The four habits of impactful product managers
Habit n°4 — CATALYZE
Four centuries ago, the Swedish navy inaugurated the Vasa, a giant two-decker warship meant to illustrate its military supremacy and help it win the ongoing war against Poland. It was a truly magnificent ship, the pride of a country. But when it set sail in the Stockholm bay, cheered by the crowd, it travelled no more than two hundred meters before losing balance, and sinking like a stone. The Swedes were very skilled and experienced shipbuilders — how could they fail so miserably?
The Vasa was originally meant to be a one-decker, with one row of cannons. The design had just been finished when the King of Sweden received word that the Polish were building a bigger, two-decker ship. For the King, it was obvious: the Vasa needed to be upgraded into a two-decker as well. The order was given and the shipbuilders abided, despite having never built a two-decker ship. Instead of starting over, they used the original design without adaptation, and added the second deck during the construction phase. The instability created by that deck combined with the unplanned weight of the second row of cannons was enough to condemn the ship.
The failure of the Vasa is the result of a poorly motivated decision: satisfying the King’s ego was deemed more important than ensuring the ship would float. But it is also a tale of lack of realism on the difficulty of building something never built before. Decision quality and lean attitude are hence the two last items that I will cover in this letter. I call their combination Catalyze in order to underline your role as an enabler of collective speed and efficiency.
Ensure quality decisions
There is a common misconception that a product manager is the “CEO of the product”, inferring that the product manager is the one calling the shots. I find this to be untrue and misleading. As a product manager, it is true that you will be in the room when decisions are taken, that you be asked to facilitate or frame many decisions, but quite often, you won’t be the decision maker. And that’s okay. Your job is to make sure that decisions are taken with a quality rationale, and at the appropriate speed. It looks hard to do that with so many experts around you, so I give you three (surprisingly easy) good practices that will get you through.
First, always make sure that everyone knows the higher level goal of the project. If you followed my CRAFT advice, you have built a 5-second version of that goal. Make sure everyone knows it, because this is the baseline: you can only align people on decisions if they are thinking of the same goal. Second, create a steering group: people who have the most valuable input, or who are the most impacted by your project, and decide everything together. Third, make sure that the group is focusing on decision criteria (how the decision will be made), instead of being obsessed with the decision maker (who is deciding). Your role in this third part is key: propose concrete criteria, create room for discussing them, and bring the group to weigh decisions against these concrete criteria.
Advocate for lean execution
Once you have ensured quality decisions, you need to pay (even more) attention to great execution. There is so much literature around turning ideas into minimum viable products that I hesitated to include anything about that in this letter. Many articles illustrate that by explaining the early days of famous startups: how Jeff Bezos started selling books online with no warehouse, how the Zalando founders would photograph shoes in physical store windows to upload them on their website, and then wait for an order before buying and shipping them by themselves, etc. There are countless such examples.
While these stories are great and inspirational, they are wrongly interpreted as things to do only when you are starting and lack budget. It is true that these stories should inspire you to overcome any lack of resources with a bit of creativity and scrappiness. But most product managers do have resources, and hence miss the other point that makes the Zalando story relevant: it shows that focusing on just one concrete problem at a time is the key to success. In that example, the core problem was to make customers comfortable about buying shoes online, without having tried them. So they focused their efforts on solving that. Why worry about the logistics of selling millions of shoes, if you haven’t convinced a single person to buy a pair?
Solving problems one at a time is at the core of the lean mindset. Don’t pile up unnecessary constraints or requirements, and encourage everyone to always keep things simple: start small, gather results, and iterate. On top of being less costly, this process is also more likely to succeed and generate actionable learnings, thanks to the increased focus on one clear problem.
Reading advice about CATALYZE
The book The lean startup perfectly explains the mindset and illustrates what is called “evidence-based product management”: start small, gather evidence, and iterate. Running lean by Ash Maurya is also a great and more practical read on the same topic.
Aligning a group and making them move forward can be uneasy when it comes to uncertain ideas. This wheel of confidence created by Itamar Gilad is an illustration of how to rank ideas according to how well they have been proven, and hence align a group on the level of effort that an idea deserves.
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.
Habit n°3 — CRAFT: Illustrate and summarize as much as you can.
