LIFE'S TOO SHORT

Life's Too Short: Product in the Golden Age of Digital

You think you're going mad as a product manager? You are.

Seventeen years. Five continents. Countless corporate disasters. And absolutely no lessons learned.

What happens when you give a Northern Englishman a passport, a corporate expense account and a job transforming some of the world's biggest organisations?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Very little of it appears in the official company presentations.

From HSBC boardrooms to the Arctic Circle, from the bars of Hong Kong to the Singapore Grand Prix, Gerard Short takes readers on a gloriously irreverent journey through the golden age of digital transformation.

Along the way, there's a banking executive sharpening a bush knife during a six-in-the-morning meeting, a corporate demonstration rescued by Portuguese cleaners before spectacularly falling apart, a swingers' hotel discovered entirely by accident, and an international leaving do involving ten colleagues, Goa, and Batman and Superman directing traffic in Singapore.

There are Michelin-starred lunches, questionable travel decisions, a perfect karaoke score in South Korea, and more corporate absurdity than any reasonable person should encounter in a single career.

But beneath the chaos is something rather more important: the extraordinary people who made the journey worthwhile.

This isn't a business textbook.

There are no seven-step frameworks. No revolutionary operating models. No diagrams explaining how to become a better Product Manager.

Just true stories, extraordinary characters, spectacular misadventures and a healthy disregard for corporate bullshit.

Funny, candid and occasionally outrageous, Life's Too Short is for anyone who's ever survived a steering committee, questioned the sanity of senior management, or wondered whether the best part of their career happened after everyone left the office.

Because careers come and go. The stories - and the people you share them with - are what remain.