All views, opinions and statements are my own. Please consider reviewing the first part of this two-post series before continuing reading here.
On Product Rumble: Part I (Context & Predictions), I shared five predictions based on my experience as a Product Manager — maybe you’ve been through some of those already or you will experience them in the future. TL;DR there is no silver bullet to truly avoid those predictions.
On the bright side, throughout my career, I’ve learned a few things that can be offered as suggestions to avoid or more quickly spot the five predictions. I’m calling them Ninja Moves and there are five of them.
Do not expect a one-to-one match between Predictions and Ninja Moves. Product Management works pretty much like the illustration below, so my best shot is to share a series of learnings with you and expect that knowledge to help you along the journey (in no particular order).
My game plan is still the same: I’ll succeed here if you learn from my experience and selfishly use it in your own trajectory.
Ninja Move 1. Get to know who you are
Pro-tip: The same applies to teams, divisions, and companies
Do you know who you really are and what you stand for?
This Summer, I had the opportunity to spend one week at UVA — Darden Business School — and what was supposed to be yet another week-long Executive training, soon became a life-changing experience with Professor Jim Clawson.
Our time with Professor Clawson was mostly driven by the framework illustrated below. If you are interested in the full story, here’s a link to one of the many books he has published on Leadership: Level Three Leadership: Getting Below the Surface. You can also learn more by exploring content on his blog.
This framework has profoundly changed how I see the world and the importance of clearly articulating an individual’s charter. Here’s my attempt to describe the key elements of a charter: Mission, Vision, Strategy, Goals, Values, and Operating Principles.
Your homework is to process the questions below, noodle on the answers for some time, and create your own charter. After all, I risk saying that it’s hard for you to define more comprehensive charters (e.g. team or company) if you haven’t spent time thinking about your own. Questions that may help you in the process:
- What’s your mission? Why do you exist and/or get out of bed every morning?
- What’s your 20-year vision? Big and bold to a point that it seems fairly unattainable today, but targeted enough for you to be able to define steps 1, 2, 3, etc. that can get you there
- Based on where you are today, what are the key milestones and learnings you think you should pursue to get to your 20-year vision? Any opportunity to course-correct your current path now?
- What values and principles define who you are and can be used in tough moments for you to decide between A and B and truly walk the talk?
How do you feel about sharing the result with people you trust? While this is your own charter, you can tell where this is going. The same applies to teams, divisions, and companies, so go ahead and start connecting the dots.
Is this the only answer to the case? Not really? Am I very passionate about it? Absolutely! That said, there are a few other references and tools you can use to start shaping your charter and more importantly, telling the world who you are. I am mentioning two of them here:
Amazon Leadership Principles: Per content on the Amazon website, “We use our Leadership Principles every day, whether we’re discussing ideas for new projects or deciding on the best approach to solving a problem. It is just one of the things that makes Amazon peculiar.”
Manager READMEs: I’m yet to experiment with this tool, but for now, imagine a “User Manual for Managers,” something that everyone can read and learn more about who you are – at work and at home – what makes you tick (or triggers you), how you behave, whether you are a morning person or not, hard rules of engagement, etc.
Ninja Move 2. Shoot for the moon
Pro-tip: Think about how the world will be like in 20 years and work backwards from there
Before we shoot for the moon, let’s have our daily dose of Steve inspiration and get in the mood for what follows.
Don’t fool yourself with 5-year visions. They are too close to reality for you to mistakenly think you have a “great” plan when you are actually incrementally making progress toward something that may look very much like what exists today.
A 20-year vision forces you to depart from today’s world and connect with tomorrow. Here’s a non-exhaustive taste of the future, and I’m not talking about eating crickets protein, like I mentioned on Product Rumble: Part I (Context & Predictions), though you should definitely get used to the idea:
- 3D printing
- DNA editing
- Longevity
- Brain augmentation
- Smart cities
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Renewable energy
- Self-driving cars
- Quantum computing
- AI & Machine Learning (ML)
- Robotics
- XR (VR and AR)
- Space exploration
- Cryptocurrency
And let’s not forget about new and existing challenges that humanity will face:
- 9 billion people by 2050
- Water scarcity
- Global warming
- Hurricanes
- Flooding
- Sheltering
- Waste
- New diseases
- Fake news
- Cyberbullying
- Cyber attacks
Take a moment to reflect on your career. Think about what you are doing these days and how that is preparing you for “tomorrow.” Are you dreaming big enough? Is the environment you’re in inviting people to challenge the status quo, try new ideas, fail, and learn?
The future will need professionals who are able combine DNA editing and Cryptocurrency to solve for Sheltering challenges. Does that sound too crazy? Maybe, but that’s the type of thinking that will be required when access to cutting-edge technology will come at no cost and our problems will get bigger and bigger.
The challenge these days is that we’ve been distracted by the current state of “innovation.” We’ve learned to admire Instagram stories, Snapchat filters, and TikTok micro-videos. Our most talented data scientists and engineers, with PhDs and more than 10–20 years of experience, are assigned to increase decimal to single-digit performance of web and mobile ads.
Let me offer you an exercise that I hope can help you scratch the surface on coming up with big and bold ideas for today and “tomorrow.” This goes beyond thinking about your own vision and it expands to our daily routines with products, projects, and requests from customers, peers, and leadership.
Whenever you are starting a new project, thinking about how to solve a customer problem, envisioning solutions, etc. get together with a group of people (e.g. team members, peers, partners) and for about 15 minutes loosen whatever constraints and limitations you have today and think about “how it could be.”
Want to boost creativity and challenge the boundaries even more?
Put all the new technologies I mentioned above inside a hat and have groups of 2–3 people picking one technology solution each. Have each group pitching how that technology will help them achieve the expected outcomes for the project. After going through the exercise above, go back to your world and compare notes on how it currently looks like and how it could be. If things look very different or unexciting today, right there you have an opportunity to rethink your plan.
At this point, if you still think you are no Larry Page, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, in terms of being able to think about those phenomenal moonshots, please hold that thought and explore Google’s Roofshot Manifesto. It’s an interesting concept on how a roofshot — intentional word selection, since the roof is closer to the moon than staying on the ground — can still give you big wins and pave the way for an even bigger trajectory. Need some help “seeing” it? Here it is:
As I learned from Amin Toufani, Singularity University, “with the pace of how technology is evolving, our biggest risk may be the lack of imagination,” so let’s all try to pause the “busy-ness” for a moment and be truly imaginative.
Ninja Move 3. Tell and sell that story to the world
Pro-tip: 50% of the job is doing the work, 50% is telling the story
We all are or should be salesmen (or -women) and storytellers. Whether you are telling me about your vacation in the Caribbean or trying to pitch a new idea in pursuit of extra funding, you are crafting, packaging, and telling a story, hopefully a great one. Otherwise, you may get more of “excited man on the right” and less of “super engaged audience on the left.”
Then why do people still underutilize storytelling? There may be tens of different excuses to justify why people don’t spend time thinking about the story they want to tell, who is in the audience, which sequence of ideas and content makes more sense, and what questions are likely to be asked. I particularly blame Microsoft PowerPoint and you too, Google Slides.
These days, it has become so easy to mash up existing content, jot down a few bullets, stick charts and pictures to the slide, and voilà, a presentation (not a story) is created. Oh…I forgot to mention the killer trick: font size 6, which allows you to paste one-page worth of a Word document into your slide and make it “rich in content” by design.
This approach is missing one key element: the narrative. I’m not alone here. If you google “Jeff Bezos no powerpoint email,” you’ll find a couple of references to an email sent by Jeff Bezos to his team with the title “No powerpoint presentations from now on at steam.” Here’s what he wrote:
“Well structured, narrative text is what we’re after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint. The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”
Since we’re talking about Amazon, it’s worth mentioning yet another tool commonly credited to Jeff Bezos and his crew: the Amazon Press Release. It does provide a great framework for Product Managers to think about the narrative and content that would define a mock press release for a new product, service, or feature when it finally hits the market. Learn more here.
One final note on slides. I love to use them as a tool to tell stories! It’s a matter of “when” and not “if.” Here’s an old trick for you to leverage before getting into slide factory mode, it’s called story/presentation outline:
- Leverage plain-text document to draft the narrative
- Define the main hypothesis and goals for the presentation
- Map out the audience, individual goals, and maybe hidden agendas out there — think about how to anticipate questions
- Write and connect headlines, as if you didn’t need support content for the story to flow
- Add notes on the type of support content you’ll need for each section
- Have the content reviewed and socialized a few rounds before pivoting to slide creation
- Budget a total of 3–5min (in terms of presentation time) for what will become a slide in the future. Ok, I’ll give you a break, cover pages and transition/agenda slides don’t necessarily count toward the total amount of time you have. However, if a presentation ends up having 10 slides and 5 of those are transition/agenda slides, there’s something wrong about it.
“Oh…but I don’t have time for that.” Brace yourself! Slide-first approaches dramatically increase the risk of getting you into “slide hell,” with an unexciting story, sections that don’t talk to each other, obsession with pixel-perfect drafts, and infinite review cycles that may likely lead you nowhere, simply because you skipped the “nail down the narrative” and “create an exciting story” parts.
Ninja Move 4. Make time for what’s really important
Pro-tip: Frequently schedule time with yourself to reflect about today and tomorrow, maybe a weekly or bi-weekly recurring meeting
Your time is the most precious asset you have and just like your career, no one should care more about it than you. Here are two golden rules to help you exercise that:
- What gets scheduled, gets done, what doesn’t…I guess you get the gist
- If you aren’t spending at least 2 hours per day thinking about “tomorrow,” you are failing yourself, your team, and your company as a leader
Pranav Khanna, who is a great mentor of mine, wrote a post on the matter: Here’s the killer app that can guarantee your products’ success. His article recognizes that Product Managers typically have a hectic schedule, and if they don’t make intentional time for what’s truly important — solving customers problems — they will always “get too caught up in the daily grind of shipping and lose the forest for the trees.”
In July 2017, Gib Biddle, former Netflix Chief Product Officer (CPO), published a Medium post, part of a 12-part Product Strategy essay, on How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting. It’s a must-read for Product Managers! Gib details how during his time at Netflix he worked with his team on making intentional time for quarterly executive product review meetings. Those meetings had a recap of the most recent state of the union for Netflix and gave Product Managers a chance to present and review their own product strategies and roadmaps, including “keep or kill” exercises on what Gib described as “board meeting for Product Managers.”
Recently, I came across a post on The dangerous rise of “crazy-busy” product managers, a helpful tool that you can use to pause for a second (or maybe for a minute) and assess what’s going on with you and your team. The post was written by Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, who, along with a few other online influencers in Tech, is known for fighting hustle porn.
One thing you should be aware is the following: when experimenting with new tools and techniques to help your teams be more focused and productive, you will fail, whoops, learn. From my experience, I’m yet to find something more frustrating for people than the feeling of wasting their time. However, if you take the pill I’m offering here, you’ll likely get it right after a couple of attempts— for what is worth, I learned that Netflix (mentioned above) has been iterating on their quarterly product review meetings for the past eleven years, so I hope this gives you some extra confidence. Again, if it could be perfectly defined by a machine, the world wouldn’t need Product Managers, so please have that in mind and experiment the heck out of it.
Ninja Move 5. Always be learning
Pro-tip: Be interested in order to become interesting
I’ll use this opportunity to answer a question that I constantly get from friends and coworkers: “How do you learn?”
One day, someone told me that “you have to be interested in learning and exploring new things in order to become an interesting person.” That really stuck with me and became my litmus test when I reflect on my recent trajectory – what I have learned – or plan for the future – what I want to learn.
In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, as part of his annual goal declaration to the world, committed to reading one book every two weeks. Since then, I adopted the same personal OKR and have been tracking how conservative or aggressive that is given my reality with work and family. Last year, I made it to 21 books and this year, as of September, I was close to finishing book #18, Competing Against Luck. Regardless of what we think of Zuckerberg these days, I thank him for setting that example and really hope to move closer to “one book per week” as a goal in the future.
In addition to setting annual OKRs related to the number of books I read, here are other important contributors:
- Formal Education (e.g. Georgetown, UVA Darden, Singularity University, and Coursera)
- Books, Audiobooks, and Podcasts (2x speed!). Pro-tip here is establishing yearly goals for a combination of books and audiobooks
- Social Media, mostly Twitter, LinkedIn, and Medium (e.g. following companies, entrepreneurs, tech influencers, and product, design, and engineering blogs)
- Technology, Business Websites, and Blogs (e.g. Techmeme, TechCrunch, HBR, Stratechery, and The Economist)
- Learning from Mentors
- Coaching Product Managers
On the last item, I have come to a realization that the process of conveying something that you know in a way that is understandable by another person is the equivalent of “learning on steroids.” Have you considered the complexity that goes in the process of learning, internalizing, and packaging knowledge to a point that you can make it simple and explainable to someone else?
We made it through the Ninja Moves! Here’s a quick recap of the five ninja moves shared above:
- Get to know you are
- Shoot for the moon
- Tell and sell that story to the world
- Make time for what’s really important
- Always be learning
If you made it through my first two Medium posts and landed here, you made my day. I mean it!
I’m considering writing more posts, so I can’t wait to hear your feedback. It only takes one minute to complete this survey and it will definitely help me along the way.
Thank you so much and be courageous, it’s a wild world out there!
Cheers, Romulo
