I Love Mess
How product counsel find the opportunity in the muck pile
An unwitting adult attempts to punish a child by locking her in an unkept horse paddock. She looks around at heaps of pungent manure, picks up a shovel, and starts whistling a tune. When that sad grownup asks her why she seems so happy, the kid responds, “With all this crap around, there's got to be a pony somewhere!”
This is my mom’s favorite joke and the fundamental outlook of a happy product counsel: there’s got to be a pony somewhere. Where another lawyer may see a chum bucket of indistinguishable risk, the product counsel sees a cioppino1 in which privacy, IP, competition and product liability can be gently spiced and simmered to a delicious launch that will bring joy to millions. If there’s no Mess, there’s no possibility of Pony.
Think of all the poor lawyers in the world who go through day after day with no opportunities to dig into beautiful Mess. Here you are, rich in mess and the treasures it hides:
💩 The mitigations you suggested for next week’s major launch are technically impossible to implement?
🐴 More time with a motivated engineering team to understand your data storage systems!
💩 The one engineer who really understands your deletion systems got poached by another company and moved to Singapore?
🐴 New chance to mentor their replacement and build your loyalty and value to the teams!
💩 Just found a demand letter behind your desk, covered in cobwebs?
🐴 Opportunity to test out a new approach to negotiation with plaintiffs counsel!
💩 The CPPA just announced your main project for the next half is their top enforcement priority?
🐴 You are about to demonstrate some value that leadership can understand, baby!
If, hypothetically, your nervous system is already torched (and if you live in the world right now, it probably is), it can be hard to open Slack without flinching. When I'm bordering on burnt out, I no evidence of any Pony. When I'm not Pony hunting, I am looking instead for how to protect myself, how to avoid all these scary problems that keep piling up, and how to convince everyone around me that everything is fine. This is a massive waste of time and the world's least fun hobby. For me, the best way out is to take a breath, find a good, messy Mess, and dig in with a colleague I trust and feel comfortable with.
How do you get back to Pony hunting after a stressful time?
Lookout: CPPA Enforcement Priorities
With all the unpredictable problems that pop up in this line of work, we take the predictability where we can. One of these dubious comfort sources is California Privacy Protection Agency’s enforcement memos. You may still find out your company got caught up in a sweep at 4:30pm on Friday, but if you use half an hour of down time now to chat with Claude, you’ll be ready to respond.
Dark Patterns: Are we still using this term? Who knows. Are California and other states still watching your subscription cancellation process like a hawk, whatever the FTC may say now? Please believe it.
Vendor management: Your company’s responsibility to its users doesn’t end when their data leaves your servers - the CCPA will hold you to monitoring and taking action against your third-party vendors. If you’re hoping that you can punt this effort to your privacy management tools and forget about it, ask Todd Snyder how that works out.
Data minimization: I have a theory that this is the common principle of data hygiene least respected in practice. It is so, so difficult to convince a product team to delete beautiful reams of data recording users’ interactions with their features when they can imagine a future of detailed analytics, personalization, and yes, even more exciting features. There are ways to demonstrate that your company is thinking about minimization without taking an ax to your databases, though - think about expiring old, unused accounts, or focus on deprecated features.
A Little Treat: I <3 Mess
If there were ever a kindred spirit to product counsel in the fashion world, it’s Emily Kirkpatrick. I love clothes - my grandmother was briefly a costume designer for the Boston Ballet, and both my grandmothers and mother were extremely competent, no-nonsense seamstresses who instilled in me a deep appreciation for fabrics and construction utterly wasted on Silicon Valley. While I don’t have time to hunt vintage and scroll shows like I did before kids and Grown-Up Jobs, I deeply enjoy her newsletter and YouTube channel. Rather than bringing you moments of quiet luxury, she dives into the swamp of celebrity dressing to find the weirdest trends. It’s all delivered in a soothing monotone I associate more with Ben Stein than than with Julia Fox. If you need a pop-culture break from whatever your teams are throwing at you, seek her out. Worth every subscription penny.
Preferably from Sotto Mare in San Francisco