It’s a long story…
Also, we launched today.
We’re finally getting a bit of summer here, so we spent the weekend on the beach.
Tonight we’re going to a restaurant called ‘Summit‘ which apparently rotates: “Revolving one metre per minute, the Summit has travelled the equivalent of two times the earth’s circumference and is the world’s largest revolving restaurant. On a clear day you can see for 80 kilometres, which is as close to “forever” as the curvature of the earth allows.”
We went to Tetsuya’s, considered one of the best restaurants in the world, for lunch yesterday. Our timing could have been better - downtown Sydney was celebrating Mardi Gras and it was a madhouse - but that’s what happens when you have to make bookings months in advance. Nicole has a nice review of it here.
The oysters arrived pre-dosed with mignonette and sprinkled with the tiniest chive “micro-dust.” I cannot imagine how man or machine could produce this volume of impossibly miniscule but impressively consistent cross-cut snipped chives. I admire that kind of insane dedication.
the curiously circuitous route to product management
Published February 28th, 2008 in Uncategorized. ClosedThis is one of those ridiculously long blog posts that is only interesting to the author and perhaps his parents. Readers are urged to skip past this post unless they have an usual level of interest in a) the author, b) product management, or c) killing time.
I find myself spending an equal amount of time in MS Excel and Adobe Photoshop. Non-software people can interpret this to mean that I spend half my time in spreadsheets (numbers and formulas) and half my time in image manipulation (inventing and modifying pictures and screenshots). This is only interesting because I don’t really know many people who would be happy doing both of these things - but I love them both.
Let’s digress. I started my professional life, as well as I can define it, working for a newspaper in Louisiana. I was the Entertainment Editor, which meant both writing the articles and doing all the graphic design. I spent most of this time attending concerts for free and then writing about them for pay. Not a bad gig. I should have stuck with that. Anyway, I spent a couple of years partying and learning Photoshop.
Curiously enough, my English/Poli-Sci degree didn’t really help the job search, but my experience in graphic design meant I could earn an honest living as a graphic artist, which paid my way out to Colorado. Once I got out to Colorado, I leveraged those skills to get into a IT Manager / Graphic Designer position, which finally resulted into me heading towards an MBA. The MBA was supposed to be in IT - the school killed that program a semester in, but I had already started to love Finance.
Finance is one of those things that is best to love from afar. The theory and application of pure finance is what business is all about, from my perspective. The reality, I came to learn after a few years at it, is that finance is buried below all the pure crappiness of accounting, review, and just pure inane tediousness. Add to this the fact that with recent SOX-related legislation, my intended career path of CFO could quite easily result in jail time if any number of things just barely within my realm of control went sour, meant that finance was not the life for me.
Luckily, by the time I was realizing that, product management had already sought me out. I had spent time at Apple, doing pure finance in a corporate environment, and it wasn’t my thing. I do love the bootstrapping environment of small company evolution, and Apple was already well beyond that. Luckily, at PGP, I was able to move into a mix of operations, finance, and product management, that well suited my temperament. However, I had moved away from any sort of creative application, which I desperately missed.
When I moved to Atlassian, my role was for a long time very similar to what I had done at PGP - bootstrapping, operational, what’s required to get project X from theory to reality. And I really enjoyed and (i hope) excelled at that role. But more recently, I’m finding myself defining the product roadmap for our newest product, JIRA Studio, not just from an operational what-can-we-get-done standpoint but also from a visionary what-could-this-product-be long term vantage point, which means lots of time mocking up screenshots and user interactions purely in Photoshop and whatever other graphics tools are available to me. Add to this the dynamic of the operational side of solving the immensely difficult task of delivering this product in a hosted model, as well as the financial aspects of hosted costing, optimal pricing, etc., and all of a sudden I am using skills learned from basically every job I’ve ever had - from graphic design at a newspaper to marketing at a flashlight accessories company to finance at Apple - as one of my newest bosses said the other morning at breakfast, I’ve spent my entire career preparing for this job.
And I can’t be happier about that. Product management is one of those roles that I firmly believe only odd-balls excel at - and I’m starting to believe I’m one of those odd-balls. We’ll see how it goes, but right now, I’m loving this job.
The writer’s strike has left our household with a dearth of passive recreation, and we’ve found ourselves playing scrabble and reading a lot more lately. Where once I was consistently hitting our 60gb month download limit (which is pretty much 100% TV shows), now I’m hovering 5% on the average, and only doing that because I’m downloading old shows like Arrested Development and MST3K.
On the flip side, we’ve seen some amazing movies lately. We went and watched There Will Be Blood yesterday, and I was just absolutely blown away by it. The performance of Daniel Day-Lewis is superlative, one of the best of our generation. The construction of the movie is flawless: from the visuals to Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s twisted, incongruous, and perfect soundtrack, the movie hits you like a hammer. I was absolutely transfixed. Day-Lewis should get the Oscar for this.
Along the same lines, we went and saw No Country for Old Men the other day, the latest effort from the Cohen brothers. Where There…Blood is different and new, No Country for Old Men adds the element of purely strange. As with most of the Cohen boy’s movies, those expecting a typical arc and tidy resolution will be disappointed, but I loved it.
Old Men is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, who won last year’s Pulitzer for The Road, which I picked up and started reading pretty much immediately after seeing Old Men. McCarthy is like a Stephen King for grown-ups; his postapocalyptic, burned America is far more disturbing than the Clown from IT. When I started the book, I was expecting weird; I was unprepared for the Pynchon-level brilliance with which he wields the written word. McCarthy spends much of his time discussing the end of humanity with some of the world’s smartest physicists and thinkers at the Santa Fe Institute, and the intelligence and realism with which his devastated landscape is described make it seem less of a novel and more of an inevitability.
Another great movie: Juno. But Nicole has done a far better job of describing that one here.
