How I Came to Storytelling and Product Management, or, a Short Origin Story

How a product manager and fiction writer connected the dots.

So this radioactive spider accidentally got loose in a lab and — ahh, who am I kidding. But my interests in the intersection of storytelling and product management do have an origin story of sorts.

Most people keep the different spheres of their life completely separate: there’s the day job, and there’s the stuff they do for fun. By day I’m a senior product manager, working with development teams to build software applications for internal customers at the Federal Reserve.

At night — or on weekends, or early in the morning, or on the bus back when I used to commute to work — I write. That’s my other “job.” I write blog posts like the one you’re reading now, but what floats my boat the most is my creative writing. I’ve written and published a handful of short fiction, a couple of personal essays, and I’ve also left the husks of many short stories, a novella, and a full-blown novel in a metaphorical desk drawer. (I am, however, still working on a crime novel. I haven’t given up on that one yet.)

And for a long time, there was no connection between these two aspects of my life.

These two realms started converging when I started structuring my fiction writing using, of all things, Trello, a project management tool. I used to be a big-time pantser — and will continue to do so with short…