The Next James Joyce? This Product Manager's Documentation Is Too Fucking Long
This product manager approaches every PRD as if it's the next Finnegans Wake.
After years of obsessing over cutting-edge technology and continuous forward progress, the tech world has recently come to appreciate the lessons and legacy from both ancient and modern literature. We've seen Zuckerberg pay tribute to the Stoics by naming his daughters after Roman Emperors, venture capitalists tweeting about I-Ching passages they read 30 minutes after taking psilocybins, and fintech CEOs adopting the drinking habits of Ernest Hemingway.
Nevertheless, no one has paid better tribute to Irish poet and modernist epic writer James Joyce than startup product manager, Tyler Satterfield. A Joyce fan, Tyler tries to emulate Joyce's literary style in his tech job by crafting long, tedious, and convoluted product specs using nonsensical words and phrases such as "Userengagementism," "Scalabilitrix," or "Big Data."
"I'm 1/32 Irish and proud, so I feel this obligation to carry on the legacy of past literary giants like Joyce at my work as a B2B SaaS product manager. As a society, we forget how vital words, storytelling, and alliterations are in our work, so I think it's imperative for me to inject a wee bit of artistic approach into our PRDs, or as I like to call them, the 'Script of Stipulations' or 'SoS' for short, because we're also all about efficiency as a lean startup," Satterfield explained as he started his 14th Notion doc for the day.
Despite Satterfield's novel product documentation method, his coworkers are notably—perhaps understandably—less enthusiastic about the literary style.
"It's quite fitting that he called it 'SoS' because that's what I wanted to fucking scream out loud whenever he passed that shit to us," said lead engineer Tamara Johnson. "This fucker once wrote 'in the upper quarter, rightward, let there be settled a button, a beckoning beacon of interactivity; that by its press, a call to action might be made manifest, drawing the eye and the cursor in a dance of purpose and possibility' instead of 'Add a CTA button at the top right of the landing page.' Just to be clear, I am against hating any specific ethnicity or nationality, but maybe The Great Famine happened for a reason."
Product designer Garrett Davis also expressed his frustration with Satterfield's style. "I was fed up to the point where I asked him to directly use Figma to visualize his idea, and you know what he did? That son of a bitch just wrote the whole spec using text blocks."
Satterfield, who earned the nickname "Bullysses" due to his partiality for complex and often indecipherable vocabularies, is not too bothered by the debate around his "Joyce-ian" writing style and believes others will appreciate it over time.
