Hello, world!

The brief story behind this Substack

It’s good to have you here! No, really.

When I started working on data products (and discovered that ‘product management’ was a thing a few months later), I found my impostor syndrome tamed: My role was by design not that of a technical expert, but rather that of a generalist who speaks the language of their customers and champions their needs. Neat!

Impostor, or just an outsider?

But then, as I started reading up on product management, and even take a couple of courses, I found that impostor syndrome peak up again: Why am I not able to relate to so many parts of what these PMs are talking about? What A/B testing can I do on a 20-user product? And ship something with half-broken data to an enterprise client or internal team? No way. Why can’t I find anything about the challenges I am actually facing? It was both demoralising and frustrating at the same time. I was used to googling my problems!

Fast forward a couple years ago, and I realised that while I’d worked as a product manager, I was not alone in finding the learnings of PMs from big tech and B2C apps only somewhat relevant. I read Building Products for the Enterprise, a great book which helped me appreciate some key differences between the products I’d worked on and those most PMs wrote about. Still, more questions were left unanswered, and I figured them out through a mixture of luck, learning from my technical teammates, and casting a wider net to learn about data modelling, architecture, and data and software engineering.

So why write about data product management?

Fast forward once more, to today (or, well, a few months ago): I realised that the lack of content that could help me get to the answers I was after quicker (or at least validate my thinking) means there is an opportunity for me to share the lessons I’ve learned. These are lessons that since then sometimes feel trivial, or obvious, either because I’ve internalised them so much in the last couple of years, or because they’ve come from my past lives as a data analyst, management consultant, and (non-data) product manager.

To get started, here’s my first post on the subject of productisation. Yep, that’s not a typo, I don’t mean productionisation (or ‘productionalization’, if you must). There’s thousands of pieces on the latter, but almost nothing on the former - especially stuff that I could make use of as I found the ‘data products’ I entered orgs to help manage to not actually be, well, products.

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