Pragmatism instead of Bullshitism

Let’s start getting things done instead of wasting time.

Originally published in GoRetro

Why do we waste so much time?

Despite being downward economically, what I see doesn’t match our current scary situation. Teams are wasting their time doing things that have little to zero contribution to creating value.

I’m shocked.

I’m not writing this piece to ventilate. I’m writing to share where you can apply pragmatism to overcome bullshitism. Wasting time is unacceptable.

I’ve been playing this game for around a decade and a half. I’ve been in different parts of the same equation, software engineer, product manager, head of products, and CPO. No matter where I sit and what I do, I still face the same nonsense. That sucks, and we’ve got to change it.

Nobody deserves to waste their time on irrelevant things.

I noticed that we tend to pay too much attention to frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and others. But we miss the point of what’s surrounding our activities.

For example, extensive focus on writing backlog items instead of getting work done or attending several meetings to discuss the future and ensure predictability instead of taking action soon to learn from evidence.

We cannot afford such waste any longer.

Getting funds from venture capitalists, angel investors or banks wasn’t a big deal a year or two ago. Money was printed out. But today, money is scarce, so let’s get serious and cut the crap.

Let me show you opportunities where pragmatism saves time, cuts costs, and accelerates progress.

Photo by Hassan Pasha on Unsplash

Building a Bullshit Radar

Some time ago, I had a realization. I used to think I was doing product management, but I quickly realized I was doing another work called bullshit management. That may sound harsh, but facing reality was necessary for me.

Let me help you understand the difference between product and bullshit management.

✅ Product management is the art of producing business and customer value from products we…