If your joining the cool social media/iphone/moble/location based/cloud/SAAS/whever cool thing, as a product manager you get street cred if you are on a Mac.  In fact, if you choose a PC, the cranky engineers on macs will think you are an MBA dork.
2. I don’t care about MS Office anymore. Back in they day, engineers authored on a wiki and product managers used ms word and sharepoint.  Now, when you go to a startup, its all wiki – google apps, dropbox, evernote.. you name it.  The only reason I have Office on my Mac is for Excel.  Probably why MSFT still hasn’t released a decent version of Excel for Mac – it would break the camel’s back.  (See finance comment above)
3. Personal Productivity P0rn.  One day Ill do a study between Product Managers in startups and GTD methodologies.  Jesus, if someone told me sooner about the excess of Productivyt POrn I could find on a Mac, well I would have kicked outlook’s GTD plugin to the curb.  Where do I start?  iGTD, Things, Omnifocus, Quicksilver.

So the next time your at your Web 2.0/SWSXi/Techcrunch/whatever conference, take a look around at the number of Macs in the room.  It will surprise you.

When I logged into Gmail today, I actually counted the “Lots of free space”.  After staring at it for a while, I noticed that it increases by .000004 per second.  Assuming no breaks, thats 2.89 additional MB of storage per day, or just over 1 Gb per year.  Ok, not lame on the fact, but if you look at the growth in storage just 10 years ago, and look 10 years into the future, 10 gb over 10 years is lame.

Post Modern and Wikipedia

Dave McClure, a great guy, valley geek, and self promoter wrote a blog post titled Resumes Are For Sh*t.  Basic idea – resumes don’t cut it anymore.  Instead its what you do, who you know and how you leverage it.  Its about social networking, linkedin invitations and especially blogging.  So I needed to find something that I’m an expert in (product management), put my own spin on it, and own the space.

Searching the google return set of blogs on product management shows me that:

• Most blogs on product management are rather dry affairs (except for my favorite Cranky PM)
• Most blogs take the ivory tower approach (have you worked in the real world as a PM?)
• Most blogs dont deal with my specific space (Im in internet software / services in small agile startups)

Ok, I got my space, now I need my spin. So, I spent the last week searching for a catchy name for this blog.  I think I got it as “The Post Modern Product Manager”.  Its the PM-PM of PM blogs.

Why you ask?

If you look up the definition of postmodernism you will find:

A late 20th-century style and concept in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism and has at its heart a general distrust of grand theories and ideologies” (especially what it really like to be a product manager… more in later posts).

Merriam Webster goes further:

1. of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one (post bubble?)
2. relating to a reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by ironic self-reference and absurdity (Just my style..)
3. of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions (is what product managers need – a swift kick in one’s modern assumptions of being a PM)

So therefore, blog on!