What is a 'Modern' Product Manager?
The rise of AI and ephemeral software.
A brief history of tools
Humans began writing 5,800 years ago, and their culture quickly evolved beyond recognition. How writing changed human culture pales in comparison to how artificial (alien) intelligence is currently changing our lives.
Writing’s first use case, if you can call it that, was keeping track of agricultural transactions. Sumerian barterers recorded the history of trades, including prices and volumes. Suddenly, markets developed, and prices stabilized because buyers and sellers knew that a bushel of grain was worth two goats or ten gold coins. Barterers evolved into a specialized function known broadly as merchants (although the term wasn’t used until much later).
While the first documents recorded historical transactions, traders didn’t take long to write forward-looking contracts that locked in prices over multiple growing seasons. Growers and buyers could plan for the future based on this newfound predictability. Vendors who became good planners got ahead of the market and began to accumulate wealth. Entrepreneurs who controlled neither the supply nor the accumulated wealth started speculating about supply and demand, and these secondary market participants–brokers if you will–also accrued wealth.
Writing topics expanded rapidly, and resolving disputes about written contracts required writing down adjudicating principles, which we now call laws. Laws and principles are shared concepts, not facts, and are open to interpretation.?
Initially, the Sumerians used simple cuneiform to represent facts–a bushel of wheat, two goats, three pigs. The writing became more complex as the concepts it expressed became more abstract. The written language evolved from pictograms into phonograms and eventually into syllabic writing. The Sumerians possessed the power to write opinions about principles governing facts, an innovation that must have utterly dazzled some and baffled others.
Throughout this evolution, they formed symbols on wet clay tablets, which didn’t seem efficient for traveling or storage. The Sumerians didn’t find those problems urgent, and they went unsolved for centuries until the Egyptians employed papyrus for business and legal documents and government records. Not surprisingly, using papyrus spread information and knowledge faster and more broadly, as did the Egyptian empire.
Papyrus sufficed for 2500 years until the Chinese invented paper around 100 CE. Over the next one thousand years, paper spread west and south until nearly everyone–Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and eventually Europeans–adopted it.
Clay tablets, papyrus, and parchment changed the flow of information and the spread of knowledge. Once written language evolved to express abstract concepts sufficiently, the type of information didn’t dramatically change. Human society and culture molded themselves around the abstract concepts committed to paper, and soon, we had fiction and fable, law and religion, democracy and socialism, psychology and physics.
Arguably, digitization didn’t change the kind of information we consume; it was just another evolution of the form factor from clay to papyrus and then paper. Instead of pressing symbols into clay, we switched on and off ones and zeroes inside computers. But computers didn’t change the way we think about written words. We still understand words we see on computers the same way we understand them written on paper or printed in books. Developers designed the writing tools on our computers to resemble paper as closely as possible.
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Our ‘modern’ tools
Twenty-five years ago, paper was still human society’s most important tool for capturing and disseminating information. Yes, the world was transitioning to computers and email. Yes, transmission channels broadened with the inventions of the telegraph, radio, and television. But people turned on their televisions to watch news anchors read to them from pieces of paper. Today, we watch television broadcasters read from teleprompters and podcasters from their iPads.
In early 2000, I was preparing for a trip to Dublin, Ireland, to meet with my engineering team. Our goal was to plan the current year’s work and draft a roadmap for the year following.?
A few months before the trip, I visited a store around the corner from my house and bought a Motorola v60, which at the time was the only mobile phone available in the US that was compatible with the GSM networks in use across Europe. The phone was just that, a phone good for voice calls and–for the infinitely patient–simple texting using the numeric keypad. Combined, the charger and international plug adapter were larger than the phone itself.?
I purchased a discounted international calling plan from my mobile carrier, which generously afforded me a small number of daily minutes at an average of $1 per minute, depending on when I called, whether I called outbound, or whether someone called me. I must have misunderstood the purposefully opaque terms, as my ten-day bill amounted to $800.
Shortly before the trip, I drove to my office in San Francisco, connected my laptop1 to the corporate network using an ethernet cable, and printed a handful of copies of my recently completed product requirements document. I paperclipped one copy and stuffed it into an interoffice envelope, which I placed in the Out tray in the mailroom. This copy’s destination was an office in Toronto, where a program manager awaited with bated breath. The rest I stuffed in my briefcase-cum-laptop bag, adding roughly two kilos to my transatlantic payload.
Yes, I emailed the document to the key participants. The Dublin office’s conference rooms lacked reliable projection capabilities, and I knew everyone would arrive with red pens and printed copies anyway. My email warned them not to bother, and I was coming prepared.
Before departing, I visited MapQuest’s website and printed directions from the airport to my hotel and from the hotel to the office. I printed my flight itinerary, hotel confirmation, company emergency contact info, and a few pages about things to do in Dublin.
Counting all the PRDs, printed logistics, and my note-filled hardcover Moleskine notebook, I carried almost 500 pages of paper. My entire career to that point was on those pages.
When I landed in Dublin, it was raining. I walked out of the terminal to hail a taxi. I had looped my laptop bag through the telescoping handle of my suitcase, and as I approached the open boot of the nearest cab, I slipped. The suitcase and laptop bag toppled over, and my trove of papers spread across the sidewalk, becoming instantly and irredeemably wet...