Coming soon - a Revamped Product Bistro

This is The Product Bistro, a newsletter containing thoughts and essays from a career in Product Management.

I am moving my stuff from a self-hosted Ghost instance to this Substack place. This will take some time to achieve, but when I am confident I have the posts I want here, I will then move the domain to point to this place, and formally retire the old Ghost site.

Why? Isn’t this a lot of work?

Darned good question. Moving, tweaking and optimizing the look and feel are major tasks, and that takes work. While I know enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous (at times very dangerous) it isn’t fun, and it also isn’t rewarding.

Thus, I am going to build (or rebuild) this on Substack. It looks like the import grabbed the latest 15 or so posts. I have a lot more to move, so I will get cracking on that. It will give me a chance to do some clean-up and other editorial tweaks that are much needed. Alas, I tend to write stream of consciousness, and that means that occasionally some really odious grammatical errors are incorporated.

Thus, think of this as a mega-Spring Cleaning that has been needed.

The Bistro will live on

I began writing this in 2016, when between jobs, I had a few months to decompress and focus. I had been loosely blogging about product management and business topics for years, and the Bistro was a way to hone, refine, and catalyze the thoughts.

Since that time, I have sparingly added content, usually when I had an epiphany, or some event in my life spurred the desire to write.

But most of the effort of the last 6 years has been to keep it running, not to expand and grow the reach. The Substack ought to help me in this manner.

What does this mean?

First, it will be driven by posts, so it is the same as before. I will have a little less flexibility with the formatting, and while I never found a Ghost theme I liked, I will be less tempted to screw around with the theme/CSS.

If you want to start a dialog, just whack the “reply” button to the email. I promise you that I will get it. No foolies. Or, you can just drop me an email at geoff@prodbistro.com.

I also am not doing any advertising, so apart from the two Mailgun tracking bits that Substack embeds in the emails, there is no metrics or analytics generated. No Facebook (Meta), no Google, no Twitter, none of that crap. Honestly, this isn’t a business, and your activities here are not adding to any following you around the internet. Pinky swear.

Lastly, if you have a request for any posts, or an idea for a guest post, please whack that reply button, and let me know. I would be glad to have contributors, named or anonymous.

In closing

If you are still reading, I salute you. You are my kind of person. You have tenacity, stick-to-it-ive-ness. You are in product, or are aspiring to product. I am here for you.

Welcome to the journey!