I’ve written a book called Product in Service: A Manifesto for Pragmatic Product Management. Here’s how that happened.

1. Impulse and Permission

For years I’d been hearing product people struggle with the feeling they’re ‘not doing proper product’. Across the product management profession I led, in coaching sessions, and later inside a consultancy, the same pattern surfaced: smart people, stuck in systems that made pure product management almost impossible. At a meetup of Chief Product Officers in the public sector, we all saw it: multiple unfinished transformations, unclear authority, cultural drift. Everyone recognised the symptoms. But when you’re ‘in house’ it can be hard to share openly and honestly what’s going on in your own organisation. No one could write openly about their own situation. But I wasn’t in-house. I was at a consultancy and free to talk about my past experiences. So I decided to do it while I still could.

2. Discovery and Craft

I’d wanted to write for most of my life but the “great novel” never arrived. At the end of 2023 I almost gave up on this dream. One last spin of the dice, I told myself. I signed up for a short creative writing course at the Faber Academy. It was on “creative nonfiction,” a term I didn’t even know existed. The discovery felt like a click.

I’d been so fixated on fiction that I’d missed what was already in front of me. For years I’d been writing creative nonfiction, just in disguise: frameworks, guidance, playbooks, blog posts, pitches. All of it, really, was story work. The course gave me permission to see that. To write about work as lived experience.

I’d gone in intending to write my memoir, but came out with the seed of Product in Service.

I’d also read too many professional books that said little, slowly. I wanted to apply the precision of fiction: the fewest words for maximum effect. Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr., became my quiet mentor. Her story The Screwfly Solution tells the story of the end of the world in a few pages. That compression, that humanity, was what I wanted: a book short enough for a train ride, deep enough to stay with you.

3. Making and Momentum

Anne Lamott’s idea of the “shitty first draft” became my north star. I gave myself permission to make something bad as long as it was real:

Fifty sides. A5.
Two hours writing most weekends from August to November 2024.
No polish, no delays, no excuses.

By December, I had a printed zine-sized draft: thirty copies sent to readers. Four months from idea to artefact. Constraint made it possible.

4. Reflection and Revision

Feedback began arriving before Christmas and kept flowing until February 2025. Voice notes. Annotated photos. Returned copies filled with scribbles. People really read it. They said:

The main point is true, and it’s the first time I’ve heard it said out loud.
It needs more structure and sign-posting.
The “Email to the Universe” is strong and should open the book.

I’d come to similar conclusions myself. It was the perfect mix of affirmation and challenge. After months alone, the book was now in conversation. Readers met it with generosity, and their reflections sharpened mine. It confirmed what was real, and showed what to leave behind.

5. Expansion and False Starts

January brought the first talk on the book, with the Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and from there the ideas began to travel. Each audience became an edit: what landed, what drifted, what drew silence. Speaking turned out to be a form of rewriting. In my day job as Director of Product & Strategy, the concepts in the book began helping clients. In coaching sessions they helped people name what they already felt. Testing the ideas in the wild took everything to the next level.

At the same time, I hit two false starts.

The first was trademarking. My original title was New Wave Product, and I tried to make it official. That led to a minor dispute with an existing trademark holder resolved amicably, but not worth the cost. Hundreds of pounds in fees for something that didn’t actually matter. It was a frustrating detour, but also clarifying: the title no longer fit the book anyway. The more I sat with it, the more I realised the real focus was product management within services. Not some new wave of fashion, but a deeper recognition of context. That insight gave me the final title: Product in Service. What had started as a bureaucratic headache became a moment of clarity.

The second red herring was Squarespace. My plan was to print copies of the finished book, sell and post them myself, and run it all through a neat little Squarespace site with Stripe integration. Except Squarespace was anything but neat. For all the praise it gets, I found it clunky, confusing, and expensive — a maze of templates and dead ends. Compared to my old self-hosted WordPress days, it felt like a regression. So I shut it down. Deleted the site. Cancelled the account. In the end, I went back to simplicity: my own website, hosted on GitHub, fully under my control. A reminder that the best tools are the ones that stay out of the way.

6. Completion and Release

Editing eventually stalled amidst real life. So I booked a solo weekend in late June 2025, cycled to an Airbnb in Dulwich with one goal: finish. I began by handing my second draft to ChatGPT, asking four blunt questions:

What repeats what already exists?
What’s truly new or useful?
Where’s the structure weak?
What patterns have I missed?

This helped focus the final edit. Over two days I worked with ruthless clarity: cutting, reordering, tightening every line for structure, coherence, and freshness. By the end of the weekend, I had it. A finished manuscript. Out of my head, onto the page. That feeling of relief, pride, and completion was the real publication moment. I printed a few copies for final review and sent them to early readers. Their feedback confirmed it: the issues from the shitty first draft were gone. The structure worked, the story flowed, the message landed.

Then I rested. July became a recovery month: space to let the words cool, to get my perspective back.

In August, a colleague mentioned that her husband specialises in self-publishing (see his website here). We had a chat and he kindly walked me through Amazon’s system and it was clear: the easiest, most scalable way to self-publish was right there. So I pivoted. I commissioned a freelancer to format the manuscript for both e-book and paperback. I uploaded to Amazon, and in mid-September the e-book went live. I promoted it through my newsletter (a small, personal launch) and the feedback began to roll in. Within the first week, the e-book hit #1 in the UK Nonprofit and Charity category.That early success built visibility and gathered reviews, the social proof that would carry the paperback.

In early October, I launched the paperback. And almost immediately, it outpaced the digital version. People still love the physical book: the weight, the paper, the mark of having finished something real. It felt like the perfect ending. A small, handmade book that grew through honest feedback, hard reflection, and quiet persistence, and somehow found its readers.

7. Integration and Continuation

It’s still satisfying and surreal to see people read and respond to the book. To see it quoted, reviewed, discussed. Many have taken time to write to me: generous reflections that make the work feel shared.

And there’s a quieter satisfaction: after living with these ideas for so long, they now sit in my head ready to deploy. In meetings, workshops, coaching I can reach for them instantly. The book became a mental framework, a kind of internalised map.

8. Beyond Product in Service

When I finished Product in Service, I wanted to know if it spoke beyond my own corner of the world. So I sent a handful of copies to folks from the commercial world too. I wanted to test how well the book travelled: did its ideas hold up outside the public sector? Could others see themselves in it? One piece of feedback in particular stayed with me. It came from someone working in SaaS, who said:

“There’s a wide belief that SaaS companies are the home of ‘proper product management,’ but in my experience they suffer from many of the things you’ve identified too. Everyone’s trying to emulate the 1% — the Amazons and Netflixes — while the rest of us are dealing with messy realities and unfinished transformations. Your book made sense of that.”

That comment lit something up for me. It confirmed a hunch I’d been carrying for years: the challenges of product management aren’t really sectoral. They’re structural. Most organisations, whether public, private, or nonprofit, are navigating complexity, legacy, and culture at once. The language changes, but the work doesn’t. When I’d joined Mind the Product Leaders meetups, I’d already sensed this. I’d listen to people from fintechs, startups, and big tech, and their stories sounded just like ours in government. Different acronyms, same knots: overlapping cultures, half-finished transformations, competing truths. So hearing it from readers felt like permission. Permission to widen the lens, to speak not just to those in service, but to the 99% trying to make things work in complexity. To take the clarity of Product in Service and let it evolve into something broader. Not a framework, but a way of orienting product within messy organisations. If I write a second book, this is where it will begin.

What I learned About Writing and Self-Publishing a Book

If I were to end with what I learned about writing a book it would be as follows:

1. Constraint is freedom

I learned that scale kills momentum. Fifty sides, A5, two hours at weekends: these weren’t compromises, they were enablers. This container gave me movement. And the act of defining “small enough to finish” turned out to be the first act of authorship.

2. Iteration is orientation

I didn’t know what the book was until I’d written the shitty first draft. Each loop (writing, feedback, talking, revising) was an improvement cycle. I discovered that I couldn’t find clarity then move; I had to move to find clarity.

3. Conversation is editing

Every talk, every reader, every message was a structural note in disguise. I realised that story lives in dialogue, not solitude. That testing ideas in the wild is how you learn what’s actually true.

4. Tools are only useful when they disappear

Trademark bureaucracy, Squarespace tangles: each false start showed that friction hides in systems that promise simplicity. Real progress happens when tools vanish and you’re left with the work.

5. Honesty scales better than hype

The feedback I valued most relaed to authenticity: “this feels true.” Not a single reader mentioned polish or brand; they responded to clarity and honesty. That confirmed my instinct: quiet truth beats loud marketing.

6. The writing of the book teaches the book

By the end, Product in Service wasn’t just a book about pragmatic product management, it modelled it. I prototyped, tested, iterated, and shipped. The process embodied the product philosophy.

7. Completion is a form of integration

Finishing the book didn’t just produce an artefact; it rewired how I think. I now carry the material in my head, readily usable in real conversations. It’s no longer “ideas on a page”; it’s part of my reflexes. The book became muscle memory.

8. The niche is the gateway

By speaking from my lived corner of the world, I found authenticity. The local truth of product in service revealed a bigger patterns.