What I learned about product management from watching 100 hours of Hallmark movies this last year.

I found myself bingewatching Hallmark romantic comedies, romances, pocket mysteries, and other feel-good flicks. Not exactly the cynicism of House of Cards or the noir darkness Jessica Jones. I saw more than fifty movies made for the cable channels carrying America’s greeting card brand: the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries.

This year they’ll release 59 original movies for a very specific demo: not me. I’m not a woman. I haven’t bought greeting cards in years. I don’t read romance novels.

That said, I bring who I am to movie watching.

• I’m a middle aged Jewish guy from New York, L.A., and Oakland who likes to watch mayhem on the big screen, organize communities of practice, and read textbooks for fun.
• I’m a geek, a quant, and a software product manager.
• I’ve been a tech journalist, blogger, and professional explainer.
• I’m writing two small product management books (one on end-of-lifing and the other on writing release notes) and Hallmark in the background feels a step up from Pandora.

My 33 takeaways…

1. Prolonged proximity reveals relationship truth: true love or something else. Lock a promising couple into a workplace, a wedding weekend, an elevator and sparks will fly. Likely true in finding employee/employer fit, post M&A alignment, and team formation.
2. Don’t compromise in romantic relationships. All or nothing. Very Steve Jobs.
3. Hallmark has to be one of the most active English language movie studios. 40 movies made for HMC and another 19 for the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel in 2016. More than Marvel. I wonder how they pass lessons learned from one production team to the next.
4. Skinny women actors (with restraining orders against carbs) remedy heartbreak with chocolate, ice cream, baked goods, pizza. I eat my product failures too.
5. Unlike the major broadcast and cable networks, Hallmark’s central movie characters are older. Still younger than their audience but usually over 30 or 40. Know your customer.
6. Any and every interaction with any mateable person is a “meet cute” whether you recognize it or not. With hundreds of movies, Hallmark could easily compile a meetcute-only clippings film. When you’re hustling for your product, every interaction could lead to the insight, relationship, or opportunity that saves your story.
7. Not too late to have meet-cutes with someone you already know. Repeatedly. There’s a UX lesson in there.
8. Old people are wise. Sometimes curmudgeonly. Not my experience. Especially looking in the mirror.
9. Nothing wrong with marrying up. Implicitly the converse should also be true. But stories don’t dwell on why better looking, nicer, wealthier people ever marry down. I’m going to think about that the next time I partner: check whether I’m the one marrying up or down and then make the case.
10. Grit is how you overcome whatever the writers throw at the potential relationship in the third act. True too in product life.
11. Commercial breaks make for unnatural story timing. Haven’t figured out how the better ones make you forget about the frequent and interminable interruptions. Lots of distractions in product management; maybe it’s noticing them and getting back to what’s important that matters.
12. Exposition and dialog don’t substitute for action. But you wouldn’t know it from these movies. So much cheaper to have characters talk around one set than to shoot a chase scene. Product design point: the product’s job and how to use it should be obvious, without lengthy explanation. Keep refining ’til you get there.
13. After your umpteenth small town setting, the small towns all look like movie sets. Now real life small towns look like Hallmark Movies to me.
14. Best Friend acting is tough. Lots of bad writing and plot explanations to make sound like they’d come out of a human. Hallmark casts masters for supporting actor roles. Value your effective communicators.
15. Pretty sure there’s a reduced vocabulary rule to keep ease of following along at sixth-grade levels, like Reader’s Digest. Nearly Simple English or Basic English. Great for lower cognitive burden and for those who don’t think in English.
16. Paraphrasing Constantin Stanislavski, “there are no small products, only small product managers.”
17. Hallmark performers aren’t speaking at Bronx speeds. Most of these movies can be played faster, than 1.25X to double speed without losing intelligibility or harming your appreciation of the visuals or score.
18. Innovation within a genre is hard. So casting is almost everything if you want to overcome faulty plot, dialog, and production value. Hire well.
19. There’s a fine line between romcom and romance. Maybe it’s a darker obstacle before the climax, or the potential for an unhappy ending. I’ve seen some managers artificially create tension to simulate cathartic release; it feels fake, never works twice.
20. There’s nothing wrong with remaking the same movie so long as you change dressing (the town, the cast, the character names, and maybe one or two of the leading characters’ jobs). Most of your viewers won’t have seen the original or the last five remakes.
21. There’s a specific subgenre (still looking for a name) for this: skinny attractive single woman baker in a small town solves bloody mysteries while flirting with at least two men. Multiple book series, at least one TV-movie series (“Murder She Baked”). A handful of authors own their niche.
22. The leading character is nearly always a woman. 
    Product-Market Fit #prodmgmt.
23. Her single obligatory character flaw is easily identified and remedied. Shakespearean character complexity is not part of the formula. Sadly, I’m a more thoroughly flawed product manager. So are my stakeholders and the products we’ve made.
24. Two quick ways to check on production budget: whether the score was a one-week synthesized job (mostly) and whether most screen time is a coverage shot. Still, for this audience, those don’t matter: they want the story, even unadorned.
25. None of these movies include songs that cost license or royalty money. Frugality is what makes this whole business model possible.
26. Haven’t seen LGBTQIA characters in a leading role.
27. Haven’t seen Muslim characters in a leading role.
28. Haven’t seen African American characters in a leading role.
29. Haven’t seen Latina American characters in a leading role.
30. Did see one flick about the arcane Jewish practice of a man marrying his brother’s widow. It featured assimilation at the expense of Jewish religion, culture, and tradition, but I’m quibbling; lucky to have Jews as anything except for politically correct extras carrying menorahs or supporting cast in Hallmark Xmas movies.
31. Hallmark tries to make perennials they can play over the decades. But it’s hard to fight aging technology, car designs, clothing fashions, hair styles, economies. Which of today’s interactive design conceits/concepts/conceipts will look stale first?
32. Hallmark has a few fun stunts. A June of wedding movies. A boiling summer July full of frosty Christmas movies. I like reminding users that they, their app, their online community, and their software publisher exist in the same real world.
33. Like porn, the job of most of these movies is to immerse your head in a fantasy, moving step by step to your climactic endorphin flush. I think Hallmark has more kissing.

Almost done with watching Hallmark movies for prodmgmt lessons. Maybe it’s time to mine another media genre. Which one? Coming of age? ’30s noir? Battlestar Gallactica? What say you?