This blog has been rapidly gaining subscribers, for which I am excited and grateful. At the same time, I’m also realizing that my posts are starting to get preachy and while it’s nice to act like I always know what I’m doing, I really don’t.
When we write things down, especially for an audience, things take on a gravitas that they didn’t have when they were vegetating in our minds. That is both the power and the beauty of writing. So when I write about my product learnings, the insights were derived in hindsight. Most of the time, it only becomes clear to me what worked or didn’t work after the fact. In fact, every product guru writing a newsletter or tweeting is figuring shit out as they go—of that I’m certain. This makes me feel like less of an imposter and it should make you feel like less of one too!
In the spirit of that, I thought I’d write about some areas of the product role that I’m currently struggling with or have struggled with in the past.
- Wavering attention span
- Lack of big picture thinking
- Failing to make my presence felt
Wavering attention span
There’s various stages in the development of a product or a product feature. It usually goes something like
- Ideate
- Prioritize
- Design
- Strategize
- Test and validate
- Develop
- Launch
- Analyze post-launch
My problem is that I have a strong bias towards the stages I find more interesting (these happen to be ideation and design). As a PM with multiple features in different stages of this pipeline, I have a hard time giving every feature an equal amount of care and attention. Similarly, I have to make a conscious effort to spend enough time and energy on existing features instead of being drawn to the new and shiny ones. But in order to be a good PM, I need to be good at every stage, whether I like it or not.
Product management is called a discipline for a reason.
Lack of big picture thinking
As an early-ish PM, I spend so much time in the weeds that I neglect thinking about the bigger picture; I’m talking -insert management speak here- “blue sky thinking”. At a large company, there is an influx of good ideas, and much of the strategy and product ideation is top-down. It has become easy for me to be complacent and wait for ideas to be handed to me for execution.
As a case in point, I can’t think of a time in the past two years where I came up with a substantial change or addition to our product. Yeah, I’m good at what I was hired to do but the main reason I went to business school was to learn how to do big picture thinking! Instead, I’ve settled into my comfort zone. This is something I want to change and actively carve out time for because
a) It keeps my brain sharp
b) It helps with career progression
c) I miss doing it
Failing to make my presence felt
I have this line in my bio on Twitter.
happiest when i’m learning. i value listening over talking, and reading over writing
It’s not pithy bullshit I promise, I truly feel this way. But I don’t think this works for me career wise. I was reading an article earlier this week called “How to get promoted” which is a mercenary but honest take on well… how to get promoted.
In corporate America the lion’s share of this signaling is done through proselytizing management technologies. Going to meetings, talking about KPIs, OKRs, collaboration, Agile— all are shibboleth to signal you’re part of the in-group
My usual modus operandi in meetings when invited as an attendee is to listen carefully, offer my opinion if and when asked, and only speak if I have something essential to say. This automatically puts me in the out-group, because the share of participation in a meeting is proportional to the seniority of the person in question, especially when it’s PMs and engineers.
And this isn’t because I’m shy or not confident; it’s because I don’t like talking when I have nothing useful to say, which might seem like a bold contrarian stand, but it’s really to my own detriment. People forget I exist in the context of a project, which manifests itself in not getting credit for my work, and being excluded from email threads and meeting invites. None of it is due to bad intent, but out of sight, out of mind holds good here.
I was complaining about this to a friend a while ago and we brainstormed solutions. The best I came up with without fundamentally changing my behavior was that I should aim to speak at every one-third interval of time during a meeting. So for example, in a 30-minute meeting, I should say something once every 10 minutes. I don’t think it matters what I say as long as it reminds people I was there. TBD on how this works because I have been procrastinating for far too long on trying this because it sounds awful. If you the reader have any ideas, please drop me a comment.
That’s about it honestly. Every PM role at every level has its ups and downs, and we all have our own strengths and weaknesses. I think the main step is to recognize you have a problem, which in my case feels easier than fixing it! I do believe I’m a pretty decent PM but I have a long way to go in order to a be a great one.
Hi Nikitha, one way as a PM to talk every 10 minutes is to ask questions or ask for clarifications or examples even when you think they are not needed by you. For example, you could say “Do you mean…” and more. I believe that will help kickstart conversations that end in your favour. Cheers!