What I’m Reading, Early November 2024

Sometimes, you just need to go through your many, many open tabs and find the good stuff. And then share it.

You do share the good stuff, right?

Here are three things I’m reading and a useful tool.

1. Product Management is Dead: If you’ve thought about how you can use AI at work, or you’ve asked your Perplexity or Claude or ChatGPT friend to straighten up a doc, summarize some complex article, or clean up some text for you, congratulations, you are already using AI at work. If you listen to folks working in successful SaaS companies that are scaling up right now, they are all talking about prompt engineering around their domain expertise. Is SaaS dead, and is the future of SaaS all agent-driven? Absolutisms are never all true, right? Hmm. So is Product Management as a discipline and function dead? Of course not, but you should probably start using AI to do the manual labor (formatting Google Docs after contributors from your team provide text via Slack, internal blogs, copy/paste, email, and CRMs, anyone?) so you can focus on the higher thinking and decision making.
   
2. Democratising Publishing: [nervous chuckle] These are Interesting Times™ for open source content management systems with commercial ecosystems swirling around them. What about Ghost? I feel like Ghost is on its third pivot, from my perspective, from open source blogging software to boutique CMS to email newsletter platform wrapped in blog clothing. It seems… kinda great? I opened up the editor today, did a double take at the Gutenberg-like interface, typed a / and grinned at the familiar interface. Oh, and also, the people behind it seem OK? I may have some trust issues, but they seem OK.
   
3. Searching for Patterns in Digital Modernization: Live close enough to Washington DC, and lots of your neighbors will work for federal government contractors. Spend enough time in the media/product ecosystem adjacent to Washington DC, and some of your friends and colleagues will pass through 18F, the GSA, and various variants of government technology organizations. The arc of time bends toward government work in these parts, and this isn’t the first time I’ve constructed my own federal government resume. That said, the government-focused modernization patterns mentioned in this post easily apply to other large corporations and organizations in my experience. “Strangler Fig” is a particularly evocative pattern if you grew up in South Florida like me, but also it’s fun to reflect on the times my product has been the vines wrapped around the legacy product, and the times I was in the other branch.
   
4. Excalidraw: Y’know those diagrams that look hand-drawn, but they’re not hand-drawn? I wish I had heard of Excalidraw earlier this year when I was… drawing architectural diagrams more frequently.
   
   Here’s something I just cooked up there to help illustrate the different energy demands of a web hosting platform.