Miscellaneous Updates for Monday

1. On Saturday, Product Camp Atlanta was held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. More than 250 Product Managers and Product Marketing Managers from Atlanta and nearby cities congregated to discuss techniques and meet each other. This was my first event and it was really excellent. It's an entirely volunteer event with corporate sponsors picking up the food tab. Volunteers proposed 44 sessions on various PM topics, the top 23 vote-getters of which are delivered. I was lucky enough to have mine selected ("The Four W's or How to Train Your CEO"). Small audience, but it was very well-received, I thought. A number of people asked if I would come in and do training.
   
   As someone who's been in this field a long time, the conference material wasn't new to me, but it was a terrific refresher on PM discipline. It's something that we slowly lose while embedded deep inside a company. It's like we slowly become acclimatized to the culture and we lose our objectivity little by little, day by day until we're part of the problem. In my next PM gig, I'm going to ensure that my team re-establishes this baseline of objectivity regularly.
   
   
2. I continue to ask Product Managers what their personality type is and every single one I've asked has said the same thing: INTJ. Talk about a trait-driven career path. Putting the least-positive spin on it, INTJs are borderline anti-social, highly analytical perfectionists who are incredibly reliable and tend to be pretty smart. That does describe most of the PMs I know.
   
   
3. In looking over the material I've published last week, I wanted to make some observations. First, when I talked about the things I've enjoyed, there were some common themes:
   
   - They all had a clear goal
   - The time lag between effort and seeing the results was small
   - They all involved creating something or discovering something
   - They all involved communications of some kind
   - Many of them involved making other people happy
   
   I think this last one is the most telling. What I really want is for PMs to be more popular, for the rest of the company to believe we're an invaluable part of the team and to applaud our contribution with the same enthusiasm that they use when applauding Sales for making the quarter, or Engineering delivering a release, or Marketing pulling off a successful event. They usually don't, though.
   
   
4. Now, I contrast that with the things about Product Management I'm not so fond of. Sadly, these are things I've had to become proficient at:
   
   - Saying "no"
   - Making hard tradeoff decisions -- somebody's always unhappy
   - Not seeing results faster -- PM actions don't yield results for months
   - Being completely honest -- it's no fun to communicate bad news
   - Getting yelled at by unreasonable customers
   - Not having the rest of the company appreciate your work
   
   
5. Now, I don't want this to sound like whining. I've been in Product Management long enough to know exactly what I'm getting into each time I take a new PM position. But if I'm going to find my bliss, I need to be honest about what I like and don't like about the thing I've done this past 15 years. It's also clear from this that I could work harder at internal marketing, too.
   
   
6. On a more salubrious note, I spent another part of this weekend making a cake for my daughter's birthday. It was a rectangular two-layer yellow sheet cake with chocolate frosting, and I decorated it (at her request) with daisies, a unicorn, and a rainbow. Other than the unicorn and the shaky writing, I thought it turned out pretty well. It tasted good, though I'm not confident enough to post a picture.
   
   I've decorated my kids' birthday cakes since they've had birthday cakes, but I learned a lot this go round.
   
   - Big cakes are hard to move. They tend to break and crumble easily
   - Piping in rainbows with thick frosting gives you hand cramps
   - Fondant doesn't taste all that good
   - Easy to squeeze piping bags are a must for good cake penmanship
   - Shaving the top "bow" off a sheet cake gives you yummy orts
   
   But the best part was when my daughter saw the cake after I was done. She gasped, said "it's beautiful", and gave me a huge hug. Later, she said the cake was the best part of her pool party. I might not have the job I truly want, but there are parts of my life that I wouldn't change one bit.