The four habits of impactful product managers
Habit n°3 — CRAFT
Have you heard the story of the slide that killed seven people? It isn’t a joke. In January 2003, the Columbia space shuttle missed its re-entry into the atmosphere and disintegrated, killing the seven crew members. These type of accidents are extremely unlikely, and a thorough investigation was lead to understand what caused it. In the course of the enquiry, an unexpectedly banal element surfaced: a poorly designed powerpoint slide.
Twelve days before the accident, the Columbia shuttle took off successfully, but the engineers analyzing the video noticed something strange. A piece of foam seemed to detach from the body and hit the wing area, causing damage. The image resolution on that camera was however too low to conclude on the severity of the incident, so NASA asked its team to assess whether that damage could be a threat to a safe re-entry. The Boeing engineers (who had built the shuttle) spent time and put together several reports. To summarize the conclusion of their risk assessment, the engineers chose the slide that you see below. Let’s have a look.
With this slide, the engineers meant to issue a serious warning to NASA officials about the risk of re-entry. Look again at the slide. Do you feel the risk? Do you have the impression that the life of seven men is at stake? You probably don’t. NASA officials didn’t either. They even left the room reassured: the title of the slide contains the word “conservatism” and misleads the audience about its real content. They didn’t notice the words “significant damage”, buried at the end of the seventh sub-bullet point, which was the true key message. As a result, they stopped the investigation, decided to proceed as usual for re-entry, hence missing a big opportunity to prevent the tragedy.
Crafting documents that convey clear and compelling messages is a major requirement for product managers. As most people, you probably under-estimate the difficulty of the task, and it’s linked to the way the brain functions. It’s like when you hum a song to someone and they don’t recognize it. “It goes tada, taaaa, tata,… come on! everybody knows this song!” You are persuaded that the song is easy to guess, because while you hum, your brain is simultaneously playing the song in your head. But others only hear the hum. Same goes for any type of message you try to convey: it will always look clear for you, because the supporting context is there in your brain. Overcoming this barrier is difficult but key for a product manager, and it should be a state of mind that you need to apply to everyday communication, and for which I give you two guidelines: always illustrate, always summarize.
Illustrate
We have all been in that situation. A group of people are debating the right way to build feature X. The tone of the conversation is confused. The group is far from reaching an agreement, and each time someone speaks, it sounds like they are presenting a new idea, that generates another debate. It has gone on for 45min, spirits are heated. Then one person stands up, but instead of speaking, goes to the paperboard in the corner of the room and starts drawing. Immediately, it triggers a more constructive discussion. A second person stands up, picks a different color and corrects part of the drawing, to explain where they disagreed. There are no more clarification questions, everybody is now focused on discussing a precise point, and weighing pros and cons of two clear alternatives.
People are visual, period. Spot-on illustration or images have great power. The life of a product manager is full of opportunities where you can illustrate: product flows, experiment results, risk assessments, etc. You’ll be surprised by how much people understand better what you mean, and by how much it will make them feel invited into your thought process.
Summarize
Before being a product manager, I used to work as a consultant. Like many consultants, part of the job is to prospect clients. Trying to convince someone to buy from you requires a very diverse set of skills, and I was lucky enough to be able to observe a talented manager deploying them. Among the many advice that he gave me, one really struck me and I still find it useful today for any type of communication, regardless of the context.
He said that for any presentation, I should be ready to give a 5-second, a 5-minutes or a 15-minutes version. My decks would have to reflect that structure: a compelling title that already says everything (mirroring the 5 second pitch), an executive summary that gives just the important details (mirroring the 5 minutes pitch), and then the rest which I call the supporting slides.
Why do that? Because people never give you their attention, you have to earn it. It plays out in the first seconds of any presentation or reading. In those first seconds, people are unconsciously wondering: why should I listen to you? What should I read your document? What do you want from me? Your job is to choose the most compelling answer to those questions, and to put it first, in a synthetic way, following the 5-second/5-minutes approach. Not doing it, on the other hand, puts you at risk of losing your audience’s attention immediately, and to never gain it back.
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” — Mark Twain.
Condensing information is difficult and time consuming, no doubt. But that is precisely why it has value. As a product manager, you will be exposed to a lot of complexity. A key part of your value added is to digest it, choose what to ignore, and synthesize learnings or trade-offs in a way that can be easily grasped. Taking the time to do that saves everyone else the burden of doing it by themselves and hence the risk that key information would be missed.
Reading advice about CRAFT
To get good at crafting clear and powerful messages, read Made to stick by Chip and Dan Heath. The amount of good practices that are listed in this book is insane. After reading it, you will craft better documents, specifications, presentations, and will become a better communicator overall.
If you want one example of absolutely fantastic communication, (re)watch this short clip extracted from the HBO series Chernobyl. Look at how simply and clearly they explain the functioning of a nuclear reactor. A nuclear reactor. Think of how much complexity had to be left out in order to reach such clarity — while staying true to reality. If nuclear science can be simplified that much, anything can!
Next article
Habit n°4 — CATALYZE: Ensure quality decisions and keep a lean mindset.
Previous articles
Introduction: Letter to a new PM.
Habit n°1 — CARE: Build empathy for your customers and colleagues.
Habit n°2 — CHECK: Be rooted in the reality of your product.
