Sanity Check

Times are rough, and we all need a laugh.

I don’t know about you, but being in product management (and tech, or even life, in general) these days can be rather tough. In a future post I’ll talk about the damage Marty Cagan is doing to our profession, but for this week I just want to leave you with some funny stuff to make you smile.

(As always, if you are struggling with your PM practice, please reach out! We can talk about it, and how the real world of product management differs from what you might have been expecting).

It seems like whenever you post something heavy, thoughtful, insightful, and meaningful on social media, you get a few likes and comments. However, it’s once you (re-)post a silly meme that things explode. I’ll take it, without a big stretch of the imagination, that people need a good laugh in order to survive their day. This post is dedicated to resources that are consistently good at making light of our profession. Those funny-because-it’s-true cartoon usually have deep insights of their own, but I’ll leave it with you how deep you want to go.

First, a recent random meme I posted on LinkedIn. It should make anyone working on tech products laugh…

This is just a warm up. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, just run an image for “Product Management memes”. You’ll find anything from Dilbert to the Mona Lisa, as well as the classic What I Actually Do and Product Backlogs. I’ve certainly used these in Slack replies and Friday-afternoon presentations, and I’ll forgive you if you go and open them and (but in a new tab — it’s a deep rabbit hole, and we’re done here yet!)

With that bit of randomness out of the way, there are two cartoonists I follow pretty regularly that deserve more notice for their deep understanding and critique of modern workplaces, particularly in tech.

First in Tom Fishburne, from Marketoonist. Leaning a bit more towards the (product) marketing side, he nonetheless deftly illustrates the insanity of modern corporates.

Typical user research, according to marketoonist.com

One of his cartoons, the Seven Deadly Sins of Innovation, was an inspiration for a blog post all of its own. There are many other insightful cartoons in his archives, so I suggest browsing.

I‘ve written about the AI hype-cycle, which coincidentally used another of Fishburne’s cartoons

Which phase of life is your product? The adoption curve changes things!

---

The next suggestion is

Work Chronicles

here on Substack. I’m subscribed for a daily dose of — often painful — fun that arrives in my mailbox. Below are some recent good ones that I’m sure will elicit groans of sympathy, and I strongly recommend you subscribe as well.

How many times have you heard about being “data driven”, without access to proper data?

It’s all about asking the right kind of questions… the ones with easy answers.

Ye olde P1-P2-P3 priority system.

See above about being “data driven.” You can prove anything with statistics.

Every. Single. Startup. (And, come to think of it, corporate).

---

Hope you had fun! Keep smiling, because sometimes laughing is the only thing you can do about the absurdities of real corporate workplaces.

And, again, if you’re struggling beyond what a haha comic can fix, please reach out! Burnout is real, is sneaky, and it’s debilitating. We can talk though anything.