What is this place?
and what exactly is a digital garden
Published on Jan 30th, 2021 2 min read
It started with a tweet.
Shreyas Doshi had been posting 🔥 Twitter threads about product management for the past 6 months, and my bookmarks were not keeping up. With no way to organize the bookmarks other than the default chronological sorting, I had trouble finding a thread I wanted to come back to at a later time. Anything older than 3 months was buried by more recent bookmarks.
That's the problem I'm trying to solve.
The modern product management profession is murky. From how to get started, to how to excel, to just what the heck you should be doing on a day-to-day basis – it's hard to explain and not well taught.
There's a lot of useful information to help with this, but it takes a lot of effort to know where to find it.
This site is my attempt to organize that knowledge into a set of skills that be applied by anyone working as a product manager. The framework for the skills borrows from a tweet by Shreyas Doshi shown below.
To develop these skills, Shreyas recommends to understand the componenents of each skill and make a conscious effort to grow in each area. This needs to happen through on-the-job experience and working in your on time.
Here's my attempt at the latter – I'm building a digital garden of curated product management wisdom.
core skills
make the right product decisions
answer the important questions
align others to achieve a goal
advanced skills
Vision & Strategy 🔮
see the future and make it happen
Commercial Sense 💰
create value for the business
PM Management 👔
help others build great products
So here we are...
I won't claim to be an expert in any of the topics covered here, but luckily those that are freely share their knowledge. I'm just trying to be the connective glue between their thoughts and add a few of my own where appropriate. Much like a garden, I hope to plant a few seeds and watch it grow over time.
Why a digital garden?
It's unclear when & where exactly this concept started, but I like this explanation for why it exists.
Excerpt from
🌱 My blog is a digital garden, not a blog
Organizing information is hard. I'm not a taxonomist. I don't have a formal information design background. For the most part I just wing it ad hoc and hope for the best. 😅
We are all constantly bombarded with information, a lot of it is really good information too, but the challenge is absorbing it and applying it to the context of our lives and careers.
When I transformed this website to use Gatsby after years of using Jekyll it was like tilling a field and starting fresh. It presented the perfect time to make some changes.
Read Moreby Joel Hooks
joelhooks.com
Stuck between constant streams of digital chaos and more cultivated publications, a digital garden is a place where you can learn in public and let your thoughts grow.
So that's it. I've built my garden with Gatsby and MDX files. So far I'm pleased with the results. I'll just be here tending to it.
Feel free to stop by from time-to-time to see how it's grown.
Further Reading
on Digital Gardens
If you're interested in improving your product management skills, check out the first section on product sense.
