Coming back from my time off - like, really off, three months of silent meditation retreat - I am now taking the time to teach myself AI, or at least, what I think might be useful and / or fun with AI.

As the best way for me to learn is by doing, I am building stuff. After 3 Chrome extensions, 1 Google doc add-on, one tool to help me manage my finances and one card game to help me practice German, I am now focusing on building myself a personal website. Which, put aside the wonder of building something without a development team, brings to life a host of unpleasant questions:

• Why do I need a personal website?
• What do I hope to gain with it?
• Who is it for?
• What do I want to offer, and why is that so much harder to answer than how to build it?

The tools and ways to build are not the point. What to build is. What should I put on my website and why? Writing about the tools, AI, Claude, ChatGPT, agents and loops and what not, is so much easier than writing about the things that are coming up for me while I am using those amazing tools to build my website:

• Fun! Me and Claude Code, and I don't need anyone else. Freedom, independence, competence. It feels good.
• Misery: I don't like thinking about myself from the outside. That is, thinking about how I want to represent myself, how I want others to see me. And that's what I think about when I'm planning the website.
• Confusion: Why am I making a website? Because I want to achieve something. To offer something. So what do I actually want to offer? My intentions, and my offering, are fuzzy. Fuzzy does not translate well to web interface.
• Momentary despair: This isn't the first website of myself that I've built. Not even close. Out there on the web are already monuments to my past desires, initiatives from before, attempts to reinvent myself here and there.
• Self-awareness: There's no way a website can answer my desires, encompass me, be a faithful reflection of myself. This will, inevitably, end in disappointment.

But that too is part of the Product Management craft, is it not? The product is always at its best while still in our head. It’s making it into something that is useful for others, and still aligned with our own and the company's goals, that is the real challenge.