The six contrarian principles of Product Management
Trade secrets experienced PMs have learned the hard way, but won’t give away on “X” because it doesn’t generate likes.
Clarifications: 1) the bombastic title is a deliberate tactic to counter the dominion of Product pundits on social media, 2) none of the below ideas should be controversial, it’s the PM discipline as framed from my own viewpoint, 3) I wrote this, not AI.
Okay. Let’s fantasize, for a second, that the Product Management collective has succeeded in formulating a “Product Maturity” coefficient, which measures an organization’s effectiveness in transforming opportunities into measurable 👊🏻 impact on customers and business.
However this mythical metric is to be defined, most product teams fail, some miserably, at it. This includes everyone: from traditional, late-coming, party-crashing organisations with an ambition to be lean, on one end of the scale, to streamlined and truly agile organisations that face growth-engendered challenges as they scale, on the other end.
On average, they struggle to find causality between actions they take (hiring, training, process definition, reorgs) and their score at this coefficient. Regardless of intent, they struggle and set camp at the mid-field. Sure, they 🚢 ship products, but at high 🥵 waste and high soul-erosion.
How can product teams, troubled with constraints, pressured by the relentless demand for results, armoured in fragile virtue, navigate these dreadful waters and come out victorious at the other end?
I offer six principles I’ve collected through experiences working in lean organisations, organisations that want to be lean but aren’t, and organisations that aren’t even trying, that can help product teams stay creative, operationally efficient, and build better products with less waste.
- Be fun
- Be wrong
- Do less
- Hire less
- Organize less
- Use the force
Yep. Trust me on this.
1. Be fun
PMs just wanna have fun, lol.
For some, “fun” means solving really hard problems alongside great people. For others, it’s the ability to focus intensely on a problem, and not the tools. For many, it’s about learning and improving their skills, which in turn may result in recognition and reward. For most, surely, it’s any manifestation of endorphins in response to our 👩🏻🎨 craft.
As Jacob said:
“There is one gift above all others that makes man unique among the animals, and that’s his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill.” — Jacob Bronowski, author of arguably the best science series (after Cosmos, of course), The Ascent of Man.
When environmental settings prevent us from completing the creative synthesis in a resource-effective way, we stop having fun, we stop caring. Usually, it comes from a lack of communication or trust between teams and team members, lack of clarity in goals, lack of access to resources, lack of recognition, or a combination thereof.
Fun is not banal. It’s critical. Fun fuels culture. As companies grow and startups scale, the lack of fun will invariably limit output by eroding the collective emotional glue that binds people together to do their greatest work. Lest we forget the abysmal gap in productivity the same person can show when highly motivated to pursue a goal, versus when bored to death by unjustifiable toil or the wrong set of conditions.
It is your responsibility to find the reasons for this. You can rely on 1:1s, exchange sessions, team surveys, or any other means to figure out what’s wrong, and what’s preventing people from being at their best. You have to reach out and connect with the humans. Listen attentively. Listen! And explain. Don’t assume the team knows what to do and why. Rally them around, ask for feedback, run retros. Like therapy sessions, they may be uncomfortable but they are illuminating. Share the big picture, let them in on how they contribute to the whole.
It is your responsibility to find solutions for non-fun environments, and it is your call to make the hard choices when needed. It may be the context, which does not allow productivity. It may be you have the wrong skillsets or the wrong person for the role. It may even be you. Do what you have to do. This might include 🥾 removing wrong parts/people/processes to enable the team to feel unblocked, empowered and motivated. But don’t wish things away. Problems are sticky.
2. Be wrong
Is being wrong wrong? Well, yes. Ideally, you don’t want to fail. But here failure is to be understood as the 💪🏻 courage to try things and learn from the outcome.
When you change nothing, you improve nothing. There is abundant proof through history and prehistory that both small gradual changes and large dramatic ones will engender new solutions in an otherwise stale environment. From evolutionary adaptation through natural selection, to the sudden injection of life’s building blocks from falling asteroids, we know that changing parameters and mutating genes produce a varied population and richer results. This might not manifest in the short term, but surely does so in the long run through continuous iterations.
But when results in the short term are not what we expect, then humans might look for blame. Why? Because we need to differentiate from others to feel special. Blame assigns fault and highlights inadequacies in others we don’t have. How uncivilised we can be. Being subject to blame breeds resentment and protective attitudes, which we prefer to avoid. So our inquisitive mind is arrested and our will to explore is dampened by environmental factors. The product stagnates, the customer loses, and the business 📉 fails.
Unless we do better. Unless we accept that failure means that the idea is wrong, not who it came from. We’re the outcome of a continuum of ideas that are created, modified, destroyed, regenerated and improved. It’s the net output that counts, not the instances or the peaks. Companies that care about long-term improvement and the pursuit of higher product-market fit tend to dispel all notions of perfection at every step, rather an open trust environment where progress is measured as 🪜 successive approximations to a desired state, with (preferably, but not mandated) positive net fitness function increment at every step.
This justifies the occurrence of errors. You can fail. Maybe you should fail. You can be wrong. Others can be right. It’s ok to change your mind. It’s the idea that was wrong. The best idea must win. Become less attached to an idea you might later kill. Kill your darlings.
3. Do less
We know focus is key. And the key to focus is pain. It is supposed to 😩 hurt. You will choose to not launch incredible features for your customers. You will prevent them from solving certain real problems and will be actively removing joy from their lives. On purpose.
There is no other way. The essence of this profession is to balance conflicting priorities in the face of limited resources. You must therefore choose to focus on the bigger problems your team is equipped to deliver, which solve the highest pains and provide the highest gains for your customers or business.
Focus, as Jony Ive suggested, is waking up one morning with an incredible idea, an urge that makes your 💔 heart ache, and to shut it down and put it in a drawer.
How do you say no? How do you convince your team and stakeholders that you must do less than you think you can? How do you convince Sales and Engineering and Design that you must build and ship a smaller product, that can solve fewer problems, that does not leverage the latest and greatest tech, that lacks code purity, and that represents just a shy and measured step?
It’s not easy. Our emotional response is to 🙈 ignore this mandate and find ways to bring the bigger dream alive. We want to overcome obstacles. We want it all and we want it now. When highly connected to our product, the vision and our mission, we overinflate our abilities and accept risks. We yearn to see our dreams come true. We are good at pep-talking our team and we distort reality. We’re so awesome!
But this emotional response needs curtailing. Put a stopper on delusion.
Focus is building something real, quickly and putting it in front of real people. Choose a smaller version of the dream, a subset that is bound and well described, and build it completely. It must not be perfect. It must do the job it was designed to do, and do it well. You’ve based this on real insights and acute intuition on what people need.
Yes, yes, of course, technology is more complex than that. If you’re building the foundations of a complex product, you need to invest in common infrastructure and plumbing to support future growth. Yet even in this case, it is usually preferable to optimise for smaller, bounded, tangible, known problems, rather than larger, unclear, complex, unknown ones.
Focus is never about building incomplete products, but about arriving sooner to the minimum unit that generates intrinsic value. So the metric really is value over cost, with value as defined by your north star metric and cost defined as investment, time spent, etc.
Success = Value Delivered / Cost
If Value is high and Cost low, we’re onto something. If Cost is high and Value low, we’re going nowhere. If Value is high and Cost is also high, we’re not being effective, and we’re probably not focused. You can optimise this metric by reducing the time (hence cost) it takes to achieve a unit of value, a product that is quick to meet the market and customers, from which you can quickly learn and iterate.
You enforce focus by rigorously asking yourself if an idea will help you deliver value faster. You will have to ignore and park many ideas, from many people, gently, continuously. You will learn the soft “no” skills that make this profession such an involved adventure in human emotion.
Park ideas. Minimise scope. Push out. Defer if not essential. Think long-term, but focus on what delivers value now. Build it fast.
4. Hire less
You do not need more people to solve more problems faster.
More people = more conversations, which require time. Time spent discussing what to do is time gifted to competitors, and time stolen from our customers, who are kept waiting for better products.
As per human nature, those who deeply desire to occupy the upper echelons of the food chain tend to believe that team size equates to power, which then fuels an ambition to hire and build little empires. I’m guilty myself of building teams that later 🍄 mushroomed resulting in high chaos. I’ve also built teams that remained lean and delivered amazing results.
Complexity amplifies difficulty. It’s hard enough to solve difficult problems, and our instinctive reaction is to call for help. What many learn late, or may never learn at all, is that hard problems are invariably compounded and made worse by tossing warm bodies at them. Hiring our way out of difficulties only fans the bonfire of interdependencies and misalignments.
Bigger does not always mean better. Scaling a business is good, and gathering helping hands enriches the pool with new DNA. But it’s not without risks.
- Decision-making slows down. Too many nodes in the graph. Cyclomatic complexity.
- New people must be brought up to speed. Not a bad thing, solvable, but often ill-managed.
- Large and distributed teams seldom develop close relationships, know each other or have a clear perspective about what others are working on. When siloes emerge the product suffers.
- Processes emerge to ensure alignment, unknowingly poisoning the well of creativity.
- Individual contribution is obscured in numbers. Refuge for the mediocre, bane of the introvert.
When the above risks materialise, teams tend to scatter. Teams are never a static construct anyway. They are in constant renewal like a Ship of Theseus and its constituent parts constantly change as people come and go. (This is fine, the best you can do is hope that will go off to solve bigger and better challenges, which means you taught them well.) It’s your responsibility as a product leader to make this machine perform, by controlling its ability to generate impact efficiently. You must fine-tune this engine. As you progress in your career, you move from building products to building the machine that builds the machine.
The answer: fewer people with high talent. Less point-to-point conversations by design. Flatter pyramids. Two-pizza 🍕🍕 rule for teams, one-pizza rule for leads. Experts leading experts. Eradicate the ultracrepidarians.
Fewer nodes with high bond valence between them put a stopper on entropy, resulting in high mental and emotional alignment (=culture) and the exceptional quality of being able to make decisions without having to talk to each other all the time. Culture is a lattice that holds things together, and adding weight without strengthening the bonds leads to collapse.
5. Organize less
Process is the mind-killer.
Meant to align individuals and teams, it emerges from a need to channel growth efforts. In my experience, if unchecked, it only exacerbates the emergence of chokepoints. When teams must follow rigorous steps plagued with tolls, committees, and forums to be given permission to progress their work, things quickly devolve into a tragedy of the commons where everyone’s fighting for a place in the queue.
It’s understandable. Growth is complex and usually a delicate time. The temptation is there to put in place controls on how teams work and collaborate. You care about something, you tend to bring it close to you and inspect its every part, to add checks to ensure it works well. But inspecting a system changes the system.
I’m definitely not advocating for product management anarchy. Alignment is key, of course, especially if it comes from the top and permeates across the organisation. Teams must find ways to know and understand to a certain degree what others do, why they do it and perhaps how they do it, and importantly where the touchpoints and dependencies are, defined often as “contracts” between teams, á la Amazon.
Yes, you do need some process.
But, by all means, get into a mindset of continuously reviewing and deleting the parts you don’t need. Simplify and automate as much of the toil as you can, to free your mind (and your day) to navigate the solution space in pursuit of global 🏔️ maximums, not just local ones. Spend your time applying mutation and recombination to your population. Imagine if genetic processes were not optimised for low-energy breeding.
Yes, you can. You can replace cumbersome processes with a few constructs widely shared across the organisation.
- A product vision, best incarnated in a visiontype.
- A strategy or master plan to get there.
- A set of very clear (yet barely) achievable goals.
- A toolset, component set, and preferred technological building blocks.
- Contracts between teams.
- A set of common principles and team behaviours.
These guidelines serve to lead teams independently towards the same rendezvous destination, regardless of the trajectory they choose to follow.
6. Use the force
Listen to your inner voice. Follow your instincts. Trust your gut. Use the force, PM.
(There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that gut 🦠 bacteria can influence brain function and, consequently, behaviour. Obi-Wan was not wrong.) Following your instincts and intuition can aid decision-making in the face of multiple options, paths and variables.
It’s what Albert said:
“I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact, I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” — Albert Einstein in Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorisms (1931)
Intuition saves time. For most intuitive deductions, the brain does not apply procedural computing or recursive algorithms to process countless signals and data. The reason it can typically provide the most meaningful and appropriate response, in the Occam’s Razor sense of the word, is because it’s a form of instant linear top-down unidirectional processing. Like a neural net, you got it 😉.
Therefore, intuition is trained on experience and learning, with real datasets obtained from the real world, and is also moulded and informed by creativity in applying patterns derived from different contexts. Like a work of art inspiring a great design. Or the behaviour of ant colonies helping optimize queue algorithms.
Intuition requires observation, and here lies the key to connecting with the real world. You do not experience design epiphanies or arbitrate otherwise uncanny prioritization trade-offs without a sense of the real-world constraints, limitations, and real customer needs, intents, problems and context. It’s because you have touched the world and inspected what’s inside the bottle that instinct kicks in to solve the equation.
Data-informed (not -driven) intuition.
May seem dumb. May get a lot of “X” Product pundit backlash, and it will not be the most sound corporate strategy where you’re but a tiny ⚙️ cog in the machine and that “voice from within” of yours matters not. (I’m sorry if this is a surprise to you.)
But it tends to work. What you feel ❤️ is right is what ends up being the right answer. It’s what Ken Kocienda calls “good taste” in his Creative Selection little gem.
You will need to verify the conclusion with data if available. You will need to wrap it around a sound rational analysis 🧠 else no one will follow. You will need to be prepared to accept if the conclusion is wrong. But applying your well-developed, over many cycles and iterations, creative intuition on how to solve hard product choices is the better path.
This is the way.
Hope these thoughts help. They’ve helped me get out of trouble, and they’ve served as a painful reminder of just how easy it is to conspire against yourself whenever I’ve neglected them.
For more, find me in X, where I usually post nothing of the sort, but maybe you’ll like my music and I’ll get some microdollars per stream.
