Last year, we almost lost my disabled daughter due to an unexpected health concern. The nurses at the hospital were MAGNIFICENT with her and with my wife, who stayed with her, night and day, for 18 days. They are a lot of the reason my daughter is currently happily bouncing around in her bed. MANY of those nurses looked exactly like these happy, dancing young women. So, if you think them dancing somehow indicates that they are somehow unqualified or won’t be compassionate and professional, go fuck yourself!
I’m very Jamaican.
When someone is going through something tough, all I can say sometimes is “Jah Know” or “ Hush” but what I mean is:
“I pray you find strength in this hard moment, peace in the midst of what you cannot change, and the grace to take each day as it comes. You are surrounded by people that love & care for you, and this too shall pass.”
I’m a product manager. My entire job is to converge revenue/cost saving opps with meeting user/customer needs and I specifically work with data. To do this you need to understand your customers as much as possible and data does help you build a profile. Ideally that profile is used to improve the experience, tailor it to the audience, provide more value, the goal always being to retain customers and gain customers. In reality, I see many product managers who don’t care about users at all. They manage up to their bosses and it can become an eco chamber of bad decisions made on incorrect information. Ego drives a lot of business choices that alienate the customer. Sunk cost fallacy, something I termed toxic positivity, politics that prohibit honest assessments of people, process and products, etc., and the bigger a company is, the more of this not only exists but actually becomes a foundational component of the organization, like a critical organ. The system ceases to exist for its original purpose (make money, solve problems) and eventually exists only to protect itself and continue to exist. And it can take an exceedingly long time for a company in this state to die. Creative operators will find other means to generate revenue, so while on its face it appears the business couldn’t be succeeding, in reality they have just changed their business model around you and you didn’t notice. McDonald’s isn’t in the food business. They are in real estate. They are in big data. They are probably in quite a few other things as well. Food service is essentially the loss leader to get you to participate in their real estate and big data business. You are the product. So now what incentive is there to improve the experience? They just need to keep getting you to come back. They don’t need you to love it. Make it convenient, put one on every corner and at every interstate exit. Make the food mildly palatable. It’s enough to keep you coming back. This is a long rant to say business is complex and it involves real people which inherently adds all kinds of issues. In an ideal world we really would think about users above all else. But then in practice, sometimes for me to get an idea over the finish line I have to play to someone’s ego, their feelings, their pet desires, a delusion, EBITDA, whatever —- we make concessions. It’s the ugly side of product management.