Can Hustlers be Defined?
Hmmmmmmm.
All there is in Product Management, and mostly everything that’s been done before the communication synchronisation race to migrate information to their appropriate stations on digital platforms, commences with the definitions that do three main things to “production” workflows:
1/ <Correcting.> Notions around all doubt that surround the “start work”/ green flag — like a contract, but within the group emailed or tacked onto the IR for everyone to see/ or for production heads to heed as the formalised go-signal to start and deadline reminders. Dreaded, and formulated to filter all inputs until there is a signed / agreed upon document that will be referred to, once things are done. (Also defines problem-setting discord along the way).
2/ <Simplifying.> When three documents are shrunk into one, and problems are whittled to solutions, whether in a format that is product manager originated, or business manager dictated — it creates a unification of business problem, translated into what the production team needs.
3/ <Specifying.> This is what we are most familiar with — as it is a touchstone document that is the basis of all work internally in the product team. It creates a fully automated and translated piece of objective paper that corresponds to what we intend defined in terms that the product dev team understand. Usually not from the product nor business managers, this is from a go-between person who does nothing but re-formats business mandates / the production team specifications of product (usually like a blue print) into internally conjugal dev-speak.
So when we say, Hustler.
We actually mean the Business Person in the team. The go-to money guy. That person who draws endlessly on the white board to illustrate the business models that will push the design into the door of production, once approved by, designed, and white-papered — or confirmed buildable by the whole team.
He writes the White Paper.
He writes the Business Plans.
He talks to the people needed to get him the figures, to manage the figures that he bounces back and forth to legal, to finance, and finally to VPs and layers of corporate (and startup boards, a timezone-appropriate phone call away) approval to get the business theory to execution stages.
He is the shake-my-hand Money guy.
He will get the money, and plugs all projections for the refinement of the business model. Usually the external go-between that gets money from investors, makes papers to attract them, and closes deals.
He is the coffee-with-you Talking head for the business.
He commands, and faces internally the production team — interfaced closely with, and backs up the Product Manager/Lead, and with the CEO (if it is the case that he is not the CEO himself as in some companies/lean startups).
He is the Hustler.
He needs to be the fastest moving part of all the three basic functions: he closes the cheques that needs to run and underlay the operations of the business, that pays the people that grabs the coffee, and hacks and smashes, and designs and fills the content that launches the publish, that the product pushes forward to consumer — before they pay for the product sold / service rendered.
When he is undefined in the equation of Triumvirate : Hustler-Hipster-Hacker, he will be a huge missing part that will make or break the high stakes that everyone puts maximum time and effort, into maximum capacity for output.
Mostly, the Hustler is the point person for accounting for both sides of Cost-Revenue, Profit-Loss, and Business Model-Fruition. He has business analysts at his beck and call, as well as the board on speed dial. Information is his middle name, and there is nothing he doesn’t know.
He normally gets the teams together, and is the glue to the platforms, proactive and normally needs caffeine more than the producer/ designers in the team, to keep active, awake, and pep everyone at every step. (Tiring.)
“It is imperative that we hustle.” -Woz, to Jobs (both hustled, but definitively were hacker to Jobs’ hipster, in today’s terms.)
This task is as non-automated a plugging-in of values and as testing models are agile — but have a smaller margin of error as the dev team’s — because there isn’t a real business canvas to work with, it’s meant to be the map, ergo set in a mould that will harden as stone as the code is published to QA and shapes up, before you even start work with already on-boarding users, en masse. Day one is massively dependent on the go signal and closing of investors’ cheques buying equipment and setting up physical nfrastructure to get the highest investments (the dev-hackers) to work.
Challenging as committing to code and production work sounds, the Hustle is like conducting a symphony that is compassed in impeccable timing, like sailing in the high seas — and bearing with diverse personalities, cordiality in the face of adversity (yikes, system crash at 2am! must get that infrastructure a second look-see at 3am…sending the architecture guys a quick ticktock message…) as well as the media (last minute coordination of what to say to the press that’s likened to state secretary speeches/ board of directors (pitching without a concluding slide, or famously a technical glitch on projector that is saved with huge flip-board drawings), and with a quick-witted charm that springs countenance at every level, to incite that poker-faced confidence from everyone round the room.
This old world je ne sais quoi, and well, mini-skirts work too. ;P
#HUSTLER
