Our data, scattered

A while back I started to take an interest in the topic of personal data archiving, and in particular how the topic intersects with the various social media platforms that so many of us interact with. The simple fact is that so much of who we are–the things we write, the photos and videos we take, the people we interact with, our very memories, as Facebook likes to remind us–are locked up in a bunch of different walled gardens that are difficult to escape, both technically and due to the powerful social pressures that keep us on these platforms.

I like to think of the traditional photo album as an interesting contrast.

It used to be that we collected memories in these books, and stored those books on a shelf. There was some real downsides to this approach! It’s a pain to add stuff to them (I have to “print” photos??) They’re difficult to share and enjoy. They’re single points of failure (think: house fires). They require intentional acts to ensure preservation. The list goes on.

But, they were ours. We owned them. We could take those photos and easily copy them, share them, rearrange them, archive them, and so forth.

Now imagine that you collected all your photos in a photo album that you could only store and access from a vault being run by a private company. The company would ensure the photos were protected and stored properly, and they provided a really nice, simple mechanism to easily add photos to your album right from your phone! That’s really nice! But if you wanted to look at those photos, you’d have to go to the vault, enter your passcode, and then you could only look at them while you were in the vault. And if you wanted to get a copy of all of those photos for yourself, well, you can, but it’s ugly and complicated and designed to make it minimally possible and maximally difficult.

Next, imagine the corporation changed their policies in a way you didn’t like. Or imagine that corporation went bankrupt. Or experienced a fire. Or you lost the passcode for that vault. Or a loved one passed away and didn’t store the passcode in a safe place.

What then?

Today, we don’t just lock those photos in one vault run by one private company. We lock those photos in many vaults, spread out all over the place. In doing so, we dramatically increase these risks, because instead of just one company failing or one account that we might lose access to or one set of terms of service we need to worry about, it’s many.

All the while we fragment our identity, spreading ourselves thin across the internet, which makes it extremely difficult to preserve all of those memories.

So what can we do about it?

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This is part two on a series of posts on my transition to Product Management. If you’d like to see where this series began, feel free to checkout part one.

As I’ve gone back and looked over some of the email traffic from my first couple of years in my role as Product Manager, one of the most obvious things that stands out is just how much was going on at the time (and how little I’ve apparently retained)!

The backdrop of this period was a parallel effort in the company to:

1. Modernize our software development practices by moving to a process built on Agile Scrum, and
2. Shift way from our custom, consultative software development model to a product-centered approach focused on broader market needs.

Either one of these would be a large, challenging transition. Looking back, attempting to tackle both at the same time was borderline insanity!

Looking more closely at the transition to Product-oriented development, this is also seems to be a pretty common phase in the startup life-cycle.

As I’ve talked to other folks in the industry, I’ve noticed that many startups, particularly those in the B2B space, initially succeed by developing a solution for a couple of “whales” that serve as an essential lifeline that keeps the company operating. Over time, as those successes beget more successes, the company can step back and focus more on the market than individual opportunities, and at that point, a pivot to a Product-centric development process makes a lot of sense.

The trouble is, this is often not an easy transition. Ignoring the challenges in shifting the entire mindset and culture of an organization, there’s the basic politics of handing off responsibility for feature selection and prioritization from technology leadership to product leadership. As you can imagine, this transition can be very difficult if not handled delicately.

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Anyone who knows me knows that I basically grew up around computers. I began my lifetime of coding very early on, beginning with a BASIC interpreter and a library book and rapidly progressing to HyperCard, Logo, and then eventually Turbo Pascal. By high school I was one of a few obsessives who spent all their time in the computer lab where, if I wasn’t playing games or messing around with the equipment, I was writing code.

I was, in short, a computer nerd.

And, while my professional life has moved in a different direction, this still true to this day. I honestly doubt there’ll ever be a time when I’m not tinkering away on one project or another. Heck, the relaunch of this blog was as much an excuse to mess around with Jekyll as anything else…

But the idea that I would ever be anything but a “computer guy” never would’ve crossed my mind. I suspect my past self would be rather surprised by where I now find myself!

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