Product Bugle - 17 June
Think Big. Start Smart. Take Stock. Don't stop. Plus: a bit of a book review; and a bit of truly great British TV.
And the essay topic for this week is..
The mantra: “Thing Big. Start Small” and then either “Learn” or “Scale” Fast wins the prize, I believe, for the buzz phrase with the most books to its name.
There’s a lot I’ve always liked about it. In fact, I was going to write something all about it this week. But the more I’ve been thinking, the more I realised it didn’t quite ring true.
My trigger for this was the Lenny’s podcast with Shreyas Doshi that I referred to last week, where he talked about Impact; Optics and Execution and the danger of ROI thinking - and how it can always lead you to ‘quick wins’. I’ve also been nudged into thinking about this by the chapter on Agile in Matt LeMay’s Product Management in Practice (great book: see below for a review).
I’ve also had a number of conversations this week with people needing to scale up product teams. They know what a great team will look like - but where do they start? what do do first?
I have no problem with ‘Thinking big’. As it says in Amazon’s leadership principles (of which Think Big is one):
“Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results”.
Can’t argue with that. Whatever you work on, if you don’t start by thinking big - by defining what truly great looks like - then you are effectively heading off without a compass.
But ‘Start Small’ doesn’t really work for me. I get the point that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step". It’s great to think big, but have to break. your big ambition into achievable pieces. But which single step? What do you do first?
The problem with doing a small thing first, and then another small thing is that the cumulative effort can often be, well, a lot of small things. There’s no guarantee it’ll really help you scale fast; and you might be learning quickly - but there isn’t really a whole lot to learn.
Starting Small is too easily tied to Execution: what we can ship quickly to show we’re making progress. And in our enthusiasm to do something, there’s the risk that we don’t launch half a product, but a half-assed product. (I think this is now my favourite thing to quote, after ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face’).
But we also need to think about Impact and Optics: What we can ship to really make a dent on our big goal? what blocker can we get out the way? or what can we do to show that our big plan is totally credible?
Here’s an example - organisational rather than a product one. At Sky we realised that although we had lots of product managers, we didn’t have much in the way of a formal definition of what product management at Sky really meant. As a result lot of the mechanisms you associate with a mature job family (such as they had in Finance/ Marketing etc) didn’t exist.
It was pretty easy to come up with a vision/ big statement about how awesome we wanted the team to be. And to come up with the long list of things we needed to do to bring that to life: levelling guidelines; promotion process; clarity about what good looked like; training/ mentoring; recruitment processes. But where to start?
The ‘start small’ idea was a lightweight training idea. We felt we could use expertise within the team to rustle up a set of basic self-guided materials or a program of virtual brown bags (this was during one lockdown or other) to get people to share expertise. We could do it quickly and cheaply and it would be useful. But when we thought about it, there was nothing really wrong with this, but it didn’t really achieve a whole lot. It was half-assed.
The smart idea was actually to tackle our promotion process. Harder and bigger: because more people needed to be involved (including Finance and HR) and there was more at stake; but it was also more Impactful and had better Optics because: 1) it was a positive change (promotions became more transparent and fairer); 2) In order to do it we had to solve things like Levelling guidelines along the way - which are essential but not something to get excited by in their own right; and 3) It gave credibility to the program because it was solving something we knew was a real problem for our teams.
So within three months we had a completely new promotion process: and everything needed to support it; and we had the first people successfully promoted as a result of the process. The consequence that the ‘Product Management @ Sky’ program (not the most imaginative name, I admit) suddenly became seen as a force for good, not just, at best, good intentions.
So your first win! At this stage there’s always a danger you can give yourself a dislocated shoulder from repeatedly patting yourself on the back ; or you can just charge on to whatever you had next on your list (move fast!).
But here’s where you pause. Take Stock and get ready to go again: ‘What did this really teach us?’ / ‘Should we be more ambitious, or less next time?’ / ‘What should we do differently’? / Have we given credibility to our vision…or do we sactually need to go back to the drawing board’.
Above all though - you Don’t stop. Too often, events take over and the next big thing comes along. It helps that our firs thing was actually of substance; but like cumulative interested, greatness is something that builds through persistent effort over time.
Mini book review: Matt LeMay’s Product Management in Practice
So, I read this book this week. And, as you can see, took a few notes.
There’s no shortage of books on product management: lots of them good. Most tread the same ground in slightly different ways, and focus on how product management should work rather than how it actually does work. The result is that you read them and to paraphrase the quote from above - they’re like the plan you have before you get punched in the face.
Matt’s book (and this is a heavily revised second edition) is very different; very much based in the real world of product management: where you’re in the middle of everything, your role is often ill defined.
With humour and self-deprecation, he walks through the day to day experience of being a PM and how you deal with the delights we all know so well: demanding stakeholders, last minute executive requests, passive aggressive colleagues, our own defensiveness, being asked to come up with a product strategy - even though no-one can quite tell you what a product strategy really is and, and…well you know how it is. It’s engaging and useful in equal measures.
A lot of the guidance isn’t really specific to product management: but just good general advice on how to be effective in any organisation (‘When communicating: go for clarity over comfort’). There’s also a great section on remote working; a bullshit-free section on Agile (he’s written a separate book on that); and one of the best chapters I’ve read on stepping up into management. Oh - and a great set of references/ further reading in the back.
So yes….totally recommended.
Also…
End of the milennial lifestyle subsidy: Clever take on why Uber etc is going to be getting more expensive from now on.
Active listening for Product Managers: from the team at Producthead - can’t agree more with the need for this.
Good product managers Drive Clarity: I think this is an improvement on my description of ‘Reducing Ambiguity’
10 product review mistakes: From Deb Liu, Ancestry CEO. I’m proud to say I’ve made all 10.
Is Google’s LaMDA Sentient? : This is the interview that kicked the whole excitement off.
A short history of tech predictions: From the NYT aka: Why Pokemon Go didn’t change the world.
A living room on a skateboard?: How the move to electric might fundamentally change the design of cars
Why do all those features exist? Also from the NYT: ‘Why do companies keep adding functions that are handy for a tiny number of people and ignored by the rest?
The case for mindful cursing: The benefits of constructive swearing.
TV talk
Can’t say enough good things about Sherwood from the BBC. 40 years on from the miner’s strike set in a Nottinghamshire (where many of the miners actually stayed at work) village, there are two murders. It’s by the spectacularly talented James Graham (who also did ‘Quiz’), and is pitch perfect in terms of setting, characters, dialogue and plot. And the scheduling trick of putting it on Monday and Tuesday nights, and not letting you binge the whole lot is also just the right amount of suspense.
If I have time - will be getting round to the Lazarus project over the weekend. Oh, and Love Island…Ekin Su!!! Play with monopoly, not with me!
Worth a listen
I’ve mentioned it briefly before but Unreal: A critical history of reality TV is really good work.
And that’s it for another week..
Hope you enjoy the glorious weather/ can tolerate the heat…as always, feel free to share! And feedback is always welcome!