Welcome to The Lens, my newsletter on Product Management and related topics. I write about topics that you may find useful for a new or experienced Product Manager. If you like what you read, please forward it to someone you think may get value. Thank you.
Avoiding Failure
Shreyas Doshi, a Product Manager at Stripe, has fantastic wisdom to share on Twitter. The one I remember most is what he named ‘Preventable Problem Paradox’, which explains how organizations and leaders inevitably end up incentivizing problem creation instead of problem prevention. The impact of preventing a problem doesn’t get as much recognition and applause as that of a solving a problem. Everyone wants to look good to their peers and their management, and to theirs and so on.
I have noticed this first hand and the problem lies in human behavior, institutional incentives and culture and finally, lack of accountability. In that tweet thread, Shreyas discusses few ways to combat this - by changing the incentives, creating awareness and doing pre-mortems.
Creating awareness is very useful to build organizational muscle to keep eyes open to a similar pattern in the future. During my early software career, we were beaten to death with processes mostly driven by checklists and approvals at every gate. Our team loathed those processes, however, I have often remembered those fondly, once I left that organization. Checklists may be boring, but is an incredibly effective and efficient way to build organizational muscle and consistency. This will lend itself to doing pre-mortems. Easy way to get started with checklists is to apply ‘Inversion Principle’ and to continue to build upon it, as the lessons are learned.
Another extreme of Preventable Problem Paradox is to be so risk averse, that you leave opportunities on the table. A simple example is when you try to emulate your competitors. Early in my PM career I found that using an example from a competitor is an easy sell to the management. I have however evolved on that position, because I have often realized that there are better ways to implement an User Experience or a functionality that competition might not have thought about or implemented. Always start from best practices, and see where you can advance or experiment that will suit your audience and context. It’s also so easy to stop at a small success, not realizing the results could be greater with an alternate approach.
Tiers of Engagement
I came across an old post by Reid Hoffman on tiers of engagement for an executive. I was thinking of a similar model for Product Managers, while talking to one of my friends who recently got into Product Management. Product Management can be various activities and different activities need different levels of engagement and attention. As such if I eliminate ‘Role’ from Reid’s grid, it can equally apply to a PM.
At any given time, it is common for PMs to juggle multiple products, if not multiple “projects” for the same product (though Agile has well defined role for a PO, the practices may differ). As such, it is very important for a Product Manager to identify her tier of engagement on different projects. If you are juggling multiple extreme or high priority projects/activities, it is a good topic to discuss with your manager. Either you are burning yourself out, or you are not optimizing your time on right priorities.