Hi there! My name is Alyssa, and I’m a product nerd. That’s not my real job title exactly, but different organizations have lots of different names for the same or similar roles. And to make it even harder to pin down, product nerds tend to wear a lot of extra hats regardless of their official list of responsibilities. Basically, if you work on a team wherein your role is to gather feedback from stakeholders, represent the interests of those stakeholders to the team, prioritize the backlog of work for the team to do, and then show off said work to said stakeholders once it’s done, then you’re a product nerd. You may be a product owner, a technical product owner, a product manager, a technical product manager, a technical requirements manager, an offering manager, etc. If you what you read here resonates with you, you are welcome to be part of the club.

I wasn’t always a product nerd. I have a computer science degree. I tried being a computer scientist. I job-hopped a lot (sometimes by choice, sometimes not) trying to make a career in software development work for me. Finally it occurred to me that the right move might be to try something different. I found a job opening for something called an “Associate Product Owner” that seemed like something I could be good at, and managed to interview well enough that they hired me. All of a sudden I had a lot of learning to do, but unlike my entire career up to this point, I didn’t feel miserable about doing it. That was years ago, and I haven’t stopped learning. This blog is my attempt at sharing some of the things I’ve learned with other product nerds. (And, ideally, eventually throw all these posts into a book, become a best seller, and retire early.)

If by some strange twist of fate you’ve found this blog from some source other than my shilling for it on LinkedIn, and would like to connect, you can find me over there (just shoot me a message that you came from my blog so I know you’re not a rando trying to sell me snake oil—I’m good on snake oil).