Something's Missing...

Something has been missing from my professional life for quite a while now.

In 2016 I made a deliberate decision to focus on getting experience in product management. 7 years later, I’ve learnt a lot, gained experience, and written a book about it - and yet, the last few years in particular have been tough, isolating and at times, have felt empty and wasted.

I realise I’ve been missing something important, something that has run through my life, though not always captured fully via CVs, LinkedIn, nor social media - creative expression and fulfilment.

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to play the whole time. I made a customised version of the Monopoly board, and an original board game, based on the audio diaries we used to keep (and no, I won’t be putting those online any time soon, they’re far too silly!).

In my teenage years, I volunteered at the local youth centre for the weekend clubs, and worked on the summer schemes, where myself and others would design, plan and run activities all day for children - often in the form of adventure games, scavenger hunts, ‘station games’ and so on. We’d have ‘stand ups’ and ‘retros’ too, but they were far more fun - not a JIRA board in sight. I even spent the final two summers of that time of my life, as a ‘team leader’, managing a team of other youth workers.

During the university years, I spent two summers working as a tester for Sports Interactive, on the Football Manager games, again, immersing myself in the world of game design and what it was really like to spend all day ‘playing’ a game (more like, bug hunting, recreating and documenting, but still…)

Since moving into product management - always a means to an end, never the end goal - it feels like I’ve kept formative, valuable, creative experiences hidden for too long.

Between 2008-2016, at the BBC, I:

• used 10% time to research how technology could be used to represent TV drama online, which led directly to co-producing the Mythology Engine, a sustainable platform to sit alongside iPlayer, allowing people to dive into and fully explore the stories they watch and listen to.
• went cap in hand to BBC commissioners off my own back to get funding for, and then recruit, a team to build ‘Storybox’, an interactive experience with an original ‘24’-influenced story. Looking back at that time now, I realise that not only did I secure the budget for this, but I recruited the team, and played a kind of producer/narrative director role, making choices about which scenes would allow audience progression.
• I wrote briefs, selected, commissioned and collaborated with several award winning game design studios and writers to learn about game mechanics and build prototype games for the BBC’s Knowledge and Learning division.
• I spoke twice on the stage of the BBC Radio Theatre, including as an invited speaker at an industry event called ‘Future Fiction’, about the possibilities of using technology to explore fictional worlds.
• I was invited to speak at the Conway Hall in London for the Playful conference on a similar theme.
• And finally, even when I was in more ‘serious industry professional’ mode, I managed to give probably my favourite talk to date, spinning a yarn about how information architects were secretly alchemists, influenced by the work of the KLF, Alan Moore’s definition of magic, the Internet of Things (remember that?), and the writing of Elizabeth Sandifer.

All the while, I’ve remained fascinated by what’s known as ‘cognitive poetics’ - understanding how we experience, keep track of, and engage with, narratives - not from a general user experience ‘storytelling’ point of view, but getting down to the nitty gritty of the tricks writers and film-makers play to design the telling of a story to keep us on the edge of our seats, wanting more.

I've tried my hand at fiction writing, wrote half a pilot script for a sitcom, even tried stand up comedy and an acting short course, but generally I think I'm probably more suited to working with and for the story makers, rather than being one myself.

Although I’d not consider myself an expert nor master tactician, I enjoy escape rooms and their puzzles, modern board games, and games like Blood on the Clocktower - the intricacies of the game design are outstanding and I often wish I could spend more time immersed in exploring them. Hell, I even have a set of draft blog posts around the narrative structure of watching sports like football and Formula One.

To sum up - although I’ve hardly ‘officially’ worked in games and/or creative storytelling roles, it’s something both dear to my heart and something I’ve gained a lot of adjacent and overlapping experience in. My move into product management, and even my time working with structured data, metadata and experimentation, has always been with the view to gaining those skills to then use in more creative worlds.

So now it’s time to get back into that. But doing so, without having those ‘official’ experiences on my CV - seems to be tough. I am going to need help.

I‘m going to need someone to recognise those adjacent experiences as proof that I’m decent at what I do, and take a chance on me. I’m not expecting to walk into something, and I don’t believe I should be handed something on a plate.

Equally, I need to listen, and learn, from those with the direct experience. Shadowing, being a fly on the wall, having conversations and just learning as much as I can from good people.

I'm happy to keep contributing and helping where I can in tech and product in the short term - as the brilliant Marcus John Henry Brown would say, in exchange… for money. To be clear - if you think you might have a role for me, please do get in touch - I still care about doing, and will continue to advocate for, product management and experimentation in pragmatic, disciplined and lean ways. I still care about the importance of information architecture, structured data and building an open Web. But equally, it's time to at least try and make that side step, otherwise it will never happen.

I am not someone who wants to become ‘the guy’ in product management. Frankly, I don’t care about being a thought leader or technology for technology’s sake. I care about making things that people will enjoy.

Being surrounded by ‘the discourse’ of the tech industry is both exhausting and depressing, as well as often soulless. There has to be more to life than Agile ceremonies, JIRA boards and editing slide-decks for weekly status updates.

Similarly, although I support those who prefer to work from home, the last three years have taught me that I just can’t sit alone, at home, all day, every day each week. I need to be with people, collaborating, co-creating, making things. Of course, if there’s a way to have that whilst also working remotely - or indeed hybridly, I’m all for it. But for me, right now, I need to find a way in which I'm not feeling so disconnected and physically isolated for 95% of the week.

So, let's see how it goes. Hopefully, adventures await. If you think you may be able to help, please get in touch.