Frittering away the time with an experiment
All experiments involving donuts are worth doing, so here's one you might try. Tomorrow, bring a box of donuts to work, and leave them in the kitchen. At the end of the day, go back to the kitchen and count the number of donuts that people have taken.

Next week, pick a meeting-filled day, and bring a new box of donuts to all of them. Don't leave the donuts in the kitchen--the point is to keep it visible at all times. At the end of the day, count the number of donuts consumed.

Chances are that the number of donuts consumed in Week One is greater than the number consumed in Week Two, for an obvious reason. People behave differently when they are observed. We like the donuts, but we don't like being seen taking a donut (Homer Simpson excluded).

I've been enjoying Christopher Cumming's product management blog, Product Management Meets Popular Culture. His most recent post, "Product Managers: Can You Reject Narcissism?" deserves special attention.

Most product management aficianados opine, at some point, about the importance of product passion. You need to love your product. You need to embrace it, nurture it, defend it, extol its virtues to other people. If your product fails, maybe you didn't believe in it enough. (You probably killed Tinkerbell, too, you unfeeling bastard.) If the product succeeds, you can bask in the afterglow, and then maybe have a cigarette.

If that sounds a little creepy, maybe it's worth re-evaluating your relationship with your product. I'm exaggerating for effect, but that's only because the word "passion" is vague, and exhortations to have product passion often sound pretty overheated.

I'm growing fond of Twitter, particularly since it's a great tool for overhearing what's on the minds of people involved in a particular line of work--including, oh, say, product management. This morning, I followed a Twitter-posted link to Brian Lawley's "Product Management Manifesto." If future historians wanted to learn about the product management profession, both the good and the bad, the Manifesto might be a key piece of evidence.

That's not a good thing. The "Manifesto" may reflect the current state of product management, but it's a bad manifesto.

What Is And Isn't A Manifesto

For people reading this blog, the word manifesto probably conjures up two main examples, Agile and Communist. In both cases, the manifesto is intended to be a plan for collective action. Today, we follow a long-term development plan. Tomorrow, we start using a more adaptive process. Today, we work on the assembly and hope our lives will improve will get better. Tomorrow, we march on the factory owner's office, or the tsar's Winter Palace.

The "Product Management Manifesto" is really a personal oath. Statements like, "I refuse to settle for mediocrity," or, "I believe that Product Management is one of the toughest, yet most rewarding jobs in the world," sound more like personal statements of dedication, bordering on professions of belief.

Here's some text excerpted from some other oaths, just to drive home the point further:

As I said in my last post, different types of product management books serve different needs. Rich Mironov's The Art Of Product Management doesn't aspire to be a detailed reference manual. Instead, it provides quick, vivid snapshots of the challenges that product managers face on a day-to-day basis.

At least, it's one version of product management. To continue the Band Of Brothers analogy from my last post, you might not be a paratrooper, but if you're in the Army, you may learn quite a lot about the job of being another type of infantryman from the story of the 101st Airborne in
Normandy.