I’ve been a Mac user for the last 9 years. Don’t get me wrong, I love my MacBook and I bought a new one last month.
This is one of the reasons why most people look at me with disbelieve, when I tell them that I’ll be working on a windows powered laptop from now on.
Why the heck am I doing it?
As mentioned before, I took on a new adventure beginning in January as I signed my first employee contract ever with Trusted Shops to become the Head of Product Management.
Hi I’m Lars and I’m an addict
Because I’ve been deeply involved in the actual development of the new platform for the last year I want to make a clear cut for myself. I love to code and I think I’ll still contribute a couple of lines of code to the platform here and there. But that’s why I’m going to make it harder for myself. Similar to an addict who bans the substance of addiction from the house. I’ll make it hard for myself to code.
It’s not longer my responsibility and the development teams don’t need the product manager to mess around in the code.
No special treatment
The second reason is, that I don’t want any special treatment.
Because I’m co-directing the entire new unit, I don’t want to give myself higher privileges than everyone else.
Within Trusted Shops it’s custom for a developer or designer to get a MacBook, but for the rest of the company it’s the default to get a windows machine. Don’t get me wrong it’s not because the company is cheap, but as I’ve spent 3.5k on my new personal setup (docking station and adapters included) and I don’t need it for my new role I know it’s the right choice.
Feeling the pain
But the biggest reason has nothing to do with me per se.
My new role comes with a crystal-clear responsibility: to get into the mind of our customers.
Christoph Magnussen inspired me with his #smartphoneforaweek challenge.
It’s about getting over my ego to get a shiny MacBook but instead feeling the pain of our customers through the hardware they are using day-in and day-out. That’s why I’ll change to setup which is similar to 90% of our customers.
Which means that I’ll be surfing the web with an IE11 as well and I’ll be the nagging product guy that is bugging the developers with IE 11 bugs.
I know that my productivity will not suffer through the device change. Because that’s one thing I learned during mob-programming last year: The notion, that you can only be productive on your beloved hardware is a myth.
But still this blog post was written on a mac and I’ll keep my beloved Macbook for my personal use, because I’m too scared to go full cold turkey ;).