Writing
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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.
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When capturing an next action, it’s vague and not fully actionable (e.g. “Goat” instead of “Milk the goat”)
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I’m not breaking down larger tasks into smaller, actionable steps. (This leaves gigantic, utterly untenable icebergs floating around within my todo list.)
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I don’t always determine the context for working a given action item. Instead, I try again and again to combine contexts and projects into a single list, thinking that this reduces complexity and friction. (It does not.)
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When I capture a next action, I sometimes fail to set a deadline. Tasks linger longer than necessary on the list (e.g. “Water the geranium” instead of “Water the geranium by 8:30am every other day”)
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When I capture a next action, I sometimes set an entirely arbitrary deadline for it. I think that this will help prioritize my work or motivate me. (It fails to do so.)
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I’m not capturing everything - all the things - into a single, trusted system. One telltale sign: piles of yellow sticky notes begin to stack up around the edges of my workspace.
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I’m not routinely scanning through all my disconnected notes for outstanding next actions / dangling tasks at the end of the work day.
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I’m not consistently making time for a comprehensive weekly review of everything. (And then I lose trust in what I’ve captured.)
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I don’t spend enough time ruminating within the Someday/Maybe list.
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I don’t always start each day by scanning through my lists of next actions and prioritizing. (Which means sometimes I spend time on less important things for entirely arbitrary reasons.)
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I don’t keep a standalone list of all my personal and professional projects updated. Where is all my energy going? (I’m doing work - but am I working on the the most meaningful, impactful things?)
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I don’t fully articulate what success / completion looks like for all of my projects. (How does my brain know it can stop thinking about this stuff?)
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I rarely celebrate - or even acknowledge - my progress, the series of smaller wins throughout the day, the week, the year.
- the Apple IIe - that appeared in the library of my elementary school, one of only a handful in the entire rural county
- a pre-release NeXT cube - that was demoed to a small group of professors at a local college (I got my invite because I was dating the daughter of one of the professors)
- an original Amazon Kindle tablet - that a coworker handed me with a smirk while passing in the hallway at work one day
- it exists outside the pages of a sci-fi novel
- it’s available for sale in retail stores
- Watching a 3D movie on a giant screen that appeared to float just above the surface of a mountain lake underneath a star-filled sky, noticing the reflections of the movie and sky in the ripples of the virtual waves
- The exact moment the dinosaur breaks the fourth wall, stepping through the virtual window and interacting with you directly
- A singer (Alicia Keys, it turns out) singing to you directly during a rehearsal in a studio space
- the 3D video of a happy child blowing out the candles on their birthday cake and collapsing into giggles on a sofa
- You need to dream about the future and what sort of changes will be beneficial.
- You need to make decisions, even in the face of uncertainty and doubt.
- You need to encourage otherwise individual contributors to rally together towards a shared goal.
- standalone learning projects (both guided and unguided)
- weekly and monthly coding challenges for students
- a blog
- a certification process
- and a data science career/job-hunting section.
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All learning activities are delivered via a web browser or app. No additional software needs to be purchased, installed, or configured so there’s little friction to start learning.
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Each topic is divided into a series of lessons and exercises.
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Individual lessons are delivered via instructor-led videos, all of which were clear and concise (not lasting more than 6 minutes).
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Several interactive exercises are paired with each lesson and serve to reinforce the new concepts. All of these were either writing entirely new lines of original code or filling in the blanks in different python samples. And if you should stumble on an exercise, several hints are available - as well as the final answer. This approach gently moves the student from a passive learner to an active practitioner.
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Learning tracks are a series of progressively more complicated topics, interspersed with projects. These standalone projects provide opportunities to directly apply lessons using examples that mirror real-world scenarios. If parts of the project are difficult for you, there are links directly back into previous lessons for more practice.
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When you successfully complete all the work within a Learning Track, you have the option of taking additional tests to achieve a certification. This is a useful credential for showcasing your expertise to both peers and employers (which I ultimately decided not to pursue).
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.
No. It’s really not your To Do app’s fault.
Let’s talk about anti-patterns in productivity, shall we?
I’m a semi-reformed addict of trying out new productivity apps.
Do I still hear that sweet, sweet siren call of the perfect To Do app - the one that will FINALLY make me perfectly productive and organized?
I confess that I do… but these days I manage to resist it just a bit better.
Whenever I feel that familiar tug, that my current To Do app is utterly and completely failing me and I need to try something new, it’s normally because one (or more) of these anti-patterns has crept into my life:
To summarize:
When it seems like my software is at fault, sometimes it ’s because I’m being inconsistent. I’m not reviewing things as often as needed. I’m generally not thinking enough about the work to be done, the value I expect it to generate, or the opportunities I need to explore.
And sadly, no software tooling can compensate for this.
Apple Vision Pro demo
I feel so lucky to have received a few early glimpses of the future in my life.
I mention this because I found myself with some extra time to kill at the local mall and got a demo of the new Apple Vision Pro. I confidently place this experience in the very same category as all these other events. Even after a few weeks of reflection, I still consider the Vision Pro to be a watershed moment, an actual quantum leap beyond the desktop computing paradigm.
The Vision Pro utterly transcends what Engelbart and Xerox PARC birthed back in the 1970s and 80’s. While wearing them, virtual windows appear to effortlessly hang in the air all around you. Old two-dimensional “flat” photos and Safari browser pages were rendered at a high enough resolution that they seemed “real.” The fonts on these virtual pages are as smooth and easy to read as a sheet of laser printed paper. And all the windows stay perfectly frozen in place, wherever they are placed inside that virtual space. The verisimilitude of the experience is flawless.
Throughout the demo, I just kept repeating variations of how difficult it is to believe that:
There were several remarkable, evocative moments:
Apple is quite justified in asking where else might you find a comparable experience for the same (or lower) price point here.
It’s presently too expensive for most anyone other than early adopters and the technologists that are building new solutions on top of it, however.
And that means, after only a handful of months on the market, it still only fulfills a limited number of usecases. Sales appear to have cooled.
Jason Snell’s thoughts on calling it a “flop” at this point exactly mirror my own lived experience with technology.
It’s important to remember that this is the very first version. Every version after this will be lighter, faster, and generally more feature-rich.
Future versions of the Vision Pro will transform education, entertainment, video games, communication… quite a bit of what we think of as “computing” today will change.
Very, very promising.
The 7 Obsessions of the Successful Product Manager
Sometimes people ask me what it’s like being a product manager or how to be a particularly good one.
This is the advice I generally share, the 7 obsessions that I believe a product manager channels into success during their careers.
1. Customer Obsession
“The key is to set realistic customer expectations, and then not just to meet them, but to exceed them - preferably in unexpected and helpful ways.” -Sir Richard Branson
Before you try to create, do your level best to understand. This is the frustratingly simple truth at the core of all product management activities.
It’s why embracing a deep and abiding empathy for your fellow humans is so fundamentally important to our profession.
You need to know your customers.
You need to dive deeply into their world. Apply zealous ethnography. Listen to them as much as possible. Pore over their user surveys, chats, and feedback.
(Remember: whenever you’re not solving a real problem for your clients, you’re just building a very fancy paperweight.)
2. Data Obsession
“Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay!” –Sherlock Holmes
Data should be your compass as much as possible.
You need to seek the truth that lies buried inside the data. Dig into the qualitative and quantitative. Pay close attention to the compelling stories that data tells. Consider the thorny questions raised by data.
Hypothesize. Experiment. Discover.
This is how you gain clarity through the fog of uncertainty - one data point at a time.
(Remember: you will almost never have all of the data you need.)
3. Collaboration Obsession
“I like people who are working on practical things and who are working in teams. It’s not so important to get the glory. It’s much more important to get something that works. It’s a better way to live.” -Freeman Dyson
You’re standing at the intersection of a passionate group of problem solvers. By default, grant the sincerity that every one of them wants to solve interesting problems and generally make the world a better place.
You’re the glue holding the whole thing together.
Build the bridges. Flatten silos. Burn impediments to ash.
Foster an environment where ideas flow freely and every team member feels like the proverbial superhero-rockstar-pirate-ninja types.
4. Prioritization Obsession
”Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” -Peter Drucker
The ideas for things to do will crash over you like a tidal wave.
Prioritization is the art of curation within this environment of seemingly infinite possibilities.
In this perpetual exercise, you will continually seek to estimate the relative impact, risk, and value of all the work to be done sitting in your backlog.
It’s your choice what the team focuses upon. This is how product’s evolve and change over time. This directly shapes the Future with a Capital F.
Prioritize ruthlessly in alignment with your product vision.
5. Agile / Auto-didactic Obsession
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” -Ferris Bueller
The 21st century marketplace is actually moving at warp speed. It’s exactly the bored researcher with his thumb pressed on fast-forward that William Gibson wrote about in Neuromancer.
Embrace the fact that there’s now so much change happening that everyone is essentially a perpetual newbie.
You need to keep learning to discover what’s new, what’s changed, what are the new opportunities or risks. You need to keep learning to stay ever so slightly ahead of the curve.
You need to willingly embrace change.
Stay nimble. Pivot whenever needed - and ideally based upon data generated by experiments. Stay nimble.
(Think more swarm of low-cost drones here and less gigantic aircraft carriers.)
6. Resilience obsession
“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” -Marcus Aurelius
Spoiler alert: There will be bumps along the way. Big, angry, soul-scorching bumps.
And yes, you will sometimes be discouraged.
Your experiments will fail. You will make bad decisions. You will communicate poorly. Your collaboration will be regretfully subpar.
But here’s the thing… what Marcus Aurelius wrote is exactly correct. Every apparent setback actually holds the seeds for moving forwards. Every stumble is just the setup for a big comeback.
Stay tough. Learn as fast as you can. Don’t repeat mistakes.
7. Agency obsession
“Custodiant incendo” (Keep moving forwards.)
I’ve already touched on this a few times.
What’s the common thread here? These are all action verbs, not nouns.
As a product manager, you’re not solely reacting to circumstance. You’re proactively driving forward momentum.
Seize the initiative. Actively explore possible solutions. Anticipate the challenges.
Always keep moving forwards.
And thank you to Audri Ordelt for her feedback on an early draft of this post.
There are no silver bullets
“Every tool you use impacts your abilities while using that tool. It increases some capabilities while decreasing others.
For example, a chimp fishing for ants with a stick can’t use her hand for another purpose while holding that stick.”
-David Kadavy
Tools perform specific functions, ideally useful ones.
Good tools perform their functions efficiently and are often cheaper, faster, simpler, and/or better than alternatives.
Great tools are transformative. Notable examples include sharpened stones, metal lathes, maps, and alphabets.
The proverbial hammer is great for driving steel nails into wood. But even the best hammer can’t help if the blueprints are wrong.
You say you want your product managers to write better user stories? Changing your word processor won’t help much.
Tools don’t magically fix broken processes, dysfunctional leadership, misaligned incentives, or training gaps.
See also:
90 Hours of Python with DataCamp: a review
In which I discover DataCamp, start learning Python, hit the Wall, and remind myself that learning new things can be hard
“Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” ― Jake the Dog (Adventure Time)
I.
Once upon a slow weekend, the word “DataCamp” abruptly leapt back into the front of my brain.
I had first heard it muttered by a group of data analysts who were keen on employing it to hone their SQL expertise.
Me? I wanted to learn more about how machine learning really works. Curiosity abruptly piqued and suddenly flush with noradrenaline, I decided to check it out for myself.
Navigating through the newly downloaded DataCamp app on my phone, I was greeted with the choice of a learning pathway. I opted for the ‘Data Scientist with Python' track which promised (paraphrasing here)
“We can definitely teach you all about machine learning. There’s just one thing. We need to teach you… 20-ish other things first."
And so I embarked on the first ‘Introduction to Python' course and - after completing the very first lesson right there on my phone - the app said (and again paraphrasing here):
“Nicely done! But - sadly - that’s all you get right now. Come back tomorrow and we’ll give you a little more.”
I came back tomorrow.
In fact, I came back each day for an uninterrupted week in order to get that tiny dose of dopamine-laced learning. And if I could complete 7 days worth of lessons in a row - why, what was stopping me from doing it for 358 more days?
I purchased an annual subscription which granted unlimited access to the entire library of coursework and - most importantly - enabled me to complete more than one lesson per day.
If I hadn’t need to print an invoice for reimbursement, I’m not sure how long it might have taken me to figure out that there was a DataCamp.com website too. Discovering that an invoice wasn’t possible through the app, I browsed out to the website and was delighted - and almost immediately overwhelmed - by the myriad amount of additional educational content available to me:
It’s all impressive stuff and I can’t help but think some of it should probably have been at least hinted at somewhere within the app.
I quickly finished the Intermediate Python class and tried my first guided project which concerned analyzing Netflix data. This proved to be quite the struggle. I found myself doing lots of googling and experimenting while trying to figure out how to do all things that I had ostensibly learned previously.
This first project was a real application of the content from the first two modules. I came out of it feeling both very accomplished and quite humbled.
II.
I started working on the “Data Manipulation with Pandas” course - and that’s when I slammed face first into the Wall.
The lesson videos started showing increasingly complex Python commands and data analysis concepts, in nearly linear relationship to how it was increasingly difficult to keep it all straight in my head.
And this is when the ever-present Voice of Resistance started its seductive whispers: “You are discouraged because perhaps this is all just too complex for you to handle - at the moment. You’ll be able to focus more later when you have more time. Just drop it for now…”
I took a brief break and I realized that I hadn’t bothered to jot down even a single note during a lesson to help organize my thinking or jog my memory about the concepts. I was still essentially winging it every time I sat down.
And so I discovered what Google Collab is and immediately started taking notes in it. (NOTE: DataCamp also introduced a built-in notebook feature, in-line with the rest of the learning experience. Like I mentioned earlier: you really don’t need to install or configure anything else to use this.)
I adjusted my thinking:
“I am discouraged because I’ve been presented an entirely new concept for the first time in a five minute long video which I have watched only once… without taking notes… and I haven’t instantly mastered it. Is this realistic? It is not.”
I would remind myself of this, re-adjusting my thinking over and over again, while completing the rest of the learning track.
It took approximately 90 hours, 25 courses, and 1308 exercises from start to finish.
TL;DR
Your time is precious and DataCamp is an effective, highly affordable educational platform for learning data science. From start to finish, I went from filthy Python casual to actually tuning machine learning model hyperparameters.
It’s really remarkable. Highly recommended.