Consulting
- Who’s the intended audience?
- What do I want them to take away from this?
- What would be the outcome if this was published on the Internet?
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Clarity: Externalizing our thinking forces us into organization and coherence. We often discover the gaps in our logic or unspoken assumptions as unexpected gaps and whitespace on the page.
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Communication: What do we do as product managers? We radiate information with the goal of creating a shared understanding. Externalized thinking becomes the seeds for other artifacts that can eventually be shared with team members, stakeholders, and clients.
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Iteration: Externalized thinking is by definition a tangible object. It can be interacted with, critiqued, and improved upon. Iteration is a fundamental driver of innovation.
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Memory Aid: Modern neuroscience informs us that our brains are quite fallible and most often concerned with conserving energy instead of retaining and processing information. Externalization serves as a physical extension of our memory. It allows us a mechanism to offload information and free up our limited cognitive resources.
- Draw smart people together to discuss opportunities.
- Listen more than you speak.
- Take notes and share them.
- Review your notes.
- Look backwards and forwards in the calendar.
- Triage all the new inputs.
- Identify new opportunities.
- Repeat!
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The diagnosis - framing the challenge
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The guiding policy - the approach to dealing with the issues in the diagnosis
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Coherent Actions - the actions, resource commitments, and policies needed to carry out the guiding policy
I am reminded (yet again!) that I always need to be clarifying, repeating, and doing what can feel like over-explaining in the moment.
It really, really does save time, reduce friction, and end up building trust.
Your product is not for everyone. This is a totally acceptable state of affairs.
Define your personas. Know who the product is for and - equally important - who it’s not for.
BONUS: This will also help you figure out how to talk with them about the value you’re creating.
“But we’ve always done it this way!”
Some of the most frightening words to hear… but so very ripe with opportunities.
Listen, listen, listen to your clients - but remember: they’re experts in their problems, not your solutions.
Your job is not to build what users ask for but to understand why they’re asking for it.
Don’t wait for the perfect moment to reach out - build your network consistently.
Don’t just ask for favors - add value whenever you can.
The relationships you cultivate today will shape your tomorrow.
Everyone expects you to be dependable.
Everyone expects you to know what you’re talking about.
Exceeding expectations is hard - and it gets harder to repeat as expectations rise over time.
But it is SUCH a powerful way to build a relationship with your customers.
As I write this, it’s early Monday morning and - reminder - now is the best time to go ahead block some uninterrupted Focus Time on your calendar for the week ahead.
As a knowledge worker your thinking is your primary product. Tackling complex tasks effectively requires dedicated time and space.
When working on a new roadmap, here are my 3 starter questions:
The needs of your audience and the realities of the market environment should shape the content.
The power of externalizing your thinking
As product managers - really as any sort of knowledge worker - we often find ourselves caught up in a swirling vortex of new market information, emerging strategies, client requests, and shifting priorities.
I’ve always found the simple habit of externalizing my thinking - whether through writing or in visual representations - to be an effective means of cutting through this noise.
So why should you bother to externalize your thoughts?
Remember: your goal isn’t to create a masterpiece here.
The power lies in the process. By making your thinking tangible, you’re improving your own understanding AND creating the opportunity for collaboration, refinement, and innovation.
Repeat after me: Words like “users” and “clients” and “customers” are describing actual human beings.
Understand their goals, their needs, their hopes, and their pains.
And how do you do that? Empathy.
Maintain transparent communication with your team, your stakeholders, and your clients.
Write things down and share them.
Close open loops.
Meet as often as necessary to stay engaged and coordinated.
Clear communication reduces misunderstandings and maintains alignment.
“Let our advance worrying become our advance thinking and planning.”
—Winston Churchill
#Quotes
This is a generative cycle:
Remember: “Mistakes” are inevitable. They’re how we discover what does or doesn’t work (albeit sometimes quite viscerally).
It’s how we respond to mistakes that defines our success.
Some of the best advice I ever received from a manager:
“Hope? I get to ‘hope’. You need a plan.”
Make sure you always have a plan.
“Listening is the engine of ingenuity. It’s difficult to understand desires and detect problems, much less develop elegant solutions, without listening.”
-Kate Murphy (no relation 😁)
#Quotes
“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
-Paul Graham
#Quotes
“The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?”
-Charles Duhigg
#Quotes
A good strategy (according to Rumelt) has 3 parts:
Strategy is a cohesive response to an important challenge (Richard Rumelt).
This is a phenomenal distillation of the concept.