How Weekend at Bernie’s Taught Me to Keep My Product Funded Long After It Was Dead
-A Product Manager’s Memoire
Keeping a product alive can feel like a juggling act of comedy, depression, and preservation. In our experience, we’ve had to keep products alive for years in order to stay employed, and one of the best kept secrets is that the tactics to do so can be found in the hit 80s comedy, “Weekend at Bernie’s.”
Picture this: the product launched with a bang, capturing the attention of investors and stakeholders alike. But like Bernie, who went from life of the party to lifeless party prop, my once-promising project hit a plateau and started resembling a tech relic. This is where the whimsically twisted guidance from Bernie and his weekend escapades came into play.
Much like the movie's protagonists maneuvering Bernie's stiff body around to create the illusion of vitality, I too played a part—except my stage was the corporate battlefield. I strategically manipulated presentations and data to showcase our product's "progress," employing tactics that were a blend of David Copperfield and Silicon Valley chutzpah. After all, if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with buzzwords, right?
As the film's heroes hilariously extended Bernie's "weekend," I likewise extended the life of my own product, stretching its relevance like a piece of gum stuck under a meeting room table. By identifying obscure market niches, I managed to keep our product afloat, presenting it as the ultimate solution to imaginary problems. Funding flowed in like sand through Bernie's corporeal fingers.
But, oh, the mishaps! Just as Bernie's capers teetered on the edge of disaster, my own journey involved slapstick moments of near-collapse. Think unexpected bugs triggering in the middle of demos, marketing blunders that made us go viral for all the wrong reasons, and the time the entire team dressed up as characters from the movie for a major presentation—all in the name of "creativity."
As my product's "weekend" transitioned from metaphorical to absurdly literal months and years, I came to realize something unsettling: my product wasn't alone. In fact, it was surrounded by a graveyard of other over-funded and under-delivering ventures, each playing its own version of the Weekend At Bernie's charade. It was a maddeningly surreal scene, like a tech Twilight Zone where ideas came to die but funding never seemed to run out.
In the grand finale of this circus, my product embraced its fate with open arms, metamorphosing into a satirical commentary on the broader tech landscape. Much like the characters in the movie, who decided to dance with Bernie's corpse in a deliriously funny display, my team and I orchestrated a bold farewell performance. Sometimes, it's not about traditional success; it's about navigating the absurdity of business with wit and a pinch of lunacy. After all, when the dust settles, you have bills to pay, and you’re not gonna pay them if you’re jobless, so keep the product “alive” at all costs? After all, everyone else is doing it so why fight against it?
