Drills and finesse for the product manager
Product management is a little bit like playing soccer.
Ultimately your job is to win the game, and based on your teammates, there are a variety of strategies you might take. Strong defense on the field = building up strong technological or strategic barriers to competition. Strong offense is more like transparency and massive viral marketing (not every shot will go in, but hopefully enough will to make up for your misses).
There’s also a level of “brute vs. finesse”. If you’re a soccer fan, you can see this illustrated in, let’s say, a Brazil vs. England World Cup matchup. Brazil’s team is young and fast and tireless and they will sprint crazily towards the goal, take a shot, and repeat about six thousand times. In comparison, a team like England seems to be playing slow motion: looking around the field, making precisely accurate passes, maintaining control and ball possession.
I must confess that my natural tendency in both product management and soccer is towards the “brute” end of the scale. Have problem? Just throw energy, tenacity, and creativity at it. But of course, that’s oversimplifying things.
The Brazilian World Cup team may look frenetic and impulsive, but it’s within a foundation of drilling, passing, looking for patterns and responses, planning and constantly adapting. Practice.
For product managers, I’m a big fan of the Personal MBA:
The core of the Personal MBA is a list of the very best books the business press has to offer. Some books will give you tools: processes or actions you can apply immediately to improve your life and work. Others will give you ideas: help in envisioning what you and your business are capable of becoming. All of them will give you mental models: useful ways of thinking about the world that you can use to your advantage in a wide variety of situations.
These are a few of the books I’ve read so far that I’d recommend:
Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler. Confrontation makes people uncomfortable, but it’s necessary. This book has good exercises and mindsets to help identify unintended consequences of your words and how to frame things to minimize defensiveness or aggression. Another book, which I actually prefer, is Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, which focuses a little more on debate and back-and-forth.
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. A somewhat simplistic tale to illustrate that to achieve your goal, your one focus needs to be identify your constraints and compensate for them. Product managers may benefit more from the corollary that, if your only focus is dealing with constraints, you will have to de-prioritize lots of other things. This book may be a useful tool in helping to push back against a manager who has eight “#1 priorities” for you to work on.
The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. This book will make you look at all products around you and ask why they were designed that way. “Is it obvious how to use this?” and “What will happen when — not if — someone makes a mistake?” are two questions that product managers should always ask themselves, and this book is full of great illustrations why.
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The “me-too” strategy of competition leaves you with nothing to compete on but price. Instead of of trying to match all your competitors’ features plus one, it’s all about differentiating. Focus on a different market segment, a different need, a different end result, and you are better able to define your own value.
Next on my list to read are The Bootstrapper’s Bible and Marketing Metrics: 50+ Metrics Every Executive Should Master…
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