Introducing: H3ATHER in Tech - Adventures of a Product SH3PHERD
Welcome! Come on in!
Meet Tank, Rocket & Thor my three favorite coworkers. They don't actually do any real work, but they do provide me with a good reason to actually get up from my desk during the day, walk around, stretch, and take a short mental break, which is important. I'm the type of person who can get so lost in work that I'll even put off getting up to pee until I absolutely can't stand it (which is a really bad habit, especially if you want to avoid wearing diapers in old age).
Tank, Rocket & Thor are Shiloh Shepherds. If you google "Shiloh Shepherd" Tank actually shows up as the first picture in an image search, and Rocket shows up in the top 10.
I won't bore you with the history of Shiloh Shepherds, but you can see that they are related to GSDs. Anyway, Tank's full name is Gen. Ulysses S Grant and Rocket's full name is Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who are two of the Union generals who won the Battle of Shiloh. I couldn't bring myself to naming Thor after Sherman, who was the other Union general because he was a horrible human being (just Google the words "general sherman native americans" and you'll get the gist), so Thor's full name is Capt. Ambrose Bierce who is a famous person who fought in the Battle of Shiloh (and if you were ever forced to read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or watched the movie short, you've heard of him). Yes I am a big dork. I'm an even bigger dork because their nicknames are Tankasaur, VelociRocket, and MosaThor.
When I created my personal brand logo I wanted to pay homage to the mutts, and I got the idea of incorporating a shepherd in the logo, and so that's how the H3ATHER in Tech logo was born. If you look closely, the dot over the"i" is actually a ball sitting at the shepherd's footses (or I guess the more technical term would be "pawses"). As a side note, AI image creation tools are still just "OK" these days, especially with graphics. It took A LOT of tweaking and time to generate that shepherd image.
After all of that, I made it a personal challenge to incorporate my pups anywhere I could on my site. It started with my 404 page. That's Tank looking sad and pitiful, probably because he wants to go outside.
Coming up with a blog name is hard.
When I got around to starting my blog, I needed to come up with a good name. Tying it into the doggo theme didn't occur to me initially so I used ChatGPT at first and it came up with a bunch of craptastic suggestions.
The only passable suggestion was "The Product Whisperer" but I'm sure that was probably taken and it's also kind of trite.
But then it occurred to me that product management is a lot like herding cats. If you are unfamiliar with the origin of that term (or at least the origin of the term's mainstream popularity), it was from a Super Bowl XXXIV commercial in 2000 for EDS, which was an IT consulting company. This was back when tech companies were throwing money at everything and everyone and trying to outdo each other with the best Super Bowl ads. It was also the year I became a product manager for the first time (see my second blog post for the origin story of my product management career).
It was only after I considered naming my blog "The cat herder" that I realized that the perfect name was staring me right in the face...
... and so, "The Product SH3PHERD" was born.
A lot of people will tell you that product managers are like the "CEO" of their product, but that makes it sound like they spend their time strategerizing and then decreeing their strategy down to the masses with trumpets and elaborate hand gestures followed by a mic drop, which is the signal to said masses to scurry away and immediately start executing. (If you happen to be reading this and you are an actual CEO, don't @ me; I'm being hyperbolic. <cough>probably</cough>) However, the real role of a product manager is to create a strategy, map out a path to get there, get everyone to agree on where you're going and how you're going to get there, and shepherd everyone along that path so that everyone arrives at each waypoint along their journey together and on time. This means setting those waypoints, removing obstacles, and minimizing diversions along the way, all the while making sure everyone is traveling together at the same pace, without leaving anyone behind.
So based on all of that ⬆⬆⬆, "Product Shepherd" is a much better title than "Product Manager", eh? That term also illustrates the love most product managers have for their products and product teams. Shepherd dogs will risk their lives defending their flock. I can't say that I would ever risk my life for my product, but I have absolutely risked my job to protect my product and product team. A great product manager will internalize her product, lead with conviction, mitigate distractions, and fight to move forward and stay the course.
Shepherds aren't just needed in product.
This concept that tech companies need shepherds instead of leaders isn't just reserved for product management. It translates across all departments and all management levels, especially in a start-up environment. This is why I named my tech consulting company SH3PHERD. But this isn't (just) a shameless plug for my consulting services. This is to provide insight into how I think about things and highlight the fact that this blog isn't just about product management, even though that will definitely be a focus. It's a blog about my thoughts on and observations of the software biz as a whole, what the industry needs (hint: AI is included, but it's not the deus ex machina that everyone seems to think it is), and perhaps more importantly - what needs to fundamentally change.
I find it incredibly ironic that the industry whose entire purposes is to effect change is the slowest to embrace change.
So how do we fix this?
I've got a bazillion ideas crammed all up in my crowded brain just itching to bust their way out. And that's why I created this blog.