What is this?

I’ll be completely honest here - I’m not really expecting anyone else to read this. If you are, allow me to explain.

A bit over five years ago, I started my first ‘real’ job at a software firm in London at the very bottom of the ladder - entry level tech support. The pace and volume of the work was relentless, and over the next five years I worked harder than I ever thought I could. During that time I came to run first a sub-team of 5-10 people, and then the entire support function, and I would have to ask HR to tell you when exactly that happened. It was something of a shock when, in December of last year, I found myself taking days away from the maelstrom of client requests and discovered that I had somehow also had three children, turned 30, and bought a house (the repeated, repetitive, repeating lockdowns also don’t do one’s temporal gland any favours).

The reason for this is that I had finally been moved sideways out of the helldesk and into a Product Manager position. As I started breaking down my little empire and handing over my darlings to my successors, I found myself reflecting on the mistakes and successes of my time in Support, and, most importantly, how to tell the difference between these.

One nasty habit I have definitely picked up is the knack of ‘spinning’ events to my advantage - pushing a post-hoc narrative that justifies poor choices or mistakes - a trait of self-preservation from my early years in the company when senior management was much more office-political. Looking back, there are definitely times in which I compounded errors or avoided a public course-correction because it would have been politically damaging to do so, for me or or for my team.

I’ve also found a number of cases in which I took far to long to properly consider problems - there are many, many issues that I could have ‘fixed’ or at least improved much earlier than I did, simply because I never took the time to think about them in depth until some crisis occurred.

In short, I’ve become much more aware of my biases and general human mental failings over the last year, and I want to actively work to improve on this as I go forward into a new role which is almost entirely about thinking in the right way. I’m not a particularly great writer and I’m not entirely sure how well writing helps me reach conclusions - from experience talking ‘at’ people seems to be the fastest way for me to realise when I’m getting things wrong (rubber ducks just aren’t the same…) - but I have found times where being able to review my thinking in the past has helped me move forward, and so that’s what I want to do here. I’ll document my progress in product management, explore the issues I face, and describe solutions I’ve found. Hopefully others can learn from my mistakes.