How to make a product vision a reality

Story, talent, trust and humility

There’s no better job than being a product manager. You get to build products people love, while sitting at the intersection of quintessential human endeavors like art, technology, engineering, psychology and business. Beat that.

If you ever were that tinkerer, curious and creative kid that played with Lego and Meccano, read Mark Twain, Arthur C. Clarke and H.P. Lovecraft, discovered coding with mid 80’s computers, discovered sound and music with synthesizers like the Kawai K5 and the E-MU 1, and played Monkey Island, Loom and Prince of Persia for hours and hours, then you might feel identified with the insatiable drive for digital creativity that generally fuels such a passionate view.

But product management is not an easy job. It’s actually highly demanding and requires expertise in a number of core competencies. Literature abounds and volumes have been written about it. Leadership and execution. Inspiration and creativity. Growth vs. value. Product market fit and customer centricity. Perseverance and stick-to-it-iveness. The intersection of technology and liberal arts. Every topic has been covered and blogged about ad nauseam. Here and here some humble contributions to this space.

Indeed vast resources, and certainly a good source of preparation and inspiration. Though not enough. Aspiring product managers that limit themselves to academia are quick to manufacture their own idealized mental model of how products are made. Shielded by an abundance of buzz words, unaware yet of the intrinsic complexities, they will flood the room with passionate appeals about the importance of “awesome user experience”, and other often misguided entelechies.

As someone I admire once wisely advised, academia may fill libraries, but engineers build civilizations.

Fact. You’ll only discover the essence of building a product by… wait for it… building a real product in front of real people. This is how you learn to navigate the false positives, local maxima, valleys, troughs, summits and pitfalls of this occupation. To get the upper hand of optimism bias, coordination neglect and the fallacies of planning. To live and breathe its intrinsic counterintuitive nature. Getting yes means saying no. Easy is hard. Simplicity is complexity. Minimalism is sophistication. Refinement is reduction. Beautiful is invisible.

Boom-ka-pshhhhh.

It is extremely difficult to build successful, delightful, easy-to-use products that people love. So what is the key to become a successful product manager, and to making a product vision a reality?

The Key

The key is that you lie at the intersection of complementary human disciplines. You are the driving force that makes every talent work together in symphony towards a clear purpose and a crafted outcome. Success is to deliver value by orchestrating and optimizing multiple talent pools, working effectively within the constraints of your environment, extracting the most out of their potential. This is about people. Your attention must go to learning how they best function both individually and in collaboration.

Having not shyly wandered about through this product life, I’ve come across many a challenge which has made me reflect, rejoice, suffer, err, learn and grow. I’ve been fortunate to arrive to product-nirvana a few times. My first iOS app Babymate or, more recently, the HSBC Connected Money app.

So here are a few ideas, thoughts and recommendations I felt would be useful to share others in this unique profession. These are my own views on how telling a story, finding the right people, going deep and wide on multiple disciplines, protecting trust, being prepared for success and managing your ego are key to becoming a great product manager and building great products.

The story

Great stories change our lives forever.

Product management is about telling a story everyone believes in. We’re in the business of manufacturing dreams, so everyone in the dream factory must feel like a character in a tale of discovery, growth and achievement. They will fall in love with the story, go through a journey evocative of human affairs, resonate to deeply engrained human emotions, endure the challenges and celebrate the deeds they have been individually and collectively a part of. The expectation of a climactic outcome will create a sense of mission and motivate everyone to take part in the adventure, run the race, compete to win.

So, build a product vision you can tell as a story, because invariably people love stories. It will describe your starting point as a large company, small organization, group of people of maybe even just an individual. It will narrate the realities of your competitive landscape, your environment and the internal and external forces that will either contribute or conspire to the desired outcome. The story will articulate the specific challenges, capabilities, phases, milestones and climactic moments which you will need to follow to deliver your product to customers, and how this product will enrich your customers lives.

The vision, in the end, explains why the journey must be made, why the end state is important and how events are to unfold to make it a reality. So storytelling is a way of bringing everything together in a single construct that blends possibilities, facts and emotion into a conceivable sequence of events, and invites anyone interested to feel invested in the outcome.

Your mandate is to build a product vision that aligns to the business you represent, plays to its strengths and fits with its strategic goals. If you’re ever to attempt alignment across a multidimensional matrix of interested parties, then make sure your vision is human-readable and compelling to all who read it. Spread it. Evangelise it. Go on a roadshow. Ask for input. Ask your team, peers, stakeholders, partners to extend it, complement it, own it. Ask them to play it back to you and measure if their own personal values are reflected on it. Crowdsource and curate. Distribute and distill. Syndicate and synthesize. It’s the 10x power of collating great ideas into a cohesive and scalable narrative that holds your product together.

Boom.

Tell a story you can believe in. Never lack conviction, but avoid falling into the pitfalls of self-dillusion and optimism bias. Get direct and derived data of the real world to check for validity and application of your ideas. Learn to tame the ambiguity between facts and perceptions you will be constantly bombarded with. When data cannot support conclusions, use your product sense to deliver discrete and tangible value increments to your customers. Use these increments to test assumptions and to build a product sense you can trust.

The story is not dogma. We’re not burdened by glorious purpose here, nor fanatic about ideas that are meant to evolve and experiences that are meant to improve as technology and customers do. You must be relentless and resilient in analyzing facts, questioning assumptions, and adapting your product vision when evidence suggests value lies elsewhere.

Once you’re able to articulate your product vision as a story, with context, challenges, characters, a coda and climactic conclusion (the 6Cs?), then you’ve defined a cosmovision with a clear and attainable future state for your business and your customers. You’ve provided a view of how your product will solve real problems in the real world. You’ve brought the future forward.

The people

Not long after you’ve launched a few products to market and reflected on the reasons for your success, you’ll realize it’s not about you. It’s about the people you work with.

Talented artists and tinkerers, or maybe even just regular people, good at what they do and with a sense of commitment, can achieve amazing things together. Not unlike the Avengers, all superheroes in their own right, all with superpowers that when combined can build up to a cohesive product within parameters, crafted with beautiful design and breakthrough engineering, scalable to 1, 1 million, 100 million.

This is the result of a collective endeavour that invariably requires a Captain America to serve as a leadership figure, a product compass, setting direction, making 100 decisions per day to ensure the vision is protected. Pushing forward through conflicting priorities, clearing paths of ambiguity, making necessary trade-offs with a pragmatical view of delivering incremental value to customers, saying NO when it hurts.

That scene never made the cut...

Innate capabilities can be energized by the right mindset. Maximum intrinsic output can be surpassed with right leadership and motivation. If engaged correctly, with an achievable and transparent approach to delivery, your team will achieve things they never dreamed of, and will be proud of it all their lives. They might remember the period as exhausting, stressful and taxing, but they will look back to one of the best times in their professional life.

Though this cannot be achieved by mere pressure. Too much, and the structure cracks. The trick is to gradually come up to speed until you make high performance the natural state of operation. Weekly, monthly and quarterly retrospectives about goals, achievements and ways of working are essential to “knowing thyself”, and defining actionable improvements than can be tested will put your team in a continuous curve of self-improvement.

But hiring is where you must put your attention and efforts.

Hiring is the single most important task as a product manager. It ensures the team is composed of individuals with enough cognitive diversity to represent your audience and solve problems creatively. When it comes to choosing from a pool, it’s competencies first, then culture. In that order.

Competencies are non-negotiable. The only reason you would hire someone with unproved skills and insufficient experience, is that you have enough evidence of their untamed raw potential and have decided to put the time and effort to channel it to a given purpose.

Competencies first, then culture. Protecting your team culture does not imply surrendering to group-think or choosing people that look, dress, think and act like the rest. Find people that will fit within the team, by having conversations, sharing knowledge, learning and accepting other points of view. Look to represent your audience and, if possible, foster the conditions for equal gender split, varied backgrounds and multiple ethnicities, provided these candidates can demonstrate the competencies you need. A diverse background serves as a gene pool where selection and mutation will operate as a relentless force to solve problems in new and creative ways.

The depth and the width

This job is 10 jobs rolled into one. (Pay is, sadly, generally not.) It demands expert level knowledge in multiple disciplines.

You’re a researcher, a designer, a developer, a tester, a release manager. If you’re not, you are not connecting to your team’s potential. They will self-organize and contribute their talents and unique abilities regardless, so it’s pretty shallow of you to not go deep into what they love doing. Understand what every expert is telling you, and how their concerns affect your product. Get out of your comfort zone and learn to grasp the intricacies of their daily challenges and responsibilities, because often times you’ll be expected to make critical decisions that require full clarity on this context.

Really? Take these examples from a product manager’s day.

If you’re on escalation rota for product support, you must be able to follow your engineers analysis of data streams, logs, alerts and dashboards that represent the health status of the various layers of your tech stack, in order to understand how proposed remedial actions can impact your customer’s experience. You can’t learn your systems’ architecture at 3am.

If you’re planning to demise support of an operating system version or certain device family, you must be able to quickly weigh the benefits of an optimized automated build process due to reduced target architectures vs. the customer impact of a forced upgrade to latest available build, latest OS or, in edge cases, a different device, and how this will impact CSAT, create pressure on support channels and degrade (or not) other KPIs.

If you’re transitioning to a new information architecture for your product, then you must have requested enough evidence via data and testing to determine potential impacts on feature discovery and customer engagement, depending on the different usage patterns and “jobs to be done” of your key personas.

Think like every member of the team. Split into 23 different personalities.

Not you, Beast.

Well, maybe 23 is extremist. There are at least 3 distinct facets of the product manager’s mind. Forget about left or right brain. No evidence.

There’s a hipster, a hacker and a hustler in your head that see the world through complementary lenses, sometimes in agreement, often conspiring against each other. It’s instrumental to your product’s success that you provide them sufficient mental bandwidth, resources and tools to operate at highest performance and in positive collaboration.

Hipster. You will know that design is not just a pretty picture. You’ll learn that a pretty picture takes a long time to finish, and requires techniques and tools few can truly master. It’s most definitely not magic. A robust design organization is made of multiple talents performing various specific but symbiotic tasks. It’s your job to ensure this ecosystem exists, survives, and thrives.

It’s easy to become a tyrant. You have the mandate to request as many variations and alternative designs you need, and the prerogative to say NO to any of them. If a design concept does not follow the product principles or contribute to the grand vision, or is plainly not fit for purpose, then you must provide clear and actionable feedback to your team so they can retry and come back with a better version. Ken Kocienda, an early engineer from the iPhone team, describes this demo+feedback loop in his recent book, Creative Selection. Adopt it! It’s essential to building products where design serves function and emotion, not a compliance checklist.

Hacker. You will understand code. You will know that there are different languages for different purposes, and that mostly all of them have similar structures, abstractions and tools to facilitate the translation of a real world problem to a sequence of commands that automate the solution.

You’ll know what challenges engineers face, like OS fragmentation, unstable dependencies, manual processes and lack of test coverage. You won’t tell developers how to build, test, release, how dare you. But you will prod as to how their code results in a robust, stable, resilient, delighful experience while being scalable, shareable, reusable. And ask them to convince you about it.

Hustler. You are here to get sh*t done. You’ll start by understanding how product design, development and delivery is done in mature product organizations, and attempt to pragmatically adopt what lessons learned are applicable to your context. This in practice means continuously asking yourself many hard questions.

Are your designers, engineers, architects and business analysts sufficiently briefed for your product epics to be understood, sized, matured and agreed upon by all parties prior to injecting in development and delivery pipelines? Have you given all 3 key stages of product delivery (design, build, operate) enough runway to function effectively and efficiently, with just-in-time dependency clearing? Do you have the right talent onboard? What happens if they get sick or leave the team? Have you reviewed your team’s performance lately, by direct involvement or asking for feedback from internal and external consumers? Do you review your ways of working at regular increments via retrospectives, and follow up on activities meant to improve them? Are you doing “agile” right? Do you get out of your comfort zone by learning what other teams close to you are doing? Are you aware of the dozens of stage gates, toll gates, committees, checkpoints, forms, change requests, authorisation and sign-offs involved in deploying new code to production? Do you know how to access key metrics, usage, performance, reviews and other monitoring information that spell out the true nature of your product?

Myriad of questions. All important and all with short-lived right answers. Must ask them repeatedly at close intervals.

The hipster, hacker and hustler will pull in different directions, exerting complementary forces hundreds of times a day. The resulting vector must point in the direction of value shipped to customers.

The trust

You’ll be bored to death with headlines about Artificial Intelligence and the advent of thinking machines. (BTW, AI is just better algorithms. Think about it next time you want to impress anyone with your domain-level expertise in what is probably becoming an epidemic of headline-spewing twitter spasms.) But this is still very much a world ruled by humankind. And the most important connections are between members of this species. This connection is powered by Trust.

Trust is essential for success. Trust comes from delivery, not story telling. A story must be told. But the result must be achieved. Call it predictable storytelling. Storytelling where spoilers are a good thing.

Lovely.

Be predictable! Deliver when expected! Your customers expect constant improvements. Your business and stakeholders expect value out of their investments, and a continuous improvement of their bottom line. If you can’t deliver when expected, then do not make it a suprise. Share your decisions openly with sufficient anticipation. Make sure you have strong reasons and a robust rational to alter already set expectations, and then clearly articulate what unmitigated risks forced your hand.

Product Management is a risk-tolerance exercise. You’ll never be fully prepared. Nothing will ever be perfect. Perfect is your enemy. Launching a product becomes a balancing act between risks you can take and mitigations you can rely on. Adopting a transparent risk-based approach is instrumental to building trust in your delivery capability. So be open about the risks that can potentially stop your product from going live. Actively listen to what experts are saying. Challenge when reasonable. Dismissing risks you don’t fully understand can destroy your product, your brand and your career.

Trust goes all around. It works best when extended to all your relationships. Build trust with your team, your peers, your stakeholders and your leadership.

Team. Be open about expectations. Inclusive when setting goals. Constructive when things don’t work. Precise when providing feedback.

Peers. Share ideas, ambitions, tricks of the trade. Expose and share your knowledge and experience so others can learn. Give away and don’t hold back. Power will not come from retaining secrets, but from spreading ideas that work.

Stakeholders. Be clear and articulate about value, scope, capabilities and deliverables. Proactive to align expectations and dependencies. Transparent about contingencies, risks, blockers and delays. Quick to inform about changes and rational for missed commitements.

Leaders. Understand broader context of your organization. Understand how you fit within the picture, and what results your area, product or team have been made accountable for. Ask for frequent feedback. And whatever you do, answer emails and texts from your boss!

Build relationships with all parties by being open about what you can or cannot achieve, what you know or don't know.

The ego

Success creates headroom. It provides resources and a playground to grow. Previous performance can occasionally indicate future behaviour, and residual knowledge and lessons learned can improve your chances.

But, due to human condition, it often puts pressure on humility. Increased remit can translate into hubris and inflamed ego. Many ignore the consequences of “rank” and accept new responsibilities as empowerment to dictate and accumulate. This, trust me, doesn’t scale and historically does not get you far. Don’t try to be Steve Jobs. Stop believing he was a genius tyrant.

What will get you far and make people remember you, is the power of your ideas, not the power you collect.

Power makes you a prisoner. Your true contribution is not yourself or your remit, but your ability to define what good looks like and how to get there.

Success breeds complacency. When your ideas turn to successful outcomes, the immediate assumption is that a formula for winning has been discovered. This is compounded as you go deep and wide into the multiple disciplines, since you tend to build simplified models to represent a deeper and wider body of knowledge. It’s not uncommon to get some of these wrong. The real danger is to become arrogantly convinced you can’t be wrong, defending the wrong outcomes in key conversations just because your own interpretation of a complex topic is mistaken.

Learn to openly accept your misconceptions. Never be afraid to be wrong. Ego is not your product, but will become your worst enemy. Accepting new facts that debunk the old, even while you’ve publicly stated them as foundational and paramount, is how you construct a better product. It’s hard to unlearn a solid truth. But your intellectual self is obliged to move past dogma. Dogma has no place in a scientific world.

Again, some examples to illustrate the point.

When people critique your product with bland arguments like “you’re product is not cool” or “you don’t have as many features as blah blah”, the reflex to copy your competitor is strong. However, there is really no point in mimicking what others do if it does not align with your vision and business goals. So learn to fight the impulse to spasmodically do what others do.

When stakeholders challenge your assumptions and demand “proof” that users will engage with your proposition, you might quickly become convinced that product is exclusively about data-driven decisions. Only partly right. Data is a tool. It will help you understand how customers engage with known constructs. It won’t explain or predict entirely new propositions. Your strong product sense might suggest an answer, and the only way of knowing is experimenting and finding data to support theories. If no data, follow your product sense.

Finally, when scrum teams inform the world they are agile, it’s easy to become convinced that you need no planning. Agile does not mean lack of a plan, and you’ll be predicating the wrong sentiment if you repeat it. Agile means you’ve come to the understanding that it is impractical to expect a fixed set of outcomes on a fixed timeline, given not all facts and dependencies are known. So learn to wave the agile flag.

In summary…

Product management brings people together to deliver value to people’s lives. You are at the center of this creative storm and are the key to channeling it towards a set outcome. Build a vision you can tell as a story, to empower your team and represent your business goals in a predictable narrative. Your team is made of superheroes that will do amazing things if you provide the spaces, the tools, and the right leadership. Trust comes from predictable delivery, and will fuel your relationships and provide runway to operate and grow. Your ego will conspire against you, so learn to be humble and accept when you’re wrong.

And now go manufacture some dreams…