Reduce Positivity, Embrace Embarrassment

There is a lot of social pressure to be positive. Pressure to emphasize the bright side of everything, and to publicly show happiness, both inside and outside work. However, different people have different ways of thinking and different needs. Many people appear to need positivity to maintain their equilibrium and motivation, but it also tends to leave people in a fantasy bubble where real problems grow out of sight until they blow up in our faces.

This positivity pressure applies everywhere in corporate life, and of course that includes software product development. The impact even goes down to the level of ticket management approaches, where there is a common expectation to hide the long tail of absolutely wanted functionality and fixes because we know as product managers we don't have the development bandwidth to handle them in a reasonable timeframe:

Whether old tickets are closed by bots automatically, or by us as product managers doing so manually in backlog reviews, this is an institutional way of hiding the scale of the real problems we face. It is a part of the enforced positivity cult(ure) that often comes back to bite us where it hurts.

"And yet, it still moves" - as Galileo Galilei allegedly said after being forced, under threat of being murdered, to lie - to lie that the Earth was stationary with the sun and other celestial bodies orbiting us.

Closing tickets doesn't make our problems go away. Closing tickets doesn't change real problems, it just temporarily hides them. A user still suffers, even if they gave up trying to make us see it as a priority. Our product still sucks, even if we don't have the money, the people, and the time needed to make it suck less.

If we were actually allowed to be honest with ourselves, product managers would only close tickets when a fix or feature is done, or if we actually disagree with the problem being stated. That is not what happens.

If we're not bathing in the shame and embarrassment every single day of everything wrong with our products, why are we even product managers in the first place? Yes, this question is partially tongue-in-cheek, but I will never understand a product manager who is genuinely proud of their products.

If I ever stop hating my products, it's time to retire, because it means there's nothing left to do. Why be a product manager if your product doesn't bring you constant anger and shame? What would be the point? And yes, I'm still joking. Sort of. A bit.

Sure, of course a product manager's job includes selling their products, comparing them favourably to what exists elsewhere, showing how far they have come, and all the rest of the marketing propaganda, presales spin doctoring, and dancing with the truth that is also part of corporate life.

But we do, at least when speaking honestly to ourselves, understand that that is worse? Right??

Again, this is at least partially joking, and partially attempting to provoke you to consider a different perspective, one that is not always looking at the positives, or needing to rebut and explain the negatives. The positives already get all the speaking time.

Yes, I'm joking, but at the same time this just happens to be an approach that comes naturally to me. I am constantly masking my "I'm absolutely not okay with any of this", and consciously deciding when and how much to temporarily remove parts of that mask, because I know that people have very limited tolerance for anything that is not 100% positivity.

Being surrounded by constant insistent unearned positivity is something I find both exhausting and it is a fuel for my determination to do my tiny parts in trying to repair the world. You do not need to become as angry and embarrassed as I am. You do not need to lose all of your positivity.

But you can learn from weirdos like me to at least some of the time face the real world, including the parts you don't want to see, because until we look squarely at the whole messy overwhelming problem, we will never begin to tackle finding solutions.

I do believe you that real people actually exist who clap for themselves. I don't know how they exist without spontaneously catching fire, but I know they do manage somehow. I know product managers do in fact exist who are proud of their own products. All I can say is that nature is a wondrous strange thing, and I try to learn from you also. ????♂???