The Cranky Product Manager

The Reality of Maternity and Paternity in the Software Industry

Dysfunctosoft, you are indeed extremely dysfunctional, but the Cranky Product Manager truly appreciates the flexibility you have afforded her as she attempts to figure out the motherhood-working mom-consummate-professional balance thingy. 

You've been understanding about the CPM's requirement for a reduced travel schedule, her need to leave at 5pm on the dot when she once regularly stayed past 9pm, and her need to work at home when her nanny gets sick, doesn't show up, or quits out of the blue and leaves the CPM without viable alternative childcare for 3 weeks at a time. You've put up with canceled and postponed meetings due to illnesses and doctors visits. You've gracefully dealt with conference calls with a wailing baby in the background. Kudos to you, DysfunctoSoft.  The Cranky Product Manager thanks you.

So yes, DysfunctoSoft, you are enlightened. Somewhat. But she can't help but notice you don't give the DADS the same flexibility as you afford moms.  You expect the dads to travel incessantly, work endlessly late hours, and be available on a moment's notice.  And DysfunctoSoft is hardly atypical.  For example, the Darling Husband of the Cranky Product Manager works at nearby software company  -- let's call it AHoleSoft -- in a similar role.  AHoleSoft gives Darling Husband no slack to contribute to the childcare situation.  (AHoles. What do you expect?)  As a result, it all falls 100% on the Cranky Product Manager's shoulders.  And that is crap, my friends.  Unexpected crap, at that.  Especially for someone ambitious who had dreams of taking over the world with her wealth of product management knowledge and derivative evil genius.  Though she never thought it would happen to her, the Cranky Product Manager finds her career derailing, unable to accept a promotion because she can barely keep up as is.

Prior to this whole kid thing, the Cranky Product Manager had full (naive) expectations of a 50-50 marital split in terms of child-raisin'.  After all, she brought down slightly more coin than DH, has a megawatt education, and had a pretty freakin' important job and excellent career prospects. Furthermore, Darling Husband fully supported this 50-50 split idea. He was all in favor of it.  He's a natural with kids and wanted to spend lots of time with his offspring. 

But alas, you Software Industry Mo-Fos make it pretty freakin' impossible.  Oh yes, you try to be nice to moms, and your efforts are appreciated.  But just remember, you can't really help working moms unless you help their husbands/partners too.

Product Management Haiku

Inspired by the fine, upstanding folks at Pivotal Product Management, here are some enthralling and inspirational haiku the Cranky PM whipped together.

Join in the fun!  Submit your own haiku in the comments.

Gartner, Forrester,
How the CPM hates you.
Damn Magic Quadrant.

Product Marketing:
They tell product lies all day
But they don't know it.

Only Bad PMs
Don't install or even use
The products they own.

Their bogus excuse:
"Technically impossible,"
Code Boyz and Girlz claim.

Darling Customer.
We shipped you crap. I'm sorry.
Please abuse me now.

Top-down, bottom-up...
How to do product planning?
We always debate.

Supported products.
An integration nightmare.
Zillions of versions.

Upgrade now or else
We'll de-support the release
Your business uses.

Sales Droid always blames
Lost deals on missing features.
Wins are due to him.

Short beta programs:
For publicity only,
Not for finding bugs.

Trade shows are useless
Tools for generating leads.
They just want free pens.

Plugs Ahoy

No bitchiness here today.  The Cranky Product Manager finally got a good night's sleep.  At last, after many months, CrankyKid 1.0 slept through the night. And there was much rejoicing.

Anyway, in lieu of a tirade against some marketing nimrod or self-important code boy, today the Cranky Product Manager is going to plug the following sites:

First,  the new PM Jobs email list. This email alias for Product Management and Product Marketing job postings only launched two weeks ago.  But wow! They have a ton of listings already. Over 115 job postings and 800 list members.  Membership and posting are free. Since perusing the listings of several sexy-sounding jobs, the Cranky PM's perpetually wandering eye has mutated into fervent new job lust. Check it out at http://finance. groups.yahoo. com/group/ pm_jobs/.

Second, It's that time of year.  Take Pragmatic Marketing's Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey before November 21. The CPM cannot WAIT until the results are published.  She'll use them to demand her boss give her a monster raise.

How to Get Hired By The Cranky Product Manager

After her last post, the Cranky Product Manager received a bevy of emails asking "given the recruiting process is a bore that yields lackluster results, how does a candidate rise above the process and snag the job?"

A fine question, Grasshopper.  Sit at the feet of the Cranky Product Manager and receive the wisdom she is about to bestow upon you. 

But first, understand that the Cranky Product Manager can only tell you what impresses her.  Others hiring PMs might be impressed by your deep baritone voice and your MBA (or lack thereof). They might "relate" while you wax poetically on the profound challenges of having responsibility without formal authority.  Whatever.

That said, there are lots of things a candidate could do to impress the Cranky Product Manager.  However, there is one tactic that is very rarely done, but really rocks her world.  When a candidate pulls this maneuver out and executes it flawlessly, well, it makes the Cranky Product Manager swoon. Her heart fills with new-hire lust. During tedious bug scrub meetings, her thoughts drift to fantasies of this rock star joining her team. Oh, how much easier life would be, if only Bobby Bubble would join DysfunctoSoft! Oh my god, I must hire him NOW.

The maneuver is called The PM Skillz Showcase.  Execute it as follows:

During the phone screen and the initial in-person meeting, YOU (the candidate) take the lead.  Interview the Cranky Product Manager about her requirements for the PM position. Just as you would interview a customer about his requirements for a product.  Uncover the "hidden" requirement. Unearth the "use cases" and the business results expected. Learn how the CPM convinced her boss to expand her team, etc. It means asking really good, probing questions, actually LISTENING very carefully to the responses, and verifying that you correctly understand throughout the conversation.

Toward the end of your time slot, summarize your understanding of The Cranky Product Manager's wants and needs and reasons for the position. Write the main points on the white board. (The ability to do a good chalk talk always impresses the CPM).  Make sure the CPM agrees to your summary of her situation and your analysis, and if not, refine it until she does.

Then, and only then, go through the list of requirements you have on the board and discuss your ability to meet each, with some examples from your past.  Point out the areas in which you are particularly strong. Show that you are a straight shooter by also discussing requirements that are not your strengths, where you are merely slightly better than average and not a true demigod, but why it will not be an issue.

Oh yeah, if you have a sales background, the Cranky Product Manager will be expecting you to try to "close" her at this point, but in a low-key way.  Even if you don't hail from Sales, the CPM is looking for some subtle "selling" as evidence of how helpful you'd be on sales calls.

Consider the interview a success if the CPM leaves your list of position requirements up on her board and judges all other candidates against it. Congratulations, you've helped her clarify in her own mind - in a HELPFUL way - what she is trying to accomplish by hiring someone new.  You've wowed her with your ability to build customer rapport, and your prowess in teasing out requirements, underlying business problems, and drivers.  You showed her your ability to synthesize detailed information and fit it into the bigger picture. You've shown you will be helpful on sales calls and not detrimental. And, by helping to define the requirements for the position, you've tilted the playing field in your favor.

Expect an offer* from the Cranky Product Manager within 4-5 months (see previous post about the ponderous "speed" of DysfunctoSoft's recruiting process). Unfortunately, the salary offer will be far too puny for someone of your caliber. Ah well.

*Provided, of course, that you have adequate technical, writing, presentation, marketing,and strategic analysis education and experience. And that you are well-mannered, not an egotistical ass, don't have a history of personality conflicts with developers, etc, etc....

Seeking Gems in a Sea of Manure

The Cranky Product Manager dislikes hiring people. DysfunctoSoft's entire recruiting process is a bore. And frustrating. And seemingly designed to ensure the hiring of the mediocre.* 

Each step, each phase, is pure tedium:

1) The crafting of dreary "this is a totally wicked awesome job and DysfunctoSoft is such a crazy FUN company that (get this!) we have a PING PONG table. And we feed you Costco pizza FOR FREE on Fridays! Wow! What perks! Pretty please apply!" job listings.

2) The tiresome meetings with headhunters who just can't seem to "get" that the Cranky Product Manager needs a local candidate and is not willing to interview wannabes in Singapore or Hyderabad.

3) The sifting through hundreds of cryptic resumes from incompetents, who all proudly list "Excellent Word, Excel, and Powerpoint skills" on their resume. Sweet Cheesus, the Cranky Product Manager certainly HOPES that applicants for an ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE PRODUCT MANAGEMENT position have some basic computer skills.  Why not also list that you know how to use a pencil and paper?  Or that you know that a chair is a cushion for your ass, not a pillow for your head?  That you know how to share, the names of all the animals, and how to wash your hands, like any good preschooler?

4) The phone screens.  These are usually very difficult for the Cranky PM since she is (i) a piss poor listener and would rather talk about herself constantly, and (ii) she sucks at understanding accents of all sorts, especially over the phone.

5) The breakfast interviews. This is when the CPM traditionally eliminates half the candidates because their basic table manners are so lacking that they would revolt and sicken any customer the candidate might meet.  Tips for candidates: Don't launch into a Web 2.0 diatribe with your mouth full of a semi-digested substance. Keep food - especially the creamy kinds - out of your skanky, smelly, overgrown beard or mustache. If you're a woman (or gay, or a metrosexual), don't try to bond with the CPM by yapping about SHOES (Seriously, what is that? Is the Cranky Product Manager the only woman in the world who gives not a s&*# about shoes?).  Wear some deoderant. Make some eye contact here and there. And don't CRUSH the Cranky Product Manager's wimpy little excuse for a hand with your iron-deathgrip-handshake.

6) And then the marathon multi-day interviews with every PM, PMM, and Dev Manager, Director and VP at DysfunctoSoft. After the CPM wrestles to set up a perfect interview agenda that accomodates all interviewers' completely inflexible schedules, without fail at least two VPs will bow out of the interviews at the very, very last minute. And of course, neither VP will have any availability for at least 2 weeks. But the CPM will not be allowed to hire anyone without the go-ahead of these individuals.  So, the process drags on and on over weeks. Meanwhile, good candidates are snapped up by other companies.

7) Then the offer letters and the salary negotiations. Why does HR take 10 days to generate a letter they no doubt have on file? Why does it not take 2 minutes?

8) And then, at long last, the only decent candidate rejects the offer. All because DysfunctoSoft's retarded payscales prohibit the Cranky Product Manager from making a competitive offer.  Apparently, HR thinks that having ping-pong table and free Friday pizza mean that it is okay to cap salaries at 10% lower than market.

Rinse. Lather. Repeat. And Repeat and Repeat and Repeat.

End result: the Cranky Product Manager ends up with a lack-luster hire who is not business savvy enough to realize he/she is majorly underpaid. Someone who has not researched the product manager market nor his/her own value within it. Fan-effing-tastic.

*Yes, the Cranky Product Manager realizes that she was originally recruited through the same process and is therefore probably mediocre herself.  Probably so. No denials here. Not only that, she's got a fat ass and piss-poor attitude.

The Value of an MBA in Product Management

Several months ago a marvelous question about the value of an MBA in Product Management was posted to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association email list. If you subscribe to this email list, you will no doubt lovingly recall the Cranky Product Manager's response, rehashed word for word, below. No doubt, it was the highlight of your inbox that week, and you forwarded it along to you mother in the form of a chain letter (i.e. "forward this to 10 people or your will most certainly overdraw your credit card balance").

Note: You are well within your rights to be disgusted by the CPM's shameless, lazy attempt to pass off an old email as a spankin' new blog post.  Feel free to rate her negatively on Yelp or eBay or something...

=======

Q: Is an MBA necessary to advance in Product Management to the Senior level, Director level, or beyond? Or can one compensate for the lack of a Masters with strong analytics and high-level strategy and presentation skills?

A: The Cranky Product Manager specializes in cynicism. Thus, her answer: it depends. It depends on whether your boss and boss's boss have MBAs.

If yes, then advancing your career will likely require this illustrious degree. If the big cheeses thought an underling could do an adequate job without forking over $100,000+ for the MBA designation, then you might force them to regret their own education investment. And we can't have that!  No sireee.

If your higher-ups don't have the degree, then they probably pride themselves on their own awesomitude: their innate, genetic business prowess - the kind of natural aptitude and raw talent that would only be hampered by book learning. This kind of uneducated boss regards the MBA as a huge waste of money and time, and MBA holders as ungifted, inexperienced, intuition-challenged, unimaginative  drones.

So, the Cranky Product Manager's advice to you: if you think the LEARNING will be worthwhile for you and will help you become a better product manager, then go for it. Because the piece of paper itself, etched with that marvelous "M.B.A." designation, does not yield any automatic benefits in software product management.  In management consulting and investment banking it does, but not in software.

Yours as a fountain of useful career guidance,

The Cranky Product Manager

A Day in the Life of the Cranky Product Manager

As an Internet icon and a member of the Technorati 100,000,000, the Cranky Product Manager receives hoards of email -- one or two messages a week, in fact. Whenever she can, the Cranky Product Manager tries to help out her readers, the fans that make her celebrity lifestyle possible.  For example, she recently received this message:

Dear Cranky Product Manager:
I just found your blog and really like it. I am a senior at Georgia Tech in computer science, and am hoping to work at a software company after graduation. Product management sounds like an interesting position. What is a typical day like for you?
-- Jack from Georgia Tech

Well, Jack, the Cranky Product Manager is glad to oblige. First, though, be aware that there is no truly "typical" day for the Cranky PM here at DysfunctoSoft. That is one of the "joys" of product management at such a fine company.  Every day is completely different, and at any one time you can expect there to be 50+ things on your to-do list.

That said, this is what her day was like yesterday:

5:45 am - Wake up.  Still in pajamas, stagger into home office and boot up laptop.  Drink coffee. Lots of coffee.

6:00 am - 7:30 am - Conference call with the marketing team in the Germany. Very difficult to stay awake on call. Endless discussion of campaigns and technical white papers they want the Cranky PM to write exclusively for the German market, because the German market is "very different" and has extremely "unique requirements."

7:30 am - 8:30 am - Conference call with Very Important Customer from the UK.  WebEx demo of the new features in the upcoming product release and get some feedback on the new features.  Try to act cheerful, not cranky.  This is very difficult.

8:30 am - 9:30 am - Shower, get dressed, drive to office. Get Peet's Coffee.

9:30 am - Arrive at office.  Before all the engineers.  They don't arrive until 10:30 or so. Slackers.

10:00 am - 11:30 am - Handle the 40 emails and 5 voice mails that arrived since 11 pm previous night. Lots of questions from PS consultants, sales engineers, customers, and customer support. All are about products, strategic direction, release schedules, and how to accomplish arcane technical tasks with the product.

11:30 - More coffee. But this time it's the swill from the break room.

11:30 am - 11:45 am - Start working on Powerpoint that the Cranky Product Manager will deliver at Sales Training next week, introducing the benefits and features of the upcoming product release.

11:45 am - 11:50 am -  The Training presentation needs to a quickie demo of the new product features, a demo that does not yet exist. The Cranky PM decides to create this demo. To do so, she attempts to install today's development build.

11:50 am - 12:00 pm -  Discover that this week's build is not available yet.  So, install last week's build. Thankfully, the QA Team's website claims that this build is good, and has passed all automated tests.

12:00 pm - 12:15 pm - Discover that while it installs, last week's build does not in fact work.  At all. What the #&$*?  Did the QA guys even TRY to boot it up? What did they do all week?  Track down Krishna, the  empire-building QA Manager. Why, Krishna, does your website claim last week's build passed when it doesn't even boot? Lame answer received: Oh, that's a bug with the website. The build hasn't worked in a while.

12:15 pm - 12:30 pm -  Track down Development Manager.  What is the latest build that actually works?  What do you mean, it's last Thursday's?  The Cranky PM tried that build and it sucked. Decide to wait a few hours to see if today's build finally shows up.

12:30 pm - 1:30 pm - Lunch with Director of Product Marketing.  Why does this guy always want to claim the DysfunctoSoft's products do shit they do not do nor were designed to do?  (It washes windows! It lowers your property taxes! It melts away the pounds!)  Try to focus him on the target market segment, the use cases and customer benefits we can offer in the near future.  He blathers some about how he can't focus on details like that because he's a "visionary."  Suppress urge to wring his neck right then and there.  Self-proclaimed Visionaries = loser (at least in the Cranky Product Manager's book).  Diffuse own temper by promising self to bitch about him on blog later.

1:30 pm - Back in office. Today's build is STILL not available. Grrr.  Try to develop an outline for the presentation anyway.

2:00 pm - Conference call with a Friendly Happy Customer. Interview her about a particular area of difficulty she's having, an area that the Cranky PM is considering for improvements in the next major release.  All is lovely until TWO DysfunctoSoft account reps join the call. Why TWO Droids joined, the Cranky Product Manager has no idea. She only notified Droid #1, whom the VP of Sales said owned the account.  Anyway, both droids are LATE for the call. PLUS each believes Friendly Happy Customer is HIS account. The droids start arguing in front of the customer.  All very unseemly. The customer is so disgusted she hangs up and then calls the Cranky PM at her desk to continue their little chat.  She says "Cranky Product Manager, we LOVE you, but we HATE your sales team. Tell your management we never want those sales people to call us again. From now on I want to deal with you only." The CPM is flattered, but fears for her schedule and stress level. Nevertheless, for five seconds she fantasizes about collecting the sales commission.

2:50 - Finish call with Friendly Happy Customer and leave voice mail for VP of Sales regarding the account manager escapades and the customer's ultimatum. Another problem the CPM must help solve, but is outside her real responsibilities.

2:58 - Today's build is finally available.  Except now the Cranky PM has no time to install it, as she'll be in meetings the next 3 hours.

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm - Meeting with product management team, to "officially" start planning for the next major release even though the current one isn't even limping yet.  Team argues the merits of top-down versus bottom-up planning for approximately the 100th time.

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm - Bug Scrub meeting. What joy. Similar to hammering nails into the palms of one's hands.  Try to Blackberry under the table while the QA Manager and Development Managers argue for the umpteenth time about the quality criteria for the release.

5:30 pm - 6:00 pm - Meet one-on-one with Development Manager for DysfunctoCrank, which is clearly way behind schedule for the next release.  Try to identify which pieces of functionality can be tossed out of the release (possibly never to return). Get indigestion at thought of telling Very Important Customers A and B, or at least their account teams, that their most desired features have been cut. Alas, it must be done.

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm - At last, install today's build.  Try to develop a good demo for Sales Training next week. Egad, the product is buggy. Lots of basic things don't work.  Start filing bugs.

7:00 pm - 7:10 pm - Notice that of the eight or so bugs the Cranky PM filed in the last hour, the Development Manager has already reclassified four of them as enhancements and has outright canceled two.

7:10 pm - 7:45 pm - Call the Development Manager at his home.  Argue about the bugs.  You can't just cancel everything that is not immediately reproducible. Some bugs only manifest sporadically. Get two of the "enhancements" reclassified back as bugs, and get the two cancelled bugs reinstated.

7:45 pm - 8:30 pm - At last, identify a scenario that might work as a demo - highlighting the new product features, works with a hypothetical but close-to-real-world business scenario, and avoids most of the products warts and broken bits of functionality.

8:30 pm - 10:30 pm - Drive home before Delightful Husband files for divorce.  Eat dinner, do bills, wash dishes, etc.  Run for 30 minutes on the treadmill -- a good stress relief technique.

10:30 pm - 12:00 am - Handle another 60 emails that came in during the day.  Most can be deleted, but some require responses.

12:00 am - Do a blog post. Try to sleep. But too much coffee throughout the day keep her up. Fantasize about that commission check again, even though she knows she'll never see a dollar of it. Remember that she forgot to bitch about "visionary" Product Marketing weenie on her blog.  Damn.

87 Cents on the Dollar

The Cranky Product Manager is not simply cranky today.  She is kinda pissed off, actually.  And feeling grossly underpaid. 

Witness the results of Pragmatic Marketing's 2006 Annual Product Management Salary Survey. On the brink of the year 2007, female product managers in the US and Canada only make 87 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make.  For the SAME JOB.

In the UK and Europe the situation is even more pathetic. Female product managers are only paid 82% of what their male counterparts are paid.

Even more disturbing, the situation seems to be getting worse over time. Over the 7 years that Pragmatic Marketing has conducted this survey, the percentage of female product managers has decreased and the pay gap is increased.

Don't believe the Cranky Product Manager? Check out the charts below.

So why is this happening?  The Cranky Product Manager wants to find out....  Her top-of-the-head hypotheses include the following:

• The women respondents skewed younger or less experienced than the male respondents?
• The women respondents tended to be less technical than the male respondents?
• The women respondents are in worse-paying industries than the male respondents?
• Sexism? (which might be increasing over time?)

The first three hypotheses could potentially be ruled out by slicing and dicing the raw survey data.

Pragmatic Marketing (Steve Johnson, you are my idol even though your blog is almost solely links to the content of others), the Cranky Product Manager would appreciate it if you would release some more analysis relative to the Product Management Gender Gap.

The Cranky Product Manager wants more women in the profession.  She is truly sick of being the only woman in the DysfunctoSoft Product Management group. She's tired of being referred to as a "woman product manager" as if it were a wacky novelty to be, well, such a BIZARRO thing.  She's fed up with DysfunctoSoft's newly hired engineers, especially those not raised in North America, automatically assuming she is a technical lightweight, the "Demo Dolly," or -- worse -- someone in HR.  Just because she is that stereotypically least technical of all creatures, The American Woman.

Truth is, the Cranky Product Manager is the most technical PM in her group. And back in the day, she'd code circles around your asses, beeyotches. Even though she looks like a supermodel.  (A supermodel with a fat ass, baggy eyes, and gray hair, that is...)

That "All the Responsibility and No Authority" Saying

"The most challenging thing about product management is that you have all the responsibility but none of the authority," the job candidate said. Quite satisfied with his answer to the Cranky Product Manager's stock interview question, the candidate flashed her a knowing, gleaming white smile. That was the signal. The Cranky Product Manager was supposed to epileptically shake her head in agreement and, at last, connect with the candidate.

No such luck. Instead, she rolled her eyes... violently. Very violently indeed, almost murderously so. Not the best manners for an interviewer, but seeing as the Cranky Product Manager is not exactly a, well, refined individual, she had no control over her response to his clichéd answer. The Cranky Product Manager already heard two other candidates spin the same old tired yarn that morning. In fact, she read a version of that I'm-a-powerless-product-manager-woe-is-me tale on at least one other blog that week (Product Beautiful, a great blog that the Cranky Product Manager recommends very highly, despite that one post).

But worse than trite, overused and unoriginal, this sentiment -- universally shared by the world's lamest and whiniest product managers, and even by some of the good ones -- is way too self-congratulatory and is just plain wrong.

Yes, as a product manager, you are indeed responsible.  Your job is to corral and coordinate the hoards of developers, testers, marketers, writers, sales folks, support engineers,  professional services staff, and more -- the entire cast of characters needed to successfully bring kick-ass products to market.

And, yes, as a product manager, it is true that you rarely have authority. No one (except maybe a few more junior product managers) reports to you. You can't fire people for not taking your orders.

But here's the thing... SO WHAT!?  So these people don't report to you. So they don't have to respect your au-thor-i-tah.  Big freakin' DEAL! If they DID report to you, do you honestly think your job would be any easier?  Do you think they'd magically start listening to you and doing what you say?

Last time the Cranky Product Manager checked, high tech product folk, no matter what their job functions, were not minimum wage workers. As intellect workers, high tech-ians don't do anything  just because their bosses command it. Nope. Those damn independent thinkers need to be persuaded. They need to buy into the plan and then they act. Sure, sure, those folks might occasionally placate the powers-that-be by half-heartedly lying there, closing their eyes, and thinking of England. But that kind of soulless attempt to merely get the boss off, uh, your back... well, it's usually worse than no attempt at all.

So, in this respect, those other "real" managers -- and by "real" I mean managers who officially manage people -- have just as tough a job as product managers. Probably tougher. People managers must ALSO corral and coordinate their people, and get them to do things that they wouldn't normally consider if left to their own devices. Like product managers, they legitimately do so ONLY by persuading and inspiring. NOT by fear nor the unspoken threat of bad performance reviews or firings. NOT by flexing their so-called "authority."

In fact, as someone experienced in both people and product management, let the Cranky Product Manager assure you that the only effective difference between a manager with "authority" and a manager without is that with authority comes a lot of tedious crap: paperwork galore, mind-numbing sexual harassment seminars, and -- most dishearteningly -- the occasional hell of laying off a subordinate who does a great job .

So, whiney product managers of the world, STOP bitching about "all the responsibility with none of the authority" right now. Get out of your minimum-wage-oriented headset and recognize that official authority is irrelevant to anyone in high tech companies. Instead consider, even if briefly, that your difficulty in getting others to follow your lead might be because your arguments are not compelling.

Or maybe, just maybe, they don't listen because they know you think of them as minions who are motivated by fear. In other words, maybe you're a jerk.

Why the Cranky Product Manager Really (Honestly) Loves Product Management

Today is a rare day. A day where the Cranky Product Manager is actually not that cranky.  Even though she is yet again hunkered down in a hotel plagued with problems, such as broken Internet access, poor television reception, and random hotel staff barging into her room in the middle of the night.  Even these trials cannot dampen her mood today.

Your interest is piqued, is it not? Why, you ask, is the Cranky Product Manager -- dare she utter the word? -- "happy"? 

Well, it might be the jolt from her venti non-fat sugar-free vanilla latte with two extra shots, or perhaps it is just the afterglow from reading the riotous Fake Steve Jobs blog. But she thinks it's really because she is now in possession of that most rare of creatures, that perpetually elusive beast: a good build.

More specifically, a good build of the next major release of the product suite.

A good build where she can at last see the ideas and hard work from the last two years brought to fruition. 

A good build that lets her do live, unstructured demos to customers, all without fearing that the next keystroke will pop up a null pointer exception. The thought of not needing to repeat over and over and over, "Well, this is a pre-production build, so we're still working out a few kinks!"... why, it gives the Cranky PM goosebumps and threatens to make the outside corners of her mouth turn upward!

A good build that lets her feel proud instead of ashamed; where customers and prospects say "that's SO cool," "this is EXACTLY what we need," and "when is this going to be released, because I want to buy it NOW."

The joy, the pride, the nirvana of a good build! How sweet it is, and how ephemeral! If history is any indication, tomorrow something will break in attempt to remedy something perceived as more serious. But... perhaps, PERHAPS... (indulge the Cranky Product Manager and let her dream, since she is -- after all -- permanently cranky) all builds from this moment forward will be even more awesome, even more kick-ass, able to truly solve the market's most pressing problems, and capable of utterly decimating the competition!

Well, WOW. Just WOW. 

Maybe, just maybe, all the hard work will be worth it.

The Cranky Product Manager has only experienced six or seven such blissful "good build of a really important release" days in her entire life. The euphoria is always too short-lived and ultimately fleeting. Nevertheless, the Cranky PM looks back on those rapturous memories, longingly, early every day of her professional life. Those recollections have thus far never failed to keep her in the profession for yet another go-round. To date, they have always renewed her aspiration of solving  real problems of real people with technology, and her dream of one day working on a tech product that just might change the world.

Days like today make the Cranky Product Manager glad and proud to be a product manager... incompetents, jackasses, harlots, and effed-up processes be damned.

Tomorrow, we will return to our regularly scheduled cynical programming...