The Cranky Product Manager is a fictional product management professional at a fictional enterprise software vendor named DysfunctoSoft. These are her fictional stories.
The Cranky PM has been officially in product management for many years, but before that spent time in the trenches as a developer and professional services slave. All told, she’s been working in tech for lots of years, at companies ranging from itty-bitty startups to IBM-sized behemoths.
The Cranky Product Manager’s personality flaws and character failings include a passion for sodium-encrusted food, snarkiness, cynicism, abject driving skills, bluntness, and an absolute inability to tolerate pompous jackasses.
The Cranky Product Manager has decided to fulfill her lifelong ambition of one day referring to herself in the third person. This blog is the product of this misguided goal, when combined with a lust for fame, the antithetical desire for anonymity, and a vast store of cynicism that must be vented in order to preserve her mental health.
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Addendum: Just to make it perfectly clear: this blog is fiction, although “inspired” (as Disney would phrase it) by the true-life experiences of a real software product manager, her colleagues, and her friends. The characters described in this blog are not real people; they are compilations of common software industry personality types that the author has encountered during her career. As they say, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Do not try to figure out who the author of the Cranky Product Manager blog is, because her life is completely different than the Cranky Product Manager’s. FOR EXAMPLE, the author may not even be a product manager any more. She might no longer even work in software. Perhaps the author is a lot more experienced than her snarky, although naive, fictional alter-ego. Hell, the author might not even be a “SHE” for all you know!
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Congratulations on your decision to refer to yourself in the third-person. We approve of this, and of your decision to a) be cranky b) curse like a sailor c) write about it.
I think I am going to like this blog.
Stewart
Congrats on a wonderful column. Your anonymity enables you to tell it like it is, and you do so very well and with wit. Please keep up the excellent work!
One PM in my office sent me your blog’s URL. Totally cool! Share your pain and crankiness as a fellow PM somewhere in the world :)
i tellya wat ! this is freaaaaaaaaakin COOL ! :)
Cranky PM turns 4 RT @crankypm: Who is the Cranky Product Manager? #prodmgmt http://bit.ly/bE7oni