Delivering Sub-optimal Product/Blog News

The Cranky Product Manager believes in open and honest communication with her customers. She has found that (often to a naive software salesperson’s chagrin) that it is better to proactively communicate with customers when there will be an unpopular product change, such as dropping support for certain third-party products (i.e. databases) or that future product versions will drop some features. 

In the CPM’s experience, as long as she first demonstrates that she REALLY DOES understand the customer’s point of view, and then second explains the underlying reasoning for why the change still needs to be made, then customers are often quite understanding. Let’s hope.

So here we go.

The Cranky Product Manager is going to start running Google ads on this site and in the RSS feed.

She knows and understands that you are all accustomed to an advertisement-free experience on this blog, and fully realizes that she might lose some readers as a result.  She too prefers ad-free sites, especially when visiting a humor or escapist type of site.

First, please understand that running this blog costs money, and more every year as the readership grows. The CPM hopes the pay-per-click ad revenue will cover her blogging costs and maybe some of the Starbucks needed to get her through the many writes and rewrites of each and every post.  (What, did you think the Cranky Product Manager was funny and snarky naturally? No sir. She has to WORK on it. Hard. It takes a lot of time.)

Second, the Cranky Product Manager suspects that you all, as an audience that is overwhelmingly product management and product marketing professionals, will understand.  After all, you raison d’etre is to help companies figure out how to make more money selling products. So therefore, you wouldn’t begrudge the CPM engaging in a bit of capitalism, would you?

Third, the Cranky Product Manager hopes that you will realize that as an anonymous blogger, the CPM has very few ways to reap tangible benefits from this blog other than via ads. It is, and will always be, primarily a labor of love. True, other product management blogs are ad-free, but their authors write to enhance their industry reputation and land consulting business. The author of the CPM blog gets neither.

In short, she hopes you find her content good enough to deserve your future patronage despite the ads.

Here’s some reasons why the ads might actually BENEFIT you:

1. So far, the ads seem really relevant to product management and software development. The CPM is quite impressed, actually. Maybe you’ll learn about something you can use.
2. The ad revenue helps keep the Cranky Product Manager’s motivation up, in both post quality and quantity. Hopefully, it will keep the CPM on track toward her goal of posting something genuinely useful AND entertaining at least once a week.

If this whole ad initiative rubs you the wrong way, the CPM truly hopes you will let her know in the comments. Maybe you have some other ideas that are less annoying than ads that the CPM can try?

Thanks,
The Cranky Product Manager