A 4-Step Process You Can Use in Product Management, Script Writing, and Basketball
A surprising parallel through brain training, patterns, and adaptability
Lack of time and the underbelly of life might play a role in holding us from fully exploring all of our passions. Fortunately, this plurality is still possible to embrace in some other different ways. But, that’s a whole different story.
Organizational skills: The mother of all skills
Working as an IT consultant and Product Owner for the last couple of years with a rising startup gave me the opportunity, above all, to improve my organizational skills on a personal scale and for my team as a whole.
Being organized is a special and magical tool that constitutes the base of the pyramid of all your other skills and upgrades them. Once this tool unlocked and mastered, you will be able to add layers of structure, clarity of vision, and efficiency to all of your already mastered range of skills.
If I had to send over “Thank you” notes to those who helped me make it through the winding path of Engineering school, I’ll certainly top the list with the Google search engine and the Youtube Indian guys, but I will give the most credit to the precious quality of being organized.
Despite never being a top student or the smarty geek in class, the fact that I used to manage to collect and organize all of my notes and class materials always backed me up through difficult times.
I always tend to lose track and linger over side subjects. Let’s get back to our main subject here.
Art is wherever you can see it
One major takeaway from my recent new life as a consultant is the four steps that I adopted to deal with each and every project or task that I take on: Ideation, Planning, Execution, and Rewarding. Let’s call them The Magic Four.
The Magic Four is an incredible and yet very underrated tool that puts you on a path that takes you from an idea up until conceiving your beautiful piece of art, which could ba a novel, a power-point, or a design.
Not only have I been using, recommending, and improving The Magic Four approach at work at different levels (Managing new projects, producing deliverables, developing strategies, etc.), but I have also been detecting this 4-step pattern elsewhere.
It seems like my brain got trained and used to The Magic Four that it built a sort of a framework of their exact shape and size to be able to manipulate them. My brain would then just keep scanning until it encounters four elements it could grip to those preassembled spots.
Then, it turned out that this skeleton is adjustable to many other situations and contexts. So, I started applying it wherever I recognized the shape of those four elements that could fit into my framework.
This is applicable for elemental immediate daily decisions, midterm, and long-term life decisions. But, I was surprised to notice that it was also applicable in situations that I was only witnessing and did not necessarily have first-hand on.
Here are some examples of how and where I was able to detect the use and efficiency of this process:
1. At work: “The new product I am working on”
Usually, when I am meeting with a client presenting their vision of a new platform or application, I ask a lot of questions to better understand their needs and take notes of every functional idea that could match and fit. Then, I start presenting some of the functionalities ideas and adjustments to them and challenge them on certain points and aspects of the project.
Throughout this pre-sales phase, I build a much clearer vision of this new platform and imagine its main screens and features, which would take me to the planning phase.
In a few words, this is about finding a balance between the developers’ team estimations, their availability in the upcoming period, the customer’s budget, and the project’s deadline.
Typically, the execution phase is composed of a series of cycles that are composed of: Sprint plannings, Grooming sessions, Development & Testing, and Retrospectives (Not getting into the details here, but God knows I could).
My role during this phase is mainly to facilitate the team’s work in many aspects. It includes setting a safe space for teamwork and communication, and thoroughly specifying user stories that match the technical constraints, the team’s schedule, the customer needs, and enjoyable user experience.
The experience you get from a project built from scratch, the satisfaction you get from carrying it out from A to Z with total customer satisfaction, the new skills you acquire and the other ones you improve are all parts of your set of rewards, not to mention the gratification of looking at your piece going live in the jungle.
2. In basketball: “The last offensive play in a game”
The opposite team was able to secure a last successful shot to take a one-point lead with less than 5 seconds left in the game.
Very active on the sideline, the head coach immediately called his team’s last timeout. As the players were gathering around him, he knew that the opposite team was expecting his superstar player to take the last shot. His idea was to make a diversion through him and to have his power forward, who was shooting at 47.2% from the field that game, take the last shot instead.
He drew the play plan on the board and explained it to his players. A couple of screens to set in order to create a mismatch for the shooter. He would get the pass from his point guard right on the upcoming double team. He should be able to have a clean look from his favorite spot.
The players walked back onto the court and were able to execute the play exactly as planned (Okay, it is almost never the case, but please, go with the flow). The shot went off right before the buzzer and the team eventually was rewarded with the win.
3. In cinema: “The movie plot”
The inspiration for a story, a movie plot, or a novel might come from a random situation encountered, a night dream, a daydream or some story heard from a friend or even a total stranger. “You’re giving me a great movie idea!”
The writer would then get going. He would start to get his story in shape, how it begins, how it carries on, and how it ends, he would elaborate the main events, develop his characters and eventually put together a solid plan for the script.
Once the writer has the main pieces in hand, he is able to move on to the execution. He details all the parts of the story, from the opening scene to the epilogue through all the ups, the downs, the heated and inspiring dialogues. He might as well imagine the scenery that goes with each scene, the music, etc.
For each writer, and depending on the nature of his art, reward differs. It could be the completion of the story itself after long months of writing, erasing, correcting, and rewriting. It could be the first feedback they get from their beta-readers. It could be the approval of an editor or being published. It could be the standing ovation after the movie premiere. It could be a personal satisfaction for being able to bring to life ideas and concepts by putting them into words. It could also be a pile of all of these.
4. On Medium: “This article”
It is actually pretty amusing to point out that writing this very article also falls into the Ideation-Planning-Execution-Rewarding process too.
In fact, it all started with a casual conversation with a friend that led us to talk about how “art” is a relative concept that could equally qualify either a painting or an excel file. This took us to think about the idea of how certain aspects that we mainly encounter managing our projects at work are also detectable in the genesis of other pieces of art or any other things we are passionate about.
I took off from there to decide to write this article and I set up a plan for it. It would simply be presented this way:
- Presentation of this wider concept of “Art” and how it defines elements in any area we have enough passion for to be able to see the art it generates.
- Presentation of the 4-step pattern that helps create and generate pieces of art.
- Breaking down examples of how this concept could be applied in different areas.
- Make this article the wrapping-up example of those areas and how the 4-step pattern contributed to its creation.
Obviously, typing this text would be my execution phase here. And, your reactions, your feedback about this article and about how much it would resonate with you would certainly constitute my precious reward.
5. Bonus part: “The post-up offense in basketball”
“But, this is not in the plan.” I know. Please, just… Please.
This part is just for basketball fanatics. If you’re not that much into the game, feel free to skip.
Now, for the hoopers and curious outsiders who kept reading, bare with me. I came to believe that our process could apply in a post-up situation. It is an offensive situation where the offensive player has possession of the ball and is facing away from the basket, protecting the ball with his back from the defender, who is placed between him and the rim and tries to block his progress.
During the few seconds preceding the attack, the offensive player analyses the situation.
Depending on the defender’s placement and movements, and based on the fact that the previous post-up situations turned out in a fadeaway shot, the offensive player had this idea to fool the defender by faking the same shot again before going for an easy lay-up.
He visualized his plan in his mind in a glimpse of a second and moved to the execution phase: A couple of dribbles pushing the defender closer to the rim, picking up the dribble, a little shimmy to the left followed by a fake shot to the right. The defender buys it and goes up as the attacker squeezes in and finds his way through the contact to finish inside. He is rewarded with the basket and a free-throw as he was fouled.
Where to go from here?
It looks like my brain went through a pretty incredible journey until it mastered this new capability.
Daniel Kahneman introduced in 2001 two modes of thinking:
- System 1: Fast, instinctive, and approximate. We use it most of the time to solve everyday challenges.
- System 2: Slow, more sophisticated, and deliberate. We use it less often, usually to solve more challenging problems and get through delicate situations.
In our process, my brain was first introduced to The Magic Four. Then, it assimilated the theory behind this new concept before it used it in practice. Slow thinking here probably was the way to think and understand.
The training helped to shape this new knowledge and eventually the brain was able to look for new opportunities to suggest the use of our tool.
I would be tempted to assume that once the training completed, System 1 took over. It took responsibility to use the tool since its value and effectiveness became well known. But, I am not sure about that.
