Product management menagerie

Dean Peters has a smart and fun taxonomy of (bad) product management patterns with fun animal names, starting from familiar classics like HiPPO and the seagull.

• HiPPO — Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
• RHiNO — Really High-value, New Opportunity
• ZEbRA — Zero Evidence, but Really Arrogant
• WoLF — Works on Latest Fire
• Seagull — Swoops in, makes noise, craps everywhere, leaves a mess
• YAK — Yet Another KPI
• CoBRA — Cognitive Bias-Related Assertions
• PUMA — Promotes Unusually Meaningless Assumption
• GOOSE — Guesstimating Overly Optimistic Scheduling Estimates
• PUFFIN — Plans Unending Feature Factory INitiatives

Varn

Round one

I wonder who really wants to experience a few hours of me talking with an old internet frenemy who has smart, strange radical politics I deeply disagree with. But if you do? Here it is:

You can find my precipitating essay what, if not liberal democracy? right here on this here blog. I never really got an answer out of Varn to its questions; the discussion meandered. I did have fun, though.

Round two

After that first discussion, Varn & I agreed that we had succumbed to being a little too genial to grasp the nettle of the original question … and had to confront the accelaration of MAGA fascism in the US. So we did an even longer call: