The vanity metric that's making me a better Product Manager

I've developed a recent low-grade addiction to my GitHub contribution graph. The little green squares filling in, week by week. But I'm a Product Manager. I don't write code. Still, I feel a small, slightly daft glow of pride about it.

There are a lot of PMs posting about this now, screenshots of their rows of green, the rising commit counts. It made me wonder why. Maybe we've found something that was difficult before: a tangible way to measure and show our own progress.

Compare the two. "47 commits in May" vs "I ran 36 interviews, analysed them, built an opportunity tree with the team, which became the foundation for what shipped two quarters later." Both are real work. But only one comes with a counter showing your involvement. It's a bit like when social media exploded, everyone started chasing the likes.

My work hasn't changed though. I still talk to people, try to identify the opportunity, facilitate defining how to unlock it, help get it done. What's changed is that some of it can now show up on a graph.

So maybe part of this is a vanity metric. Look at me, I did all that. (The graph says nothing about whether any of it made a difference, which is the vanity point.)

But I feel it is making me a better PM. My language is getting more precise. I can do much more hands on exploration in tighter cycles. I've a sharper sense for where the thorny engineering problems lurk. And I am starting to understand, in a way I could only theorise about before, what it takes to keep a codebase focused and coherent.

The wall of green doesn't mean I am becoming a developer. I'm not. Claude does the architecting and the coding, not me. Heck, Claude is even the one doing all the actual GitHub work. What it means is that I'm honing a part of my craft I could only watch from the outside before.