The ongoing farce our industry is inflicting on itself with "AI" reminds me of Oracle databases of the 1990s and early 2000s:

- a spectacularly inefficient and buggy data architecture
- ridiculously expensive
- a resource hog
- beyond buggy
- structurally hard to debug
- fundamentally not solving any of the right problems
- but "safe" in the eyes of markets and decision makers because "everyone else is doing it"

One of the earliest PM-ing I did that made a phase-shifting difference was solving the real reason we were killing ourselves with Oracle nonsense.

I'm not looking forward to doing the same when the masks finally fall on this latest round of con-artistry.

#Software #ProductManagement #AI #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

Many people are out here on these streets are making the extraordinary claim that adding glorified chatbots (literal "automated bullshit generators" using the philosophical definition of bullshit *) to every random product, app, website, object, organisation, process, and more will help people better understand the world, know things, and therefore take efficient and effective actions.

While we can assume there is a heavy dose of marketing insincerity and follow-the-crowd-leadership behind most of these claims, like with any grifter-driven hype cycle, at least some people do sincerely seem to believe glorified chatbots are really going to help their victims to access knowledge.

For this last group, I have to wonder if people are aware of and have considered the philosophical definition of what "knowledge" is? Knowledge is a justified true belief, with all three elements being crucial. [🧵 1/2]

#Software #ProductManagement #AI #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

* Thanks to Alan Blackwell's short article (https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit) for this:

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his classic text On Bullshit, explains that the bullshitter “does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does […] He pays no attention to it at all.”

Amongst other things this must-read piece is an excellent breakdown of the disgusting ghoulishness of the TESCREAList cult grifters' "vision" for how they will further enshittify and colonize our world.

150 years ago, these would have been the same people scamming grieving family members out of their life savings with traumatising fake shows of "contacting" "the other side".

Everyone working in the so-called #GenAI space should be deeply ashamed of what they are doing.

Unfortunately because this well-financed minority lack any semblance of normal shame, we must all waste our time fighting, damage controlling, working around, reducing harms, caring for & mourning the victims, and finding ways to live despite the harms their awful toys and "visions" are creating everywhere they are allowed to spread.

https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/memento-mori-kneese

#Software #ProductManagement #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

"I can't see the chat because I'm presenting", "I can't see hands up because I'm presenting", etc.

Depending on how you define the start date, we are now at the end of year four, or already into year five, of a global pandemic where we all had to learn how to handle remote meetings if we weren't already doing that before.

So why do we keep hearing this nonsense from people whose job includes key requirements of being excellent at meetings and presentations?

A key part of managers' and sales people' job is to read the room, to listen, to watch, to respond, and to adapt to their teams and their customers.

How is it acceptable to be this embarrassingly incompetent at the basics of your job? How is it acceptable to publicly repeatedly refuse to do a few minutes of learning to handle the basic tools of your job?

And then afterwards many of the same people turn around and absurdly cherry-pick data to claim only work in noisy highly distracting unventilated locations after exhausting travel is productive. [1/2]

#Software #ProductManagement #Inclusion #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

Today is World Mental Health Day and you just don’t know. You don’t know what those around you are living with.

To illustrate the point, here is something you likely would never have guessed about me.

Read here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-just-dont-know-fennel-aurora/

Or as a 🧵 below 👇🏻

#WorldMentalHealthDay #ProductManagement #Software #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

For me product management, fighting for social justice, and mutual aid are all fundamentally the same practice, at least when done right.

All three are a constant "no" in the face of the tyranny of low expectations.

All three are a refusal to settle for the voices who insist we must just put up with the obviously inadequate and obviously changeable world as it is.

All three seek to bring relief to those most in need even in the smallest of ways, while never forgetting the much larger end goals of full relief.

All three are a discipline of hope.

This question could be written about any of the three:

"sure we could improve things slightly but what if we just counted on institutional inertia and the individual human capacity to adapt to misery such that all hopeful possibilities died unimagined and the hearts of our young hardened into something resembling the stones of peaches" - Pat Blanchfield

#Sofware #ProductManagement #Cybersecurity #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

Three sporting events, two very recent & one very old, have me thinking about the organizations I'm a part of and my role in them.

Read here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/football-chess-software-fennel-aurora/

Or as a 🧵 below 👇🏻

#Software #ProductManagement #Inclusion #ItsNotAPipelineProblem #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement

This is a beautiful bit of data-enabled communication: https://viewports.fyi/

Despite so many product managers and execs chasing after the fictional Apple model of "we in our infinite genius wisdom thought of something all by ourselves that's so good everyone wants exactly this and only this" that has poisoned so much of the business world, the world does not work like that.

The world has never worked like that.

Have you been outside??

Testing and optimising to a few "main" user cases just doesn't work as an approach, flexibility to the vast variety of how people do things is always needed.

Yes, of course we can continue to pretend there is one "normal" type of user who makes up the majority we made up in our heads, and who by great chance happens to be remarkably like the person in the mirror.

And by pretending this, we can continue to force the real majority of people to deal with minor and major annoyances and harms every single day.

Or we could take the real world into account and build things that assume everyone is as wondrously different as we all are, and let people live as themselves.

I know which approach I will continue prioritizing. 🤷🏻‍♂️🙃

#ProductManagement #Software #EmbarrassmentDrivenProductManagement