Want to be a better product manager? There are myriad articles, books, videos and training courses that promise to make you the king of the roadmap, queen of product discovery / lean UX, and effective jack of all product management trades. Many of them are indeed useful, but they aren’t always much fun. To lighten the learning load, while picking up some genuine enlightenment, I’d recommend diving into Taskmaster, a comedy series on UKTV channel Dave (and via on-demand). Sounds nuts? Read on…
(Full disclosure: I have no affiliation with UKTV, Dave or this programme. I just really like it.)
At the heart of a great deal of product work is problem-solving (this is also true of the wider design and development process, but let’s use product as shorthand for the whole team). Taskmaster illustrates, often in hilarious fashion, how many different ways there are for human beings to solve (or completely fail to solve) the exact same problem. Here are some of the themes I noticed, which can be applied to non-comedy situations as well.
If a solution to a customer problem exists, why invent a new one?
In series two (episode five), the contestants are charged with getting a pile of items into a shopping trolley at the other side of a shallow ‘river’. It’s amazing how the focus of the tasks narrows their field of vision. Doc Brown is the classic example. While Katherine Ryan rolls up the goodies in the deflated airbed and carries them around to the trolley (over a nearby bridge), Doc frantically throws them across to the other side. Some make it, others land in the river. He crashes through the river holding the others and fills the trolley, then looks up and says ‘There’s a ******* bridge there’. And then ‘there’s another bridge there’ — as indeed there are. He was so focused on solving the immediate problem, he literally didn’t look up and see two simple solutions to the question of how to cross the river.
As hilarious as the task is (and the Richard Osman meltdown with the trolley is well worth watching), it does highlight the need to really look around for existing products that address the same user need before you commit time and cost to development. You may well have a better solution (being first to market is no guarantee of staying at the top) in which case there’s a great business case to be made. But make sure you’re aware of what’s out there, and what it would take to get users to switch, before you dive in.
Your rival may have a bigger budget
Series three of Taskmaster is dominated by money — Al Murray’s money, to be precise. If it’s possible to gain an advantage by throwing cash at the issue, he’s pulling out his wallet and doing just that. In episode one, a challenge is issued to see how far you can propel a pea, and have it finish up on a red carpet (laid out in the garden), within 20 minutes. Sara Pascoe takes the honourable approach and turns out to be an amazing pea-thrower, but Al Murray romps away with the win after propelling the pea onto the carpet, then taking them both on a cab ride to see how far they can travel in 20 minutes. Eighteen miles, it turns out.
There are many cunning solutions to user problems, but it’s also realistic to sit back and look at who you are up against. Industries are disrupted by lower-budget start-ups (Uber, AirBnB and WhatsApp undercut the taxi, hotel and SMS markets respectively) but it’s different to simply take someone on head-to-head if they have a massively disproportionate budget. Is there any point in trying to build a social network to take on Facebook? Or is there a user need that’s not being served within the existing products which can be developed into a viable product of its own? Market research is vital; who is out there, what do they do well (and badly), and what are users indicating that they actually need? A great idea, backed by research, may well trump a massive budget.
Don’t just look at what is in front of you
One of the most telling tasks was in series two. In episode five, the contestants were in a small, white room with a table on it. The table featured a tableau with a river, and the task was to make a bridge that could support a potato, ‘using only the materials on the table’, which were a fairly random and unhelpful selection of items. On the wall behind them, fairly high up, was a sign. Nobody looked around to see the sign, even though they pressed the button which made it light up. And, crucially, nobody looked underneath the table, where a selection of construction materials had been attached. Not one of them.
It’s really hard to resist the urge to dive in and find a solution as soon as a problem is presented. Strong discipline, and creative minds, are needed to literally or figuratively step back, review the entire situation and available resources, and then proceed. Is there actually a problem? If so, how do you best generate multiple possible solutions (for this, Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree could be a good starting point)? And which one should be tested first?
Ask questions
Sometimes, finding out more information than you’re initially presented with can make a massive difference to how you proceed. This is particularly true when presented with a request for an output (“We want you to build us an app”) rather than an outcome or goal (“We are seeing low engagement rates for users on mobile and we’d like to increase them by 50%”).
Following up on a request in order to find out what the actual goal is, and what if any restrictions are in place about how to achieve it, found its way into multiple Taskmaster tasks. Richard Osman, in series four, almost never said ‘Your time starts…Now’ until he’d actual done some thinking about the task, or in some cases started working on the solution (many of them have a very limited time for completion). When faced in series four, episode one, with the need to knock rubber ducks off a fence (more fun than it sounds), Hugh Dennis’ question about whether he could move the ducks closer to the point where he had to stand was crucial to winning the task.
Ask for help
In series two, Katherine Ryan proved the value of remembering that you can ask for help when you’re stuck. When faced in episode one with getting three exercise balls to stay on top of a yoga mat that was itself at the top of a windy hill, she roped in passers-by to hold onto two of them while she retrieved the other. If only she’d actually run rather than strolled, the task would have been hers! In the same episode, she won a task based on getting information from a Swedish person who could not speak to the contestants in English. Katherine’s solution? Phone a Danish friend and get a live translation.
During product development, it’s vital to gather information and expertise from as many places as are appropriate. There may be experts in other teams, customers who know a product frighteningly well, feedback coming into customer services or external resources that can teach you and team valuable information or skills. Every problem doesn’t have to be solved within the existing team, and it’s not a sign of weakness to reach out to others.
Work as a team
Occasionally, the Taskmaster hands out group tasks and the egos, sorry contestants, have to try and work together. When it works, the results are amazing – scary stop-motion videos about potatoes, efficient navigation without the use of English and surreal tickle-stools emerged as a result of under-pressure teamwork. Mel G and Hugh Dennis were particularly effective as a team, perhaps in part because they have been friends since university.
Working as a team isn’t always easy though. Without a shared goal and clear communication, things can go horribly wrong. For a fantastic example, watch series four, episode five. Joe Lycett, Lolly Adefope and Noel Fielding are put into a team for a task. Each of the comedians has an individual goal (one to put items in the bath, another to fill the bath with water, and one to put clingfilm over the bath), but they are supposed to work together. Because they don’t talk to each other about what they are trying to do and why, they constantly undermine each other (one putting items in the bath while another tries to wrap it in clingfilm and throws the items out) and ultimately fail. It’s hilarious, but also a stark reminder of why, if you want a team to work together, you have to make sure they have a shared understanding of the goals. ‘We should have told each other our tasks,’ says Joe at the end. Perhaps indeed.
Think outside the box. Like really, really far outside the box. Or hire people who do
When I grow up, I’d like Noel Fielding’s imagination. (Maybe just for a few hours a day). He didn’t win every task, but his approach was always unconventional, and often surprisingly effective. In the very first episode of series four, his method for destroying a cake was to put it in a washing machine. When faced with drawing a caricature, he used the chopping board rather than the paper because ‘it felt more natural’. His ringtone-based dance with Alex has to be seen (in series four, episode four) was somewhere between beautiful and disturbing.
Noel wasn’t the only one to think outside the proverbial box; doing so was often the key to success. Mel G, in series four, episode six, won the task to ‘Put a toy camel through the smallest gap’ using a trip to a local Baby Gap while others massacred it with scissors. Genius.
Having someone around who can suggest solutions that might not occur to everyone can be a great way to come up with products and features that really do something different. Managing that kind of imagination without ending up with frustration all round is a challenge, but there’s likely to be a lot of fun along the way.
More lessons to learn
There are no doubt lots of other lessons to be taken from Taskmaster (and possibly more high-brow sources) but these were the ones that stood out for me. Suggestions welcome for others, especially if any emerge in series five!
