Up until about 6 months ago, if you had asked me what my “go to” app for PM is - I would have said Miro. And I still love Miro in so many ways.

But, Cursor has become my “PM Desktop.” I’ve had the thought for many years that PMs live in a world of text - our world is written. UX works in pictures, and dev in code - but the craft of PM is mostly writing.

The complaint (observation?) I have about PM writing is that writing tools have become adorned - overly so. Our standard tooling is focused on either formatting or collaboration. It’s become about the look and feel, or about the chatting with colleagues.

Both, important, but also both missing the central element: words have meaning. When you write words about your product, the words give meaning to your product. If your words are “templates” or the “filling-in-of-forms” (such as a Jira template) then inevitably the meaning falls away.

Marty Cagan has written endlessly about the difference between process people and product people, and you can clearly assess this difference in the quality of the writing. Process writing is the “filling-in-of-forms” - we must have a WSJF score and a Business Rationale for every feature - and therefore the PMs (usually) must write such things.

I have a test I do when evaluating PM writing in whatever form it takes. I call it the “lacko.” Many (too many) PMs will write a business rationale in the format of:

“We need [thing] because we lack [thing]”

Insert a thing here - maybe a dashboard, and you’ll see what I mean:

“We need a dashboard in our product because we lack dashboards”

It’s a nonsense example, obviously, and the wording is simplified. But you will see this pattern repeated often. Now that I’ve said it, you will see it EVERYWHERE. The lack of something as the justification for something.

Which doesnt make any sense at all, and there is probably logical fallacy term in there that I don’t know the name of - tautology maybe?

I usually interpret this into a more understandable example to make the point:

“the lack of a $10,000 e-mountain-bike in my garage is why I need a $10,000 e-mountain-bike.”

It makes perfect sense in my mind, but not so much in anyone else’s mind.

Clear writing, sadly, has become a subversive act in today’s software company.

Which brings me back to Cursor. What I love so much about Cursor is that it bridges this gap. It is writing centric - it’s about the words and it gives me a canvas to write words with this magic robot brain behind me. No more cut and paste back and forth into chat threads. I can write inline, and think inline. But I’m still in control of my craft. It’s a power tool - an electric drill instead of a hand drill.

It’s rough at the moment. I can see it getting better every day.

Dialectic podcast and Cursor

I’ve officially gone down the rabbit hole on Dialectic.

I listened to Ryo Lu and Brie Wolfson and midway it occurred to me that the common thread was Cursor. Cursor is what happens when many great minds come together and based on these two I’m now wondering what everyone else is like. One might argue that if your company culture is not being formed like this, you are doing it wrong. But thats a post for another day.

Two podcasts on the topic that I would recommend - with a snip from each that caught my attention:

Dialectic E34: Ryo Lu - It’s all the Same Thing

Ryo’s catchphrase is a part of the conversation that they come back to several times:

It’s all the same.

I didn’t really get what he meant until he explained it, and I won’t try to explain it all here (but listen to the podcast and it will be clear).

He didnt say it, exactly, but he obliquely said it, and I think this is where he is going - there will be no “Cursor for PM.” While it may seem counter-intuitive considering how I just gushed about Cursor - I think that is the right direction. I hope there will be no Cursor for PM.

What I need - what every PM needs - is a way to amp up the clarity of their thought. I don’t think this is particular to PM, but rather, particular to anyone who writes for a living. PM is just that role in the software industry that needs to be the sense-maker, and sense-making is writing. We need PMs to be very articulate, and to make sense of ambiguity. Cursor is a text-based sense-maker. It’s all the same.

Ryo talks about how important it is for craftpeople to work directly with the material. The material of software is words. Cursor puts that right on the surface. It’s a tool for perfecting your craft.

Great stuff.

Which led me to…

Dialectic, E35: Loving Attention & Ease in Craft

Brie Wolfson on developing a finger feel for excellence in whatever you do. It’s a similar idea to Ryo. All-in, a great podcast as well, which I also won’t elaborate on other than to say, go listen.

Of note - she called out a post by John Salvatier (Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail), something she has been reflecting on, and something that I’m now reflecting on in the vein of PM.

Some choice quotes from Salvatier:

The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.

You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.

It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

Seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

Your zen for Thursday

Go yakiimo go yakiimo go

Yakiimo

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Be good to each other. -j