The Hangover

Well, I went too hard. It's just been one of those months. Work got even more hectic, I was giddy from playing with all these new tools, and I found myself short of breath rather than taking a breather at the end of the day. As I've been writing this I've realized this feels like a common part of the adoption cycle.

Elision between "can" and "should" is hardly novel—I spend a not-insignificant amount of my working life helping people think through that very distinction—and I still ended up going home to build six different things over the course of a weekend.

But I'm trying to give myself some grace. The rush of new stuff is real. (And it's not like I have nothing to show for it: a new website I'm really enjoying writing in, tools I'm already using at work, and some fun toys to fiddle with.) But when I really hit a wall at the end of last week I found myself interrogating a lot of the choices I'd made.

In a way I guess it's funny: I walked straight off the very cliff I've been warning everybody about with these tools. It's easy to just... make a lot of stuff. (Hell, I even linked out to a big thread on this a month ago.) I guess the part I hadn't anticipated was that I might actually like quite a lot of it? I'm only human, after all.

Last month I hit the two-year mark at work. It's my first proper client-side role, I'm part of product rather than marketing, and it's been a while since I've stayed in one place this long. So it's prompted some reflection. I don't have anything grand to say: work is work, stuff happens. But it's meaningful and I'm really humbled to work with some great people.

I recently realized that Paul Ford and Rich Ziade started another podcast and I've been enjoying some thoughtful discussion of what AI's doing to us and the industry. This episode in particular hit on the uneasiness of everybody suddenly being able to kinda do each others' jobs. While I'm not part of the traditional product triad, I am very much sitting in the middle of it as an experimentation specialist. So what happens when I start encroaching on the triad's roles?

Because that's kind of how I'm trying to think through some of the stuff I've built in the last month. There are parts of these roles I've always dipped into and a lot of the value I bring to work is being able to pinch-hit in a lot of different roles. But officially I've always been an analyst, data scientist, or experimenter.

Lukas Vermeer gave a great talk at the conference known as Experimentation Island this year about the "jester's plight" of speaking truth to power while lacking the authority to wield it. (i.e. As evidence-based practitioners we're supposed to be able to name inconvenient truths for leaders, but we're ultimately insulated from the decisions being made.) Which is all a very roundabout way of saying it's both exhilarating and terrifying to be sitting on the throne of my org of one.

These are good muscles to be working and I'm just glad to be excited about my discipline again. I'm dipping into product planning, thinking about journey maps, and catching up on development best practices. As I've said around the internet for ages, I like making things. I just also happen to want those things to be good.

Andrew Neyer designed one of my very favorite things and when I read his Manifesto™ I slammed the ol' add-to-cart button. The distinction between "junk" and "stuff" is a good one and it's been one I've come back to again and again.¹ So I'm going to be practicing how I make stuff. Not junk. (Hopefully.)