Editor, Product Manage Thyself
I’m a rookie at product management. But I’m a pretty experienced journalist, and before that, I was a passable designer and coder. My active work with code ended in the early 2000's. It’s still hard to say why I left web development for the world of journalism. I think one reason is the development work, and the tools available to do that work, just weren’t capturing my attention or interests at the time.
Little did I realize that the tools available to coders, especially ones like me, who tried to be holistic about design and code, were about to get way better and way cooler to do stuff with. And that journalism was about to undergo a secular shift away from print to digital, though massively downsizing, trading dollars for dimes along the way. On the face of it, I made a pretty horrible mistake in trading careers. I should’ve buttoned down, learned the languages I needed, and built cool new stuff. But I’m not unhappy with my choices. Here’s why:
1. Content management and product management are converging. You see it in places like The Verge. In GDGT. In The New York Times’ Snowfall. This is the unavoidable reality of the transition to digital media. It’s no longer good enough to blurp a blob of text onto a screen and expect readers to find it. Whether it’s machine-readable metadata that subtly drives readers to engaging content, or intensely pretty graphics and…
