A Project Manager’s toolkit
Tools shouldn’t replace people, but it’s so nice to have a personal set ready for use, especially when it can help you in a wide variety of situations. Around the top of my toolbox, you’ll find these 4 that I’m excited to share with you today (although you probably already use them 😉). I’m a Localization PM but you’ll see that these apply to many roles, not just Localization and not just Project Management, of course.
1. The core of each thing
Whether you’re writing a simple bug report about an untranslated string, or tackling a larger initiative like switching from one vendor to another, the 5 whys method is the go-to tool to make sure you don’t waste time doing the wrong things. That’s because in the end, most problems can and should be summarized in one or 2 simple statements. And there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing something complicated and seemingly complex turn into a clear and enticing project.
As a Localization PM, I am faced with questions and ambiguity most days. There are only so many issues that you can handle by only relying on your own experience and learnings. In the diverse discipline that Localization is, you always find yourself facing new problems, with different scales, affecting new parties, bringing on new dimensions. Every other problem feels like a new topic that you didn’t go to school for. And that’s where the beauty of the 5-whys comes in: Any question, any goal, any dream is simply a problem waiting to be stated in a manageable way and then solved. Get to the core of the issue at hand with this method and soon you’ll be wondering what you used to do with your time. And the best part is you can use it for anything, not just work topics 👌.
2. The Eisenhower Matrix or how to fit everything in.
Do you find the following pattern familiar?
- Have a ton of things to do.
- Start the first one in sight.
- Realize you can’t do it without doing that other thing first.
- Remember that that other thing is part of a larger group and it would be nice and better to do it all together.
- End up leaving everything halfway finished because an email reminded you about another much larger item for which the deadline has “unexpectedly” arrived.
If so, read on:
There’s a massively helpful solution for this: The Eisenhower Matrix (woohoo). It requires discipline so it won’t hurt to have it displayed on your wall next to your screen, but if you can make it a habit of filtering each new task and project through it, you’ll enjoy not being brain dead when the end of the day or week comes. Bouncing from one task to another all day is draining and not only bad for productivity and effectiveness, but also for your health (so don’t do it). Instead, assess first. I repeat, always assess first. And if you’re getting this giant new project that you need to take care of but can’t even think about now, schedule time to just assess! It’s that simple.
3. “Microproductivity”
This is simple and everybody probably already does it but I think it’s still important to mention it. How often do you get tasked with a problem that’s so big you just feel like postponing it and postponing it again because it’s vague, it’s too intimidating, etc? In Localization, these projects can be adding new languages, switching providers, changing tools, etc but in most disciplines, you can find equivalent tasks and projects. One key to solving this: break it down.
As the founder of Taoism, Laozi put it, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Giving yourself small and achievable short-term goals keeps you moving, removes the dauntingness that comes with a huge task, and helps you understand what you’re doing better. Microproductivity removes the abstract horror of big projects by providing you with a new, manageable view of them.
So, among all those tiny tasks that will take you to your end goal, the very first one is to start breaking things down. The 5-whys come into use here but simply said, you can start by asking yourself what you need and what needs to be done. In other words, reverse-engineer your goal to find out what the very first task towards it is. No matter the number of medium-sized tasks you come up with, you can then break those down into smaller ones (whether it’s sending Bob an email, gathering requirements, or creating a template).
Finally, it comes with a huge benefit: with each action being so small, you’ll be able to separate it from the others and identify feedback that goes along with it. If you try to do everything in one go, you’ll end up in a blur of execution in which it’s rather hard to learn anything. However, if you take each task one at a time, you will be able to look at it more objectively — as the little task that it is, separated from the overall context. In time, you will learn how to do each small task in the best possible fashion, giving you the confidence to tackle bigger items and helping you understand those bigger projects better and faster, through the mechanical prism you acquire doing simple tasks. As above, so below (and vice-versa).
4. “Share more, learn more”, and the “Protégé Effect”
“Share more, learn more” is one of our core values at BlaBlaCar, but I have to admit it took a while for me to wrap my mind around it. My first thought when reading more about it was “well, if I’m sharing, it’s others that are learning 💁🤔“. Obviously, that couldn’t be it so I thought about it further. The second way I looked at it was this: “If I share, people will see that there are benefits to sharing and they will do it too and I will learn things! 👌“. What learnings we’re talking about, however, I didn’t know. So, I just continued thinking about it.
Today, the feeling I get from it is simple: the more you share, the more you get feedback, the more you create a certain level of motion and energy around this topic or that topic, and the more visible the learnings, lessons, and information about it become.
But, there’s another dimension to this that I like even more: teaching (whether it’s by sharing information or training others to do or understand something) is the most effective way to learn about a subject. I experienced this first-hand recently when I had to onboard someone to do some of the things I had been doing for a while. At first, I thought that since those were all in my head and in my daily practice, I’d have no problem explaining them and showing them. How wrong I was…
There’s a world of difference between doing something and explaining it to others. But the amazing thing is it got me to think about my discipline from a completely different angle. Instead of a million little activities and bits of knowledge subjectively supported by a battery of concepts, I had to give structure and form to the information I was transmitting, and that led me to better understand many of the things I thought I had perfected. By asking myself the questions “where do I start?”, “What’s most important?”, “Why do I do this?”, the comprehension of my own realm of practice was considerably strengthened, and as a benefit, I was able to rebalance the areas where I invested too much against those where I invested too little (time, energy, and attention), for instance. More info here.
I hope this little list helped you. If not, please reach out to me on Linkedin so I can find out what should Really be at the top of my toolbox.
As Project Manager tools and Product Manager tools can overlap, if you want more, check out this Hackermoon article on what makes a great PM, by Lawrence Ripsher, SVP of Product at Pinterest.
Thanks to Blake Faulds and Aurelien Beltrame who helped me get these ideas into a decent shape!
