Planning – How To Train a Product Manager

June 23, 2018

Your New Checklist For Crushing Your Largest Goals

It’s time to think big about making your dream a reality! With our largest, most ambitious goals, a little preparation goes a very long way. Taking a moment to reflect on our path to our goal ahead, and why our goals are important, keeps us focused and on-track through thick and thin. For me, I find a little structured process gets me energized and thinking smarter. This in turn leads to these personal dreams becoming my new reality. I can’t wait to share my approach with you!

I start by filling out a simple two-page form that’s free for you to download:Download here

I’ve personalized this to my own style, strengths, and weaknesses. Hopefully you find it a great starting place to make your own tweaks. Let’s take a look at what I consider valuable when starting a new goal:

Goal – I Give the goal a compelling name that excites me. I also draw a doodle or logo to recognize it easily in my set of goals and make it fun.

Why – What’s in it for me? I make it as juicy as possible to get me excited when I hit blockers or barriers. Spending time to articulate the why will also unlock new ideas in later sections. I jot down a couple bullets, nothing complex, as this preparation is for me and me only.

Success Metrics – How will you judge my success? A common mistake I can make is celebrating too early. When I have made progress or achieved some success, and get distracted or reprioritize, I lose track of the bigger win or breakthrough right around the corner. By noting what success means first, I can hold myself accountable to not stopping until I’m truly done.

Your Strengths – What is my unique or unfair strength in completing this goal? I often reference my StrengthsFinder assessment and think back to similar goals I’ve achieved in the past. What went really well? What positive feedback did I get about my actions or behavior that I should duplicate this time?

Partners – Who can join me on this journey and help achieve my goal? Who can I ask for help to be more successful and build lasting relationships? I check each name off after I’ve asked them for their insights and assistance to confirm I’m not leaving any stones unturned.

Key Activities – This todo list evolves over the course of the goal, but I limit it to three outstanding items at a time so I don’t get distracted and identify the highest priority items. It’s the classic way to jot down action items and mark progress.

Risks – As opposed to the Strengths section, I take some time to acknowledge my fears. This not only makes them more concrete and thus solvable, but also helps revise the other sections. Perhaps, for instance, there is a partner that can help overcome the risk. And if there’s nothing risky in the goal then I’m not being bold enough.

Learning Opportunities – What can I learn along the way by making mistakes? How can I share that learning with others via blogs, social posts, presentations, or conversations? Is there a new technique or practice I can implement?

Pomodoros – How much effort will it take me to achieve my goal? In a previous post, I share how I use Pomodoros as 25 minute blocks of focused effort that help make the best use of my time. Estimating how many I will need also leads me to better understanding my goal by considering how long it will take. I acknowledge the long road ahead, or consider how I could achieve my goal with less effort. I make a box for each Pomodoro I think it will take, and check them off as I do each Pomodoro (adding more checks than boxes if my estimate was low). I include estimates for time in meetings as this too (so an hour-long meeting would add two Pomodoros).

Start Date/End Date/Blockers – To help me retrospect on my goal when it’s crushed, I track when I started and completed it, and what major blockers I encountered along the way that stopped my progress.

Appreciations – I note who helped me along the way to make a concerted effort to say ‘thanks.’ I check them off after each is delivered.

Each week I start by reviewing the goals I have in progress, and make new ones, trying to keep a WIP (Work in Process) limit of three. For each goal I print, fill out, and maintain one of these forms. I keep them in a special folder for quick editing and access. I purposely make them physical, rather than digital, to encourage me to focus as I review and update them. The corporeal nature of the form lets me take them to a quiet, distraction-free place and treat them with more importance than the urgent items on my computer.

Hopefully you find this goal-preparation valuable too, and tweak it to match your own style. If you have changes you make, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

May 24, 2015

Don’t Fear the Future

I just finished reading Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore for fun, and it was a great read. It is a humorous take on Jesus’ childhood, wherein he visits several wise gurus alongside his friend, Biff. One quote in particular stuck out to me:

“All fear comes from trying to see the future, Biff. If you know what is coming, you aren’t afraid.” (p.231)

To me, this was an intriguing take on the one of the most important and challenging responsibilities of a Product Manager: to create and communicate a vision for the future. If a Product Manager does not do this well, there will be fear as team members and stakeholders are left to prognosticate on their own. They won’t have the full context of solutions that are viable, feasible, and usable, and will thus assume the future will fail in one or more of these aspects. From unsellable products to technical meltdowns, everyone has a boogeyman product that they never want to revisit. And this nightmare project is the first thing that comes to mind for them when they think about what might happen. A Product Manager may see this fear in decreased team productivity, lose of stakeholder trust, and time wasted squashing rumors.

So what can a Product Manager do to avoid this fear? By creating a clear vision, using Lean Canvases and other methods to show the “what” and “why” for the plan, team members and stakeholders can see the future. A plan doesn’t magically make everyone agree, and folks will certainly question the plan and raise risks. This questioning is healthy as it gets their fears out, helping to refine the plan and focus the vision in the places that matter the most for them. Iterating on a plan ultimately leads to a supported vision that everyone can rally behind.

The next time, or the first time, you’re making a plan for the future, think about what you’re doing to remove fear for your team and stakeholders. I think you’ll find the planning, even if it can be repetitive, is more engaging when you think about the emotional relief you’re providing to others by helping to remove fear from an unknown future.

March 18, 2015

The Kano Crystal Ball

Previously I talked about how to do a feature inventory with Kano to help onboard a Product Manager. Kano can help them feel acquainted with a product’s feature set and understand how customers engage with your product. You should also use Kano to take a look at customer feedback and upcoming plans. Classifying the planned features into the Kano emotional responses gives the same insights as the feature inventory, and also helps ground a product’s upcoming plans.

An important aspect of Kano when viewing future plans is that your customers’ emotional responses to features change over time. Features that were once Delighters will become Basic Needs as customers get habituated to such functionality and your competitors match you in the market. When looking at the roadmap, I like to first check that Basic Needs are met at the minimal level to reap the large returns on removing customer dissatisfaction. Basic Needs are “check the box” features, so as long as you check the box you’re good, and there’s little benefit to putting extra effort into making the “box’s check” fancy. I try to keep the MVP philosophy in mind to get the most value for the minimal effort when working with Basic Needs, as I’d much rather focus on Delighters. Delighters deserve the focus for several reasons:

They age better – By building a Delighter today you can reap value from that feature for a while as it ages into a Basic Need. If you were to focus only on Basic Needs, your customers would lose interest in your functionality sooner as they age into Indifferent features. The longer lifecycle for Delighters gives you more time to focus on improving customer satisfaction even more.
Competitive Advantages – Delighters give jet fuel to your marketing and sales team as they are often competitive advantages that can be touted in demos and marketing materials.
Team Motivation – Delighters are often much more fun and enjoyable to create as they are innovative and rewarding to customers. They give your dev team a challenge and boost morale which in turn creates even more innovation.

Kano can thus be a crystal ball that predicts how your features will fare in the marketplace over time. By knowing your customer’s emotional response to your current and upcoming features, you can extrapolate how those features will age over time as the emotional responses change. Reviewing the product plans with a new PM will help them know what to be on the lookout for in customer discovery as well as where to look for Delighter opportunities when creating new features.

March 13, 2015

Total Awareness with Lean Canvases

We’ve started a series of Lean Canvas reviews at work, which is a succinct way to share a product’s current ecosystem and plans to expand or focus its features. I shared mine today, which led to a constructive conversation on how to tighten up the model and view the current environment differently.

Beyond evolving a business model, the lean canvas is an excellent tool for communicating your analysis and plans for a product. Thus it’s also a great initial tool for onboarding a new Product Manager as it gives them awareness of all aspects of a product’s business model. This then empowers them to think of new product ideas by supplying the basic vocabulary and goals for a product that they can leverage to express their own proposals.

Consider these aspects of the canvas when reviewing it with the new PM to help them get the full value from the exercise:

Problem – Make this juicy to captivate the emotions your customers feel. As a PM, why should they lose sleep over scheming great solutions to this problem? The “Existing Alternatives” section also gives a chance to talk about competitors in the market.
Customer Segments – This is a place to introduce personas and other formal categorizations of users that the new PM can use as shorthand in future communication.
Unique Value Proposition – After you review the canvas, you may want to come back to this section to see if the new PM has an alternate way to express the proposition. With their fresh eyes, they may see a different angle that you missed to make it more compelling.
Solution – You can introduce some basic existing or proposed product concepts here, that will then be built upon in later activities like feature demos and tech diagramming.
Channels – Be sure to cover any unique or oft-forgotten channels like special partner relationships. This can also highlight the different internal and external communications the new PM will need for launch coordination.
Revenue – Help the new PM see what financial numbers are important to the business. Is it monthly recurring revenue, or one-time sales, for instance?
Cost Structure – This is the place to highlight any uncommon costs such as data acquisition or partner integrations. If you can put concrete numbers it will get the new PM a baseline for comparing the scale of different models.
Key Metrics – Try to get specific to give the PM a focus in exploring new products. This helps them see the user behaviors you want to increase or decrease. At work, we’re also exploring the use of “KPIs” for this panel to better link it to higher-level planning.
Unfair Advantage – Tie it all together and talk about how this product gives you a competitive advantage.

Another use for the Lean Canvas can be in the interview process. If your product has a rich website, you could have the PM candidate create the Lean Canvas for one of your existings products for the first interview. This prework will validate interest from the candidate, give you a chance to review actual work material, and judge their critical thinking and research skills. With the same above conversations used in onboarding, you can investigate the candidate’s product thinking and share some more details on the product to ensure they’re excited to manage it.

March 6, 2015March 6, 2015

Feeding the Roadmap with Feedback

Feedback Roadmap We’re approaching the end of Q1, and that means it’s time to plan Q2. Each quarter I need to produce a one-year (4 quarter) roadmap, and with Jenni starting at the beginning of Q2 on April 1st, it’s a perfect opportunity to involve her in to the roadmap plan that she’ll be helping execute. Luckily she’s willing to help out with planning while still doing her current role.

One tool that I use to help prioritize product work is an affinity map of direct customer feedback. Each month our Customer Experience team deploys a monthly survey to collect both quantitative and qualitative customer feedback. The survey has the customer rate our products numerically on several scales and gives them the opportunity to deliver unstructured feedback. I receive an email after each survey response, and for each customer who makes a comment, I print it out on a card such as this:

I then organize the feedback into grouped possible product solutions, like “Performance Enhancements”, “New Import Tool”, or “User Management.” On a wall or window, I mark a column for ‘Delivered’, ‘Q2’, ‘Q3’, ‘Q4’, ‘Q1’, and ‘TBD’ (as shown in the photo above.) These cared groupings are placed in either one of the four upcoming quarters, or TBD, to show how customer feedback is addressed by upcoming product solutions.

With the new quarter coming, I worked with Jenni to clear off the old board and rebuild it from scratch. I reprinted the cards, got some tape and markers, and we got to work. It was a great time for several reasons:

It was an opportunity to collaborate on not only the next quarter’s plan, but also to look at the upcoming quarters that Jenni would get to help more directly plan.
The activity of cutting, taping, and marking was a fun way to get away from the laptops and get some “arts and crafts” time, leading to great conversations.
It was satisfying to get a project done together. When starting a new team or project, it’s always a great idea to start with a success, no matter how small. Everyone starts with a sense of accomplishment, even if it’s as simple as taking a pile of cards and getting them taped to a wall in this case.

Getting the feedback wall updated for the next quarter was great, and showed both of us how we’re addressing the majority of customer feedback in the new plan. It sets the foundation for Why we’re building new products as we progress to defining the How.