TBM 289: The Boring Product Manifesto

Guess what? Product can be just a job—a fun job, a rewarding job, but ultimately a rather uneventful and drama-free (for the most part) job.

This might come as a surprise, given the Sturm und Drang in the industry right now. I stumbled on Mike Long's post about a recent panel discussion, and I swear we're actors in a perverse Machevelian simulation. There is angst, hot takes, life or death, do or die, resistance vs. resilience, adapt/transform or become irrelevant, weakness vs. courage, heroes and villains, and best and rest. 

WTF is going on? It is coming from somewhere, right? Are we caught in a global moment prison? The number of Simon Sinek reposts is reaching a fever pitch, so there must be a disruption in the force.

Here's my theory. In almost any job, there's a bit of overlap between the macro environment, corporate machinations, and the fairly straightforward (but challenging in its own right) job of doing good work. It looks like this:

But in our current reality, things are all mashed together, intertwined, and in your/our face:

This is a shame because making useful, usable, and viable products is kind of straightforward. Identify and connect with customers. Unravel what they're willing to exchange money/time for. Design and develop. Monitor your progress. Tend to the health and aspirations of your team. Rinse and repeat. Yes, this takes competency, but it is directed competency. If you want to tackle climate change, PLEASE go for it—that’s a truly wicked problem. Your average B2B CRUD application or OpenAI front-end is not that complex.

I’m talking about the good kind of boring, where most of your brain power goes to your work. You don't need to be a combination of Oprah Winfrey, Stanley McChrystal, an F1 driver, Indra Nooyi, the Dali Lama, and Marcus Aurelius to turn some code into something someone will pay for and enjoy.

I know this is a privileged view because people's careers are being turned upside down, and we're all being dragged into some sort of weird tech-utopian, libertarian cosplay. The shit is heavy! There are reasons why the panel played out that way. So, I'm not trying to discount the anxiety—see my post, Professional Everything Everywhere All at Once, where I advocate for kindness and understanding.

In fact, “Don’t be dramatic!” and “Back to basics!” is its own form of gaslighting. That’s not my intent.

But I wanted to remind people that when things are working, things can be simpler. They need to be because that's the only way you'll get anything done. Try to remember back to the times in your career when you had tempo, focus, and psychological safety, and while the work was hard, you made reasonable progress.

You show up and do your thing as a team, with minimal overlap between all the normal corporate machinations and the work you must do. You’re making a thing. You get to work with a group of quirky, fun, diverse people. Your boss deals with some BS, but makes sure the team has the support it needs.

Do a good job.

That's what transformation should be about, not this epic hero's journey stuff.

Boring is OK.

Transform to boring.