Even the most well written and best produced movies in Hollywood consist of small plot holes that are often overlooked during production. It’s not until we understand what the director originally had in mind versus what made it to the screen. Movies are meticulously torn apart, freeze framed and explained what couldn’t be filmed or was cut from production. This nitpicking is done by passionate fans whose intentions are good and had high expectations wanting a perfect film about their favorite Marvel character or book.
Movies like products or features are experiences for some viewers. They live movie to movie, passionate about the story that’s created in a Hollywood production studio to entertain us for 3 hours. Often times they leave the movie theater disappointed that their expectations weren’t met and plot story lines were left with gaping holes.
As a product manager you often spend time gathering data, developing a story for your product or feature, telling that story to the world, receiving feedback, tweaking, running beta tests, only to find out that our viewers or users find it suboptimal and needs improvement. PMs reading will know what I’m talking about.
I’ve been to a few product review meetings where I get asked the hard questions like “If situation A happens then what happens to situation B?” Not having the answer or not having a good answer is embarrassing, and disappointing at the same time. You feel like you’ve looked at every angle, done your research, analyzed, only to find you’ve overlooked a detail that is important to completeness of the product.
A great example of this in the real world is Star Wars. Star Wars has a passionate fan base who only want to be entertained by a story of Jedis, Wookies, and spaceships that all intertwine and make sense. With questionable decisions like Jar Jar Binks, Jedi story lines, and Sith story lines, you can start to imagine that it would be pretty complex to keep all the stories straight through 12 movies spanning over numerous decades. It’s their job right?
As a PM our job is to not leave any plot holes, complete the story and intertwine all the stakeholders so that it makes sense and can become an instant classic upon release. Here are a few things that I’ve done to help me “keep my story straight” and not leave any plot holes:
Diversity of thought, early and often
Get your engineers involved early, get your product marketing involved early, get your QA involved early, letting them hear and listen to the feedback live and in person will allow for diverse thought around solutioning for different problems and potential “gotchas!”. Involving other teams like support, onboarding, sales, and customer success will help to poke holes in the story and ultimately lead to no plot holes.
At Weave, we pride ourselves in ownership and that only happens if everyone feels involved and valued from the get go. We have a policy that at product ideation launch, we have a stakeholder meeting that includes all impacted teams and departments to go over the “jobs to be done” of a particular feature or product and who/what/when/where/how it will impact stakeholders.
Not only do we have this kick-off meeting but we continuously communicate with them throughout the build it process so that target dates are clear, problems that pop up are solved, and everyone understands what the end product will look and feel like.
2. Be Humble
Humility is one of the most important traits as a leader. As a PM you’re the leader. You make tough calls, but also need to lean on your team to make the right calls. Asking for others’ opinions, thoughts, or feedback isn’t a sign of weakness, but of strength. It enables others to help you solve for hard problems and creates a relationship with them that you value their thoughts and opinions. This must be done genuinely, in order to have the desired impact.
When asked a hard question, not knowing the answer is okay. When you BS your way through the answer to a hard question it’s often obvious to those listening that you aren’t sure on the answer. Acknowledge you don’t know the answer but will follow up with them, and then really do! If you follow step 1 above, you can usually avoid some of these hard to answer questions by diversity of thought.
3. Write, reevaluate, re-write.
Sanity check. It’s a critical necessity when planning for a big feature or product. This will help put on a different lens especially if time has passed since you’ve ideated, and need to check to make sure that this is indeed the direction you need to go. Data, and circumstances can change pretty quickly especially in a start up environment. If a story, or solution, has been thought through, but not implemented, it might be time to scrap it and re-ideate if possible.
This happened to me a few months ago when redesigning a specific part of our app. It was old and outdated and we had gathered a good amount of feedback on the problems with the page. We redesigned it, and sat on it, never feeling 100% confident we were actually improving the experience. We kept trying to justify to ourselves that it was the right move, but never truly felt that way. We never moved those designs into “build it” phase, but instead looked back at the data, the feedback, and the jobs to be done. We indeed we’re missing the mark.
We re-evaluated, sifted through the feedback and built empathy for our users in the problems they were experiencing and the solutions we weren’t giving them. Finally, after almost six months of redesigns we finally landed in the bullseye.
Rethinking and rewriting the story, will help you avoid plot holes, because you’ll have more information and data as time passes to plan for holes in the story written prior. In a changing environment, re-evaluating and rewriting a story, will allow you to make a more informed decision and question your “why” on previous decisions. It’s a healthy exercise that when used (and not all the time) will help avoid holes in the plot.
4. Buy-In
What if…What if during the storyboarding and writing stage of star wars, George Lucas brought in hard core fans to help write the story of the prequels? The screenplays? Would the story have flowed more seamlessly to the originals?
With this process could we have eliminated plot holes, had more complete character arcs, and enjoyed the vision George Lucas had in his mind translated onto the screen? Holistically looking at a product, feature, or experience with stakeholders develops early buy-in, and eliminates the risk of plot holes.
In Conclusion.
No one likes an incomplete story, and we don’t want to be embarrassed by missing key plot points in our product story. By using some of the tips and tricks above you can avoid plot holes and create magic for your users, and stakeholders.
