While engineers often work in teams and designers often critique each other's work, I don't have a consistent group that I feel a part of.

I thought this was unique to me and my struggle to be vulnerable with people, but I'm learning that loneliness is a common part of the role:

Why is this? From talking with other PMs (and asking questions on Reddit and Blind), I think it’s a few things:

• We have to be leaders: I notice this when I have to be optimistic about the future of whatever product I'm working on others have the ability to express doubts or concerns.

• Roles are not well-defined: The PM role is relatively new and seemingly everyone has a different take on how it should be defined. This leads us to feel insecure in our knowledge and rely on resources that could be plain wrong because there has yet to be an established framework for success in this role.

• Awkwardness and Politeness: It can be hard to change a relationship from a strictly professional one to a social one. We also may not know how to navigate the culture.

• Unspoken competitiveness: In a role where you're vying for scope, there can be some animosity between PMs. While there are exceptions, people note this as a common theme.

Loneliness isn't a good state for our mental health and can lead to burnout. It’s also hurting our career growth.

All of the big jumps in my career — my first job as a designer, working on winning hackathon projects and my dream role on the WhatsApp Payment team — all stemmed from conversations with inspiring people outside of my current team.

Conversations with other smart people are where I get great ideas, opportunities and advice from someone who is not connected to my day-to-day life.

Loneliness, I'm learning, leads to poor mental health, the inability to have important conversations, and worse career outcomes.

I think this is something we should try to solve as product managers.

👥 Connections versus Friendships

If loneliness is the problem, what's the solution?

I was stumped. But fortunately, my girlfriend (who is smarter than I) shared a famous essay with me to help me think through this problem differently. It was aptly named "The Opposite of Loneliness". Here's the part that hit me (emphasis added):

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life...

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed.

Something clicked. As PMs, we're surrounded by people every day. We have a "community" — colleagues, Slack channels and PMs we occasionally keep in touch with.

We're not lacking PM connections, we're lacking PM friends; people "who are in this together” and “Who are on your team."

Connections are PMs you chat with on Slack, occasionally tweet at, or catch up with quarterly over Zoom. They may be people who you enjoy spending time with at work, but the conversations don't stray too far beyond small talk.

Friends are people who check in on you when things are rough. People who you can bounce crazy ideas off of and who will root you on in whatever you're doing. They don't feel the need to act professionally with you and they are people you'd love to go to a concert, bar or park with. I've been lucky to have some of those in my PM career:

The opposite of loneliness isn't a bigger network; it's real friendship. In our context, friendship with other PMs who you actively want to spend time with.

Building these friendships will help us become happier and significantly improve our career trajectories.

😕 Friends Aren't Prioritized

PM loneliness is not new. In fact, there are many communities trying to help PMs build connections. They break down into a few categories:

• Free-to-access spaces (ex. Product School, PM Facebook Groups, Mind the Product): these are spaces with 20,000-100,000 people interested in product management. They can help you discuss topics (ex. "Should PMs be technical?"), but aren't conducive to building relationships or having 1-1 conversations (the one exception here is Women in Product which I've heard amazing things about).

• Courses (ex. On Deck Product Management, Lenny's Course, Reforge): these can be extremely valuable and I admire folks like Andrew Yu, Lenny Rachitsky and Sachin Rekhi who are leading these cohort-based classes. But the time-commitment (3-10 hours per week), price ($1,000-$5,000) and focus on lectures/workshops can make friendship secondary to education.

• Communities for aspiring PMs (ex. Lewis Lin's Slack channel, Product Buds): these are great for breaking into PM and I like how supportive they tend to be. But they are targeted to new PMs. When I joined as a current PM, I was asked to give mock interviews, review resumes and have coffee chats.

All of these communities serve important roles and have participants who really benefit from them. But at the end of the day, these are primarily about professional connections, education or interviewing. These are helpful, but as Shreyas Doshi puts it, developing relationships with other PMs can do wonders.

This raises the question: what is the right design of a community focused on PM friendships?

❤️ The traits of a good community

I'm incredibly lucky to have been a part of one community where I made real friends in product management: the Rotational Product Manager program at Facebook. Looking back, RPM helped me make some lifelong friends who have already changed the trajectory of my career.

I want to share what this program did exceptionally well to foster friendships. This is not meant to be an advertisement for the RPM program. Instead, it’s a potential blueprint for the type of community that the wider PM industry needs.

Here's how this community created genuine friendships:

🤟 Friendship > Curriculum: during onboarding, we were told time and again that we should spend more time getting to know each other than doing our training modules. We accepted the advice and spent time eating lunches together, going on a trip to Sonoma and going out together on the weekends.

🔒 Small and safe: you can't have meaningful friendships with 1000s of PMs. Our small group of about 15 people allowed us to get to know everyone individually and have intimate conversations that were not performative.

🏃‍♀️ People of the same calibre: we bonded because all of us were equally smart, ambitious and had similar career goals. This community thrived because anyone could reach out and you would be excited to speak with and learn from them.

🌍 Diverse: Homogeneity is boring. Hearing stories from someone with different lived experiences, skillsets and cultural upbringing makes a community exciting and dynamic.

🏦 Investment: Admittance to this community requires rigorous screening and people who had the same goals. It also requires us to go to events and organize things for the community. This made us all feel like we had "skin in the game" for the community to succeed.

🔑 Access: As a small group of high calibre PMs, we could access the most intimate, useful conversations. These included

• 🥗 "Tiny Lunches": 5-6 PMs would have a candid conversation with industry titans like Sheryl Sandberg, Fidji Sumo and Chris Cox. These conversations were exponentially more enlightening than fireside chats in front of 1000s of people. Conversations got personal, specific and involved the whole group (rather than a Q&A).

• ⭕️ Circles: Groups of 3-4 PMs and a more senior PM would get together every week to support each other. We'd talk about how things were going on our teams, common themes (ex. performance reviews with our managers) and ask the senior PM for advice.

• 📚 Playbooks: There were onboarding guides, templates to start off with and best practices from people who had been in our shoes before. This gave us a clear playbook to do our job better and shed light on what it takes to get to the next level of our careers.

This community helped me create real friendships with other insanely smart PMs. Outside of friendship, there was an even bigger impact on my career trajectory:

• 📈 Higher performance: RPMs routinely perform at the level of PMs with 2-3x the experience.

• 🧑‍🚀 Exit Opportunities: RPMs are poached to go to places like Stripe, Chime, venture capital or found their own startup. When they stay at Facebook, they excel quickly to leadership.

• 🛣 Proven paths to product leadership: Seeing people in your community go on to do insane things is inspiring. It also helps you understand what you need to do to cross the IC to PM leader chasm. One example is Ashley Yuki, a 2013 RPM who is now the Co-Head of Product at Instagram. Hearing stories from people like this makes our path to becoming product leaders clear.

With all of these incredible attributes, the RPM program had its limitations — I only met people from Facebook and only learned how to do things the Facebook way.

This is where I see an opportunity to build on some of this community design to create something truly unique.

Introducing Product Circle ⭕️

I've spent the last few months working with kick-ass PMs to build the community we've always wanted. We call it Product Circle and applications for the first cohort (20 spots) open today.

Product Circle is designed to be an intimate group for PMs at top startups and companies to build real friendships.

These friendships will create great memories, introductions, opportunities, side-projects, startups, mentorship, ideas and conversations.

Being a member of this community involves:

1. 🤟 Friendships with top PMs: In your first week, we'll introduce you to other PMs with overlapping interests who we think can make for great first friends. We'll host in-real-life (IRL) member events, deep-dives on hot industries (ex. crypto, creator economy) and regular peer coaching sessions (modelled after my experience with "circles" at Facebook).

2. 🔑 Intimate events with product leaders: We know that chats with 5 people are more honest than those with 500. We invite Head of Products, first-PM hires and Directors/VP of Product to have candid, open and practical conversations with our community.

3. 🔒 Conversations you can't have anywhere else: It's hard to speak to your manager about everything. It helps to have a safe space filled with people of the same calibre as you to talk through things like switching teams, product consulting, bias at work and more.

4. 📚 Exclusive Resources: A crowd-sourced vault of the best resources to give you a leg up. Examples include templates on how Spotify plans go-to-market, Unity does product requirements and how Stripe creates a writing culture.

Our guiding principle is friendship > connections. With this mantra, I see us creating a product version of the famed “PayPal Mafia” (but more diverse and thoughtful) with each member going on to build teams, products and industries that move the world forward.

If this sounds like the type of community you want to be a part of, join us.

Apply for Membership

Know someone who could benefit from a community like this? Share this post with them (especially for diverse candidates).

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But how are individuals on the team — including the PM — evaluated? In other words, what's the scorecard our managers use to see if we're top performers or below the pack?

Understanding the scorecard is crucial to make the next big jump in your career. Extending this idea to your product team also lets you build leadership capacity on your team — allowing you to scale your collective impact.

In other words, scorecards are a good thing to understand! Let’s start with…

🏅 The PM Scorecard

Shreyas Doshi created an excellent map of the skills PMs need to demonstrate at different parts of their careers:

He even goes a step further and breaks down the components of each of these senses:

These two charts set a great foundation for the general skillsets you’ll need to develop as a PM.

But here’s a cool thing I’ve learned: you can choose to develop those skills on low-impact projects or high-impact projects. Think about it — you can develop really strong project management skills (“Execution Sense”) by delivering a feature that is not critical to the business or you can apply those same skills on a strategic priority.

To combine skill development with the fastest career growth, look to develop your skillset on company priorities. Seek to understand your leadership’s perspective to identify these priorities.

When I was working on WhatsApp Payments, an area that our leadership was especially interested in was scaling was our compliance platform.

While I was prioritizing P2P payments, I realized that my focus on compliance would be amongst the most impactful things I could do for the business. I stepped up to lead strategy and execution for a series of compliance initiatives.

Because of work, I developed strong skills while having regular check-ins with our VP and a chance to see the broader strategy that I may not be privy to. In the end, the outcome I created benefited the business more than other work I could have done while helping me grow my presence in the company.

In brief, pair your PM scorecard with the highest impact projects to scale your career the fastest.

📭 What if there is no scorecard?

Even better! This is a way to grow from a PM into a product leader — by defining organizational processes that can improve overall product efficiency.

Tell your manager that you'd like to proactively define the evaluation criteria for PMs on your team/in your company. I'd suggest starting these criteria based on Shreyas' map.

Next, be explicit of what actions translate to each “sense” in your company’s culture. For example, in your company, "Analytical Sense" may correspond to setting quarterly goals that are well-informed by data.

Design the skill maps to both optimize for the value each skill provides to the company and the skills people at the company want to learn.

Merging these will require you to talk to other PMs on your team to understand what they see as important for their growth in the company and the skills they personally want to develop.

Finally, align leaders on this scorecard. This is a fantastic way to develop your internal presence by genuinely helping your team to scale.

As a final note on the importance of having a scorecard: scorecards reduce bias. It makes success objective, not subjective to the point of view of particular managers. Standardizing success can help you retain and grow diverse talent in your product team.

👏 The scorecards of your teammates

Let’s expand the concept of a scorecard to other members of the product team. The key idea: if you know how others are evaluated, you can help them grow their leadership abilities.

Why should you care about the growth of your teammates? Three reasons:

1. Build leadership and ownership on the team: chances are that the more senior someone becomes, the more likely their scope will involve leadership, higher-level thinking and strategy. Helping teammates develop these skills will create thought partners and more capacity on your team

2. Collectively do more: having more leadership skills will also increase the raw output on your team. This will allow you to set higher goals, take on new scope and attract more resources.

3. Retention: If you can help people identify a growth path within your team, they are more likely to stay and continue adding value to your product area.

Understand the scorecards of your teammates by asking them how they are evaluated. Have a candid conversation where you share how you’re both evaluated and what your growth plans are. This also helps to strengthen your relationship and demonstrate genuine care for their growth.

With an understanding of their growth plans, you can then set challenges that allow them to grow while increasing the output of your team.

🏁 Summary

1. Identify the business needs that matter most to your leadership. They often have more visibility on the big picture.

2. Being successful in these areas will yield higher rewards/exposure than doing the same tasks on other areas.

3. If there is no scorecard, step up and create one. This will let you take on the scope of a PM leader while growing your visibility within the company.

4. Understand the scorecards of your teammates to help them grow into leaders. This will help you create ownership, collectively do more and retain the best people.

📚 Reads and Resources

To perform at your best, focus on goals not tasks by Paul Adams (shared with me by Adam Kazwell): a short read on improving performance by focusing on outcomes.

Build with Maggie Crowley: a product focussed podcast with nuanced and tactical conversations between great PMs. I liked this episode with Jackie Bavaro.

Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials by a16z: by inner payment nerd loved this chat on tech-enabled solutions for student debt, consumer choice and bureaucracy.

👀 And one more thing…

When I started as a product manager, the thing that changed the game for me, and really helped me grow, wasn’t a newsletter or a course.

It was community.

Communities of ambitious peers, mentors and product leaders helped me make big leaps in my career.

I’ve since learned that building friendships with the right people is the most valuable thing PMs can spend their time on.

Next week, I’ll share what I’ve been working on to help top PMs change the trajectory of their careers.

Stay tuned. ❤️

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

After roadmapping, prioritization and defining success for your projects, it’s time to start executing. Enter the kickoff meeting. This meeting brings all stakeholders onto the same page, defines ownership and creates momentum around execution.

When done right, kickoff meetings can help to empower your team to drive progress independently. It can be seen as passing the baton from the PM, the person who often defines the feature, to the lead builders on your team. 

Successfully passing the baton is an art.

When I first became a PM, I didn’t think I needed to pass it at all. Isn’t the role of a PM to lead projects? While this is true initially, to scale yourself and take on more scope, you need to empower leaders on your team to drive execution so you can spend time defining the direction of your product.

Below I’ll share my process towards kickoff meetings — an invaluable tool to scale your leverage.

Why are kickoffs useful?

1. Create ownership within your team: to successfully scale your team, you need multiple leaders. One litmus test of how centralized your leadership is: would your team fall apart if you were sick for a week? Kickoff meetings help to establish new owners to drive projects.

2. Create clarity: kickoffs ensure that everyone has all the details, context and definition necessary to make the project succeed. 

3. Create excitement and momentum: finally, kickoffs are a great opportunity to install excitement, urgency and purpose into a project. 

Before the meeting

Find owners: On any given project, there are several product team members involved. This may include designers, engineers, data scientists, product marketing managers or any other number of roles. It’s important to find 1-2 members who have the knowledge and capacity to drive progress.

Often, these are the people who will be closest to the project. If this is a front-end heavy feature, for example, a designer may be well-suited to drive progress. If its an analytics heavy, this may be the team data scientist.

One thing that is not variable is that this person must have the capacity and ability to lead the project. These people are looking to grow their scope and are on a track to a formal leadership role (ex. Engineering manager) on the team.

Define the product: regardless of the owner, the PM still needs to define the project. Loop in the owners early to get their ideas, but ensure that you have a product spec or product requirements doc defined.

Huddle with owners to ensure that you are all aligned: With owners defined and a product spec ready, ensure that the leads are aligned on the requirements and what will be necessary to succeed. Tactically, this will allow them to answer all of the questions from their teammates in the kickoff meeting and beyond — allowing them to be seen as the project leader.

Ask an owner to schedule and drive the kickoff: This puts them in the right spot to drive the meeting and be the point of contact for questions that arise in the future. Be available if they need support (ex. “Loop me in if you need my help.”).

Include stakeholders: Include all relevant team members in the meeting. It may also include people who want to be aware of progress (ex. A sales team member who wants to understand timelines for a project their client has been requesting).

Suggest topics to cover: topics I like to suggest are:

1. Why are we building this (i.e. the wider context)?

2. How did we decide to work on this project over others?

3. The product brief

4. Any initial designs or engineering architecture

5. Next steps and timelines

During the meeting

Understand the two purposes of a kickoff:

1. For the team: the purpose of the meeting is to get concrete next steps on how this project will be executed. People should leave the meeting with action items, a clear understanding of why we’re building this product, and excitement.

2. For the PM: the purpose is to empower owners to drive the project independently. This will help maximize the impact of your team, get the most value from individual team members and free your capacity to work on projects that demand your attention.

Volunteer to take notes: this is a value add that allows the owner to focus on driving the meeting. It’s also a general best practice for PMs.

Do not lead, but play your role: although there will be owners driving the meeting, you may be called upon to share product-specific details. These may include the product vision, how it aligns with broader strategy or any external dependencies that you will help to resolve.

If the owner forgets, ask about the next steps towards the end of the meeting: this makes sure there are next steps and accountability to drive progress.

After the meeting

Congratulate the project leads: this is just a nice thing to do! It also shows appreciation for their leadership.

Pro-tip: give the next steps you’ve documented to the owners to share out. I will literally type out the next steps, action items and timeline and encourage the person who led the meeting to share it out. This reinforces that they are leading and driving the project from here on out.

Take the back seat but be available: with owners now driving progress, be sure to make yourself available to unblock, help or support in any helpful way.

Summary

The kick-off meeting is one of my favourite tools for creating ownership within your team. It allows teams members to step up and grow their skillset while freeing up your capacity to focus on strategy or more involving execution projects.

1. Kickoffs should create clear ownership, project clarity and excitement for the work being started.

2. Before the meeting, find owners and make sure they are aligned with the plan. Encourage them to schedule and set the agenda for the meeting.

3. During the meeting, support the owners by taking notes and sharing the pieces they feel are necessary (ex. Product vision).

4. After the meeting, congratulate them and give them the next steps to share widely. Be available to support where necessary.

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

📚 Great reads, watches and listens

🤝 Being a Tech Lead in an Empowered Product Team: This read captures the ideal team state for a product team. In it, you’ll see tech leads doing far more than engineering.

🤑 Life Advice: Become a Billionaire: A quasi-empirical argument for why you should aim to be a billionaire. A fun and thought-provoking read!

🛬 How to write landing pages: As I work on a new project now, I’m amazed at how little I know about copywriting. This is a great resource for those building side projects.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

After creating a vision, strategy or roadmap, you may need to review the plan with your leadership team. This is called a product review.

Generally, these reviews involve presenting an artifact (a strategy document, a vision deck etc.) with a few asks attached for the leadership group. These questions focus the session around three possible outcomes:

1. Alignment: ensure that leaders know how a decision was made and make sure they are on board.

2. Decisions: use the leadership team's larger point of view to make decisions.

3. Visibility: keep your workstream top of mind and bring relevant people into the team's decision-making process.

After we made our recent roadmap, I reviewed it with our leadership team. This group contained leads from product, engineering, marketing, data science, design and sales.

Below I’ll share the way I approached my review with templates that you can use. Hopefully, this will save you from all the trial and error that I did during my first few reviews. 😅

Desired outcome

Speaking of error: In my first product review, I remember presenting for 25 minutes and asking for feedback on this presentation for the last 5. Don't do this!

The main goal of a product review is to get feedback from leaders. This is in the form of agreement on a chosen path (alignment), a decision to unblock the team (decision) or comments/questions about the team's direction (visibility).

This is why encouraging discussion and engagement on a handful of key points is the best use of time. Refrain from presenting unless it is a specific area you need feedback on.

Facilitating discussion requires defining the discussion points ahead of the review. Here are anonymized asks that I’ve made in the past:

Alignment

Given the total addressable market and growing user base, we've prioritized Ecuador as our first target market (over Guatemala and Honduras). Is this group aligned?

Decisions

The platform team has asked us to commit two engineers for 6 months on supporting initiative X. We think Y is a better investment. What does the leadership team think is a higher priority?

Visibility

We’ve selected the following four goals for next year. Please let us know if you have comments or questions.

I’ve also seen two approaches for framing these asks. Here they are with a template for each of them:

1. Goals and Non-Goals: Helpful to set the discussion topics and topics you will explicitly not discuss. This is great for an ambiguous topic with many open questions.

Goals and Non-Goals Template

1. Labelled Summary: Useful for status updates on execution (ex. roadmap reviews, check-ins). Allows you to jump to multiple areas easily.

Labelled Summary Template

Process

Here are the steps I did for my recent review. You’ll notice this is a replicable process that can help facilitate conversations in many contexts.

Before the review:

1. Append the discussion points onto the document/presentation you want to review with your leadership. This may be a roadmap, a product strategy, market analysis etc. See what I mean in the template.

2. Send the document/presentation to the stakeholders whose input you are requesting 48-72 hours before the review. Encourage them to read it, leave comments in the document and come to the review with questions.

   1. Even if people don’t have a chance to pre-read, it’s helpful to set your desired expectations and share context ahead of time.

3. Ask a team member if they are able and willing to join the review to take notes. This allows you to prioritize driving the discussion.

During the review:

• At the start of the call, ask if everyone has read the pre-read. If they have, jump right into the discussion points. If they have not, spend a few minutes reviewing the most important context before jumping into the discussion.

• Start at the discussion points. Be clear what the desired outcome from each discussion point is.

• Ask people to leave comments in the doc if they have lightweight thoughts or questions that can be resolved asynchronously (i.e. not during this meeting).

• For points of alignment, document decisions and next steps.

After the meeting:

• Re-attach the pre-read and encourage people to leave comments or questions

• Recap key discussion points, follow-ups and next steps in an email to the relevant parties. Try using the example in the template.

Summary

Use leadership reviews to align, decide and provide visibility. This will make sure all relevant stakeholders are on the same page about how your team will achieve it’s mission.

• Set discussion points on the most important topics at the start of the meeting. Do this by appending specific asks to the document/presentation you want to review.

• Remember that the majority of the session should be about soliciting feedback. Make sure someone is taking notes, and follow-ups are captured.

• Encourage people to leave asynchronous comments or notes before, during and after the meeting.

• After the review, document the key points and follow up with stakeholders.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

🤔 The CSPO Pathology by Marty Cagan: The person who literally wrote the book on product management is concerned that most product managers “are effectively little more than overpaid backlog administrators or project managers.”

👾 No Code 101 by NoCodeMba: I’ve heard great things about this course about building apps and websites without code. Check it out if you want to launch your business or earn money building for others.

🧠 The Power of Product Thinking by Julie Zhou: an incredible read on how to learn and deploy product thinking in your everyday life.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

Summary: Give prioritization decisions the fidelity they require — and nothing more. This will allow you to maintain a fast pace of execution while freeing time to work on larger decisions. Try the processes below for small, medium and large-scale prioritization challenges.

👩‍💻 Side note: My team at Facebook (and the company as a whole, tbh) is hiring a ton right now across engineering, product, and data. Looking for people with 4+ YoE. I’d love to refer some of the Product Life community — reply to this email if you’re interested. 👨‍💻

A key responsibility of product managers is to identify the most impactful projects to work on. This requires a critical process: prioritization. 

I struggled a lot with prioritization when I transitioned to the PM role. But over time, I learned something that changed how I approach it: the level of attention you give a decision should depend on its relative importance.

If something is small but is weighing down your team, make the call now. If something is large and requires thoughtfulness, take time and be explicit with your criteria. Here is this idea summarized:

Below, I’ll go through the process I use to make decisions of varying impact. Try them out next time you need to prioritize.

🌱 Small decisions

Examples:

• Should the logo go on the top left or top right?

• Should our goal be 8% or 9% revenue growth?

• Should we do one additional week of work on feature X?

Small decisions are ones where either option is reasonable and can just as easily advance your goals. The key idea with small decisions is to make them immediately to maintain your team’s velocity. The longer you let them sit, the more ambiguity and frustration you’ll create. 

How can you make quick decisions? I lean on culture and principles. 

Culture is the values your company prioritizes. These are the spoken and unspoken rules of what matters most for the team.

Facebook, for example, has five core values: move fast, be bold, focus on impact, be open and build social value. Using any of these is helpful for making small decisions. However, if one option is to take on a bolder goal while the other is more conservative, I’ll default to the bolder one in line with the culture.

Principles are defined at the product or group level. These inform how products are built in your group. If your team doesn’t have principles, define them. These are values that you and the team will follow when building the product.

For example, one of the principles for the Ads product group at Facebook is “People First.” If there is ever a tradeoff between creating user value and revenue for Facebook, we will always choose the user value. This stems from the belief that building the right products for users will generate every party more value in the long term.

Summary: make small decisions on the spot by leaning on your company and product principles. If there aren’t any principles, define them.

🌻 Medium Decisions

Examples:

1. Which project should we work on next quarter?

2. What should our top-line metric be?

3. Which of these user segments is most important to focus on?

These are the decisions that often suck up a disproportionate amount of my time. I tend to do a ton of research, get many opinions, and take a scientific approach to weigh the criteria.

But I’ve learned that this is ofter overkill given the impact. So I’ve now focussed my time on two things that are truly necessary for these decisions:

1. Explicit decision-making criteria: People will want to know how you’ve made the decision with decisions of this scale. Importantly, they also help you objectively make a decision rather than succumbing to biases or politics. 

2. Estimated values: estimate values for each criterion rather than finding precise values. Precision takes longer than is necessary. 

I want to share how you can put this idea into practice for medium decisions. Here are three approaches you could take depending on the type of criteria you choose:

A checklist for binary criteria

T-Shirt Sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL) for quantifiable criteria

Ballpark estimates for number-driven criteria

These simple tables help me make quick, principled decisions. So give them a shot next time you’re in a similar position.

Summary: spend time objectively defining the criteria you’ll use to prioritize. From here, estimate the values depending on which estimates will provide the most clarity — checklists, T-Shirt size estimates or ballpark sizing.

🌲Large decisions

Examples:

• Should we focus our strategy on user retention, activation, engagement of monetization?

• What should our first international market be?

• What should our two-year North-Star metric be?

Large decisions add more nuanced criteria and precise estimates to the medium-sized decision process above. So instead of optimizing for objectivity, you want to capture the nuance of the situation instead.

I was in this spot often on the WhatsApp Payments team. Given the complexity of launching consumer payment products in global markets, many big decisions needed to be made all the time. Each time it the decision required collecting the following:

Situation-specific criteria: General categories like “impact” may no longer be sufficient due to the nuance.  But the need for objective decision-making criteria remains. For our decision, these are some of the areas we are considering:

1. Ecosystem Value

2. Supporting Company Priorities

3. Incremental Revenue

4. Opportunity Size

Unfortunately, there aren’t common metrics at this stage. Instead, you’ll need to consider the most important things to consider depending on your product space.

Precise estimates: Precision is more important with large decisions. This is the time to partner with your product team — data scientists, engineers, product marketing, product strategy or any other role who can help estimate the size of each area correctly.

Points of view of key stakeholders: At this level of decision, aligning stakeholders is just as important as the actual decision. I wrote a separate guide (with a template) to help drive alignment when making big decisions.

Put together, the large decision-making matrix may look like this:

After assembling the decision matrix, involve the stakeholders again to see if a decision can be reached. If not, consult your leadership team to force a decision.

Summary: capture the nuance of large decisions with situation-specific criteria. Enlist the broader product team to help create more precise estimates of these criteria.

 ✍️ Summary

Give prioritization decisions the fidelity they require. This will allow you to maintain a fast pace of execution while freeing time to work on larger decisions.

• Make small decisions on the spot by leaning on your company and product principles. If there aren’t any principles, define them.

• For medium decisions, spend time objectively defining the criteria you’ll use to make the decision. Then, estimate the values of these criteria with the right approach — checklists, T-Shirt size estimates or ballpark sizing.

• For large decisions, spend time defining nuanced criteria that capture the complexity. Then, work with your team to create more precise estimates of each criterion. Enlist leadership to help make tradeoffs if necessary.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

⭐️Choosing Your North Star Metric by Lenny Rachitsky: a great guide (with 40+ examples) of how to find the right north star for your team.

🎥 The Business by KCRW: I love movies, and I’m fascinated by the entertainment industry. Been learning more about actor guilds, how streaming changes revenue and more in this podcast about showbiz.

 🗣 How to Ask Useful Questions by Josh Kaufman: Templates and pointers for asking for clarification, help, advice and agreement.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

Subscribe now

Until next time,

Will

Finding the right problems to solve is one of the most important roles of a product manager. But unfortunately, we don't spend enough time understanding the problem because it’s easier to build solutions that move our KPIs.

Today, I want to dig deeper into why and how we can weave the process of problem discovery into the roadmap. Doing this effectively will help you:

1. Find product-market fit: ensure that your building against a real customer need will allow you to find a fit in the market.

2. Help your team achieve more: you'll have more impact if the problems you're solving are big, nuanced opportunities.

3. Advance your own career: build a reputation for tackling important problems (rather than being distracted by unimportant ones).

Let’s jump in.

👩‍🏫 What does understanding look like?

I became the PM of a brand new team recently. We assembled a group of 10+ people to tackle an area necessary for our product's strategy. The challenge: none of us were familiar with the users, problems or opportunities in the space. This made our early feature ideas shallow and unfounded.

We needed to understand the problem before we could identify the right solution. This is exactly what an understand roadmap is meant to do.

An understand roadmap is filled with research projects into specific topics. Like a regular roadmap, these research projects are prioritized against their impact and the effort it will take to complete.

But unlike a regular project, the goal of research projects is to create actionable product insights. These are ideas, opportunities or problems that can directly lead to impactful work for the product team. This forces these research projects to be more actionable than academic studies.

I've observed six types of research projects, each of which is lead by different members of the product team. Use these to inspire you and your team to discover unknown opportunities:

🤷‍♂️ User Research (led by user research or design):

Understand the user’s interactions with the problem space or your product specifically. If you were a payments company, this could be user interviews with 10 people who don't use digital payments, a survey of "power users" to understand why they use your product or eye-tracking of first-time users to see what they focus on.

📊 Data Research (data scientist-led)

Understand the trends, funnels and lifecycles that are relevant for your product. This may be defining user segmentation, visualizing the checkout funnel or finding the drivers of adoption to your product.

💼 Market Research (biz-ops, operations or product marketing-led)

Understand the market landscape and the challenges of businesses in your space. This may be speaking to partners, enterprise customers or end users. This group often works with sales, customer success or partnerships to coordinate meetings with the relevant parties.

👨‍⚖️ Regulatory Research (legal, policy, privacy or finance-led)

Understand the restrictions, opportunities and potential path forwards in spaces with considerable regulation. This may be a policy analysis of European antitrust, a legal assessment of digital payment laws in India or the financial analysis of a competitor. This requires expertise in the area you're researching (ex. a lawyer will need to investigate privacy law) to help shape product decisions in scrutinized spaces.

🗃 Internal Research (can be anyone, often the PM)

Find and catalogue the knowledge that teammates previously generated in the space. If you work at a large company, there’s likely a team that has attempted to solve similar problems. It avoids reinventing the wheel and can help you build off past knowledge.

💻 Engineering Research (engineers)

More technical projects may need engineering deep dives. This may include understanding CPU use on complex algorithms or finding problems in a recommendation system.

Each of these projects creates valuable product insights that can inform future roadmaps. But how can we prioritize these projects against features that move KPIs?

🌍 Prioritize discovery

Prioritizing problem discovery requires you to explicitly set aside part of the team's capacity for discovery.

Strong teams that I've observed mandate that 20% of the team’s capacity should go towards discovery. This varies across roles (ex. user researchers may spend 80% of their time researching while engineers spend 5%). Still, it’s healthy to create a culture of discovery where everyone is involved in the process.

By setting this mandate, you won't have to compare KPI-moving projects with discovery projects. Instead, you can compare projects within their respective categories.

This was my experience when I was the product manager for the Memorialization team at Facebook. Our main goal was to support the bereaved after the loss of a loved one. While team members each had ideas of what we could immediately do to address this challenge, we invested significantly in understanding the nuances of the space.

The team’s cross-cultural findings identified shared ideas of stewardship after death, how social connections form after a node in a social graph is dropped, and real testimonials from users who had experienced this grief. We used this knowledge to build features like the Tributes section of a profile where people could commemorate and share stories of their mutual connection.

⛳️ Summary

Discovery projects can lead to a larger impact on long-term KPIs than normal projects because it focuses the team on solving the right problems.

• Set a mandate that a certain percentage of your team's roadmap should go towards discovery projects. 20% is a good threshold for an ambiguous area.

• Empower the cross-functional team (designers, researchers, lawyers etc.) to tackle the highest impact discovery projects.

• Remember that the goal of a discovery project is to create actionable product insights. This prevents the projects from becoming too academic or fluffy.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying This Week

🧬 Technology Saves the World by Marc Andreesen: a fantastic essay on how coronavirus shows the world what is possible with technology.

🍿 The Carpool Critics Podcast: a new podcast I’m loving with movie nerds talking nerdy about movies. I listened to episodes on Avengers Endgame, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The Last Jedi.

🍀 Your Success Probably Didn’t Come From Merit Alone by Ezra Klein: a great conversation with Tressie McMillan Cottom about everything from “smartness” to the dangers of nostalgia.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

There are points in developing a product where a decision needs to be made. Here are a few examples:

1. We haven't got sustainable growth for this feature. Do we kill it?

2. We need to expand into our first international market. Which do we choose?

3. Our competitor launched a killer new feature. How do we respond?

Decisions like these are hard because there are many people involved. Creating a decision-making framework, capturing all of the right perspectives and forcing a decision is tough — but it's a common responsibility for the PM.

I was in this spot often on the WhatsApp Payments team. Given the complexity of launching consumer payment products in global markets, there were many big decisions that needed to be made all the time.

One memorable decision was which license we should operate under in an important market. There were policy considerations, marketing concerns, partners who were voicing their opinion and technical challenges to boot.

I used the following framework to drive an answer. Below, I’ll discuss why this lightweight framework works and how you can use it to answer more challenging and ambiguous questions.

Open the Framework

⚖️ What makes a good decision-making framework?

• Transparent criteria: a framework like the one above communicates how the decision will be made ahead of time. This allows people to align on what is important.

• Involves all relevant stakeholders: people want to feel included in the process. This framework lets people include their perspective and is involved in the final outcome

• Create objectivity: Because everyone's opinion is captured in a central place, people can objectively compare and contrast the perspectives. It will be clear that there was no favouritism or politics involved.

🔒What needs to be captured when making a decision?

• Decision criteria: These are columns you can add to the framework that communicate the important differences between the options. The PM should add these and make sure they are accurate.

• Options: Create a set of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive (MECE) options. This will let people share opinions on all possible paths forward, not just the one that they are championing.

• Points of View: This the net-new addition to this framework that I love. It lets everyone voice their opinion, see each other's perspective and gain empathy for all sides of the argument.

• Accountability for the assessment: Assign owners to each point of view so there is accountability on who is responsible for sharing the POV.

• Decision owner: finally, all decisions should have someone responsible for making the final decision. This is often the PM but it can also be the lead for the given area.

🪜 Steps to use this framework for your own decisions:

1. When a decision needs to be made, outline the MECE options and the points of view that are necessary.

2. Define the decision-making criteria. These are the factors that will decide which option is best. Some examples include addressable market, engineering effort or price.

3. Assign points of view to an owner. Share the framework with stakeholders who are interested in the decision outcome. This creates broader visibility into the decision-making process and creates accountability for the points of contact.

4. Share a date when this decision needs to be made. When in doubt, bias towards less time. Recall Parkinson's Law - a decision will take as long as you give it time for.

5. While people add their perspectives, ask for more clarity or details where necessary. Each assessment should be clearly understandable to all stakeholders.

6. When the table is filled, the decision owner will need to weigh the opinions and criteria of each option. After this, the owner makes the decision and documents it for the stakeholders and POV owners. Here are two key points about this step:

   1. Any decision will be more palatable now because there is objectivity and transparency around the whole process.

   2. Partner with your manager or a trusted colleague to ensure you're seeing the full picture.

This process does more than make a decision. It creates transparency, trust and objectivity within your team. Used properly, this process can help you strengthen team culture and make your leadership more confident in your team’s abilities.

Summary

Use this lightweight decision framework to drive decisions across a large group of stakeholders. Lean on your team to share their perspectives and objectively weigh them against the decision criteria. Also, use the process of decision-making to build empathy and internal alignment with your stakeholders.

Try this framework next time you need to make a hard decision. ☺️

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

Integrated Apple and App Store Risk by Ben Thompson: Ben explains the consumer benefits of Apple’s integration play with software and risks to third-party developers.

The Cooperation Economy by Packy McCormick: In the Internet Age, cooperation is proving to be the dominant strategy. This is reinforced with web3 and the rise of digital communities.

Venture Education Center by AngelList: Ever wonder how venture capital actually works? AngelList launched a resource hub to shed light on the complicated field.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

After creating a vision, mission and strategy, it's time to think about how and when your team will execute this vision. Enter the product roadmap. This living document is a list of projects, experiments and research your team will undertake to achieve its goals over a certain time period.

Your product roadmap builds on the themes developed in your strategy but goes more granular. For example, if part of your strategy is to grow UberEats in Dallas by onboarding more restaurants, your roadmap may include tactics to make the UI more understandable, in-app resources for this cohort and incentives for newly onboarded restaurants.

Importantly, a roadmap is the outcome of a process called roadmapping. While the final roadmap matters, the process is much more important to get right.

I'm currently in the process of roadmapping with my team. I want to share the process we're taking to create this roadmap and some templates you can use to do the same.

Here are two templates that I’ll reference below:

• Roadmap Template from the former VP of Product at SurveyMonkey

• 1-Page Roadmap Template from a PM Manager at Facebook

Why roadmap?

1. Creates buy-in: a major benefit of roadmapping is getting your extended team aligned and excited about the team’s charter. Done right, roadmapping creates a sense of ownership within the team and empowers individuals to make important decisions for their team.

2. Makes strategy concrete: strategies can be fluffy and hard to understand. By backing strategy with well-defined projects, you’ll know how well you can execute on your strategy.

3. Find the most impactful work: spending time identifying the highest impact project is time very well spent. Compare potential projects based on how they will move your goals.

How I create roadmaps

A roadmap is the result of “roadmapping.” This is a multi-week effort that focuses your team on a handful of themes, collects potential work projects and prioritizes these against explicit criteria. On my current team, we’re roadmapping over six-weeks at the end of Q2 and Q4. We take six weeks to find the most impactful work for the next six months.

Here is our timeline:

• Week 1: Socialize Your Charter

• Week 2: Understand Share-outs

• Week 3: Ideation

• Week 4: Longlist to Shortlist

• Week 5: Prioritisation and Goals

• Week 6: Consolidate and Review

Let's break these down.

Week 1: Socialize Your Charter

Start at the charter of your team. This is a document that you've created ahead of time that outlines the team's mission, the problems you are aiming to solve, why those problems matter and high-level themes for how you'd like to solve them.

Speak to every team member (ideally 1-1) and discuss the charter with them. Get their thoughts, add their input into the doc and make sure they are aligned.

From here, share the charter with your leadership team, partner teams that you work closely with and any other relevant stakeholder. This will help ensure all parties know what your team will focus on for the next six months.

Week 2: Understand Share-outs

PMs need to create a shared understanding of the your problem space, users and product experience. One great way to do this is by setting up share-outs within your organization.

Share-outs are presentations from members of your team where they present findings, knowledge or opportunities related to your product. Ask your team members (ideally a few weeks ahead of the presentation date) if they would like to share insights from their work. This is a great opportunity for them to highlight their work, practice presentation skills and develop a sense of ownership of their area.

Here are some examples of good shareouts (for a hypothetical e-commerce product):

1. The End-to-End checkout flow - led by team designer

2. Understanding our growth funnel - led by team data scientist

3. How developers build on our platform - led by an engineering tech lead

Week 3: Ideation

Ideation is a way of generating ideas. The goal is to think of as many ideas as possible — not to find great projects right away. Two ways to do this are 1) brainstorms, 2) asynchronous idea-collection.

Brainstorms are sessions where one person (often the PM) thinks of prompts that encourage people to think of solutions. These are often phrased as, "How might we do X?". Carve out time in your schedule for these sessions.

In our current remote world, asynchronous idea-collection also works well. Set up a Slack channel, a Google Doc or anything else that can collect ideas. Encourage people to share their ideas with a brief description in this group. It’s the PM’s role to encourage people to share and lead by example.

This should help you generate a long list of potential projects. Start to organize them by themes.

Week 4: Longlist to Shortlist

What do you do with a long list of shallow ideas? Try a process called shortlisting. Here's how it works:

1. Get everyone into a room (or video call) and open a spreadsheet with all of the ideas for a given theme and the person who submitted that idea.

2. Go through the list. Give idea submitters 1-2 minutes to explain the project, why you should work on it, and its perceived effort (T-shirt sizes work well here, i.e. S, M, L, XL).

3. Do this for all the ideas. Be sure to keep time to keep the session flowing.

4. Once ideas have all been shared, describe the criteria that define a good project — in my mind, that is high impact and alignment with our strategy. Give people a set number of votes (we use 10) to vote on the ideas that they think are most worthwhile by the criteria that have been defined. Give them 3-5 minutes to vote silently.

5. Choose the top X projects (depending on the team size and the number of ideas). These ideas appear to be the most promising and warrant a deeper dive.

6. Nominate an investigator (often the people who submitted the winning ideas) to spend a few hours investigating the feasibility, challenges and opportunity size of the project.

This process helps you take a long list of ideas into a shorter one where team members are empowered to drive an exploration of their proposed idea.

Week 5: Prioritization and Goals

After investigations, you’ll have more details on your shortlist of ideas and prioritization becomes much easier. Approach prioritisation in a few ways:

1. Support the investigator with opportunity sizing, understanding dependencies and understanding risks. Encourage teammates to ask for help and help each other at this phase (ex. the team data scientist may be most helpful with opportunity sizing).

2. Create and share an explicit prioritization framework with your team. This will reinforce the criteria of a “good project” and show objectivity in the final list of projects.

3. Fit all the projects into that prioritization framework. Objectively take the top ones and add those into your roadmap.

From here, you should have a table that looks a little like this:

Week 6: Consolidate and Review

Projects are not the only thing in a roadmap. They also require a narrative that tie the mission, strategy and roadmap items together. The PM leads this and should aim to answer questions like:

1. How does this roadmap align with the companies larger projects?

2. Why are you choosing these themes over others?

3. What are the risks and dependencies of this roadmap?

4. Is your goal ambitious enough?

The PM should drive clarity here by reviewing the roadmap with all relevant stakeholders. This may involve a leadership review, but I also encourage you to do 1-1s with key stakeholders.

Here are the templates again that can help drive this leg of roadmapping:

• Roadmap Template from the former VP of Product at SurveyMonkey

• 1-Page Roadmap Template from PM Manager at Facebook

Conclusion

By the end of roadmapping, you should have

1. A roadmap that prioritizes the highest impact projects

2. A team that is aligned, bought-in and feels ownership over the strategy

3. Alignment with leadership, partner teams and relevant stakeholders

4. Goals that can define if you've been successful.

Give this a shot next time you need to build a roadmap. I hope this helps!

Summary

Build a roadmap to align a broad team on the tactical path forward. Creating a roadmap involves the process of roadmapping. For my current team, this is a 6-week process to collect ideas, prioritize and align a team. Try the six-week scheduled I shared, and be sure to use the templates above.

• Roadmaps create accountability, goals and buy-in (upwards and downwards).

• Create ownership within your team by socializing the strategy and asking for shareouts from individuals

• Guide prioritization with shortlists and explicit decision making criteria

• Consolidate the plan into an understandable narrative

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

💰 Building Products at Stripe by Ken Norton: A fascinating look into how Stripe build products differently than other companies.

🍿 A Brief History of Netflix Personalization by Gibson Biddle: An under-the-hood look into the product decisions and tradeoffs Netflix made around personalization.

🔥Build a matching dating app like Tinder in Glide by Seth Kramer: A sweet tutorial I checked out this weekend on building a No-Code Tinder clone.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

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Summary: Maximize the output of individuals on your teams by giving them ownership. A great way to do this is by setting challenges aligned with their skill level. This fosters ownership which can improve the aggregate impact of a team, increase your leverage and help your team advance their careers.

Last week, I was working on a strategy for a newly formed product pod. While I was writing the doc, I realized that our plan could really benefit from designs of some of the roadmap items we listed.

Initially, I wanted to ask my designer, “Can you mock up feature X?” But I paused. This was a senior designer with a breadth of expertise. She could obviously do mock-ups, but the real skills a senior designer brings to the team are product vision, creativity and understanding of our users.

Asking her to mock up an idea that I thought of would be like asking Gordon Ramsay to follow my grilled cheese sandwich recipe. 🥲

It’s a reminder of a lesson a former manager shared with me: the role of a PM is to get the most value from your team. Often, this involves leveraging all of the skills that your teammates have.

I updated my question to be, “We’re being asked for our 2-3 year product vision. Any ideas on how we can drive clarity here?” I could see the gears in her brain start turning. She decided to lead a design sprint with the whole team to get an answer to this question. Better yet, she would become an owner of the user experience and a knowledge source on everything related to the product vision.

This brings us to a natural question: how can we get the most value from each team member? One way that I used in this situation is to set big challenges to create ownership. Let’s dig more into both of these parts.

By the end, you should be able to turn small-challenge-low-ownership asks into big-challenge-high-ownership. This will allow you to increase your own leverage, the output of your team and the rate at which team members progress in their careers.

🏋️‍♀️ Setting challenges 

Smart people love challenges. Specifically, they love challenges that require a mix of their current skills and skills they are hoping to develop.

Brandon Chu, GM of Shopify, has a great take on tailoring your PM style based on your team's skill level. He suggests understanding two things:

1. The relative skill of a team member: understand where they are in their careers. What are their strong suits, their growth areas and their career goals?

2. Your relative skillset: Compare your skills/experience with that of your team. Understand where you’re able to set challenges and where you’ll need to follow the lead of more skilled/senior people.

Mapping these out on a grid can help understand the right way to create ownership within your team:

When in a space to “support,” lean on your teammate to define the right challenges to focus on. When in a space where you can “partner” or “lead,” aim to define these with or for your teammates.

Once you’ve identified the relative skill of you and your teammates, think about engaging the skills you’d expect from your teammate’s skill level. Aim to engage multiple layers of their skillset:

Engaging the right skills for their experiences allows you to create interesting challenges to tackle and take full advantage of their skillset.

👤 Create Ownership

Ambiguous challenges create ownership. This is because they require deep understanding and forming opinions about a problem space. There are benefits to having multiple owners on a team:

1. Maximize individual impact: Teams will have more impact when everyone engages their full skillsets and driving areas independent of the PMs involvement.

2. Increases your own leverage: If other people are stepping up, you can step back and focus on other areas. This will help you carve time for tackling your own ambiguous challenges.

3. Helps team members grow their own careers: Tackling big challenges is essential for career growth. Helping your team grow their careers will boost retention, morale and the raw skills available on your team.

In addition to aligning their skills with the level of ownership you want to cultivate, there are two other ways I’ve seen as effective for creating ownership:

1. Involve would-be owners early on strategy, goals and major decisions: I try to include key team members in the early days of creating team artifacts (ex. strategy, roadmap). Tactically, I share with them the first draft of these documents — typos and all. I’ll also tag them in areas where I feel their specific input would be valuable. 

2. Position them as leaders: Once you’ve discussed ownership with someone, continually reinforce their ownership when communicating with other people. For example, if your designer owns the end-to-end experience, direct all questions about the UX to them.

Summary

Create challenges that foster ownership. These are generally tasks that are large in scope and require them to engage a range of skills. This helps to create a culture of ownership — an essential ingredient of an effective product team.

• Giving low-skill tasks to high-skilled teammates is a waste of their talents.

• Engage your team’s full capacity by creating challenges in line with their skill level.

• Ownership allows the whole team to have more impact, increases your own leverage and helps individuals advance their careers.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

The Most Epic Battle in Music History by Spotify: a great retelling of the famed Metallica vs. Napster case and how that impacted Spotify’s product.

Cracks in the Great Stagnation by Caleb Watney: reasons to be optimistic that the stagnation of the last 20-30 years may be coming to an end.

You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup by Evan Armstrong: a contrarian take that was all over my Twitter feed this week. Let me know what you think.

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Until next time,

Will

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Summary: Use lead metrics to measure progress towards a long term objective. Find leads by looking for measurable and understandable predictors of the long term outcome. 

I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw this great question from Krishn:

This reminded me of a common problem in product management: how do we correctly measure progress? I shared my answer (featuring an on-brand typo 😓).

Lag metrics are long term goals. Lead metrics are predictors of achieving those long term goals. In most situations, lead metrics are the ones that are more helpful to track because they are more moveable.

Let’s take some common product/business goals (lag metrics) and turn them into more useful lead metrics:

These lead metrics are much more actionable than the lag metrics. It makes my PM heart so happy to see!

Today, I want to share how to find lead metrics, how to use lag metrics to coordinate broader teams and how we can apply these ideas to our personal goals. If you want to understand how metrics are broadly used for product strategy, check out the primer I wrote.

📍 Finding the Lead

Lead metrics are things you can measure today that indicate if you are on track to hit your long term goal.

When building products, most of your goals will be tied to growth. While growth can be seen in many areas — more revenue, higher adopotion, deeper engagement — it all centres on creating more value for your users. Specifically, value is created when a user hits certain Aha moments — moments when a user receives significant value from your product.

The best lead metrics measure the value created by your product. If you can continue to create more value, your product will grow as a result. In this way, success is a lagging indicator of generating user value.

Let’s ground this in some real examples:

A famous example of finding a lead metric from user value comes from Facebook’s path to 1 billion users. Chamath Palihapitiya, then the head of growth of Facebook, anchored the team around a single point of the Facebook user journey: getting to 7 friends in 10 days.

Chamath found that users who met this milestone (this Aha moment) saw more value in Facebook and stayed on the platform longer. In other words, they received sufficient value that they were more likely to become an active user. With enough of this value creation, the growth team reasoned that they could grow to 1 billion users — and they were right.

A good lead metric has three qualities

• Dead simple: optimise for understandability as opposed to precision. This will make it easier to rally around the metric.

• Measurable: use a quantitative measure over a qualitative one (ex. user delight)

• Moveable: choose a metric that will be sensitive to change to best measure progress.

⭐️ Lag to align teams

Does this mean lag metrics are useless? No, definitely not. 

Lag metrics are helpful for defining milestones and coordinating multiple teams with different goals.

Let’s return to Chamath’s world. The growth team focused on “7 friends in 10 days”. But the marketing and infrastructure teams likely had a different focus. How do you unify all of these together into a single company?

Use a lag metric (a milestone) to make sure all boats are rowing in the same direction.

❤️ Lead metrics in life

I started this newsletter because so many ideas in product management also apply to navigating life. This is especially true with using lead and lag metrics!

We all have goals. They could be to run a marathon, get married, become healthier, or read 20 books in a year.

But you’ll notice that these goals (and many of our personal goals) are lag metrics! To better operationalise life goals, let’s apply what we know to find lead metrics.

Don’t settle for lofty, new-year-resolution style goals. Force them to be actionable to drive real progress.

Summary

Lead metrics can help you track progress towards a long term goal. Lag metrics, on the other hand, can help you unite disparate work streams under one banner.

• Lead metrics should measure the value created by your product.

• Great lead metrics share three qualities: they are dead simple, measurable and moveable.

• Lag metrics are useful for coordinating broad teams. Use them to set milestones of progress.

• Apply the idea of lead and lag metrics to life. This can help you make progress on seemingly nebulous goals.

🖼 Internet Things I’m Enjoying

The Potential of Blockchain Technology by Chris Dixon (recommended by David and Brad): A fascinating take on the limitations and opportunities within crypto.

Come for the creator, stay for the economy by Patrick Rivera: A great piece on how creators can create micro-economies to deepen relationships with their fans.

Mario Gabriele - From Lifelong Obsession to Thriving Business by Nathan Barry: An inspiring (and highly tactical) story on how Mario went full-time into his newsletter, The Generalist.

Thanks for reading! If you like what you read, subscribe for weekly insights on product management, careers and personal growth:

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See you next week,

Will

P.S. if you want to support Product Life, drop a like or comment by clicking the buttons below ⤵️

I started on a new team last week. In my first one-on-ones, I always ask a version of “Where can I help?”. This helps me understand the team, space and challenges in the area. I’ve been getting a range of answers:

• “Can you help us get this feature approved by legal?”

• “We need the budget to run this test. Can you secure it?”

• “We’re blocked by another team. Can you unblock?”

When I first became a PM, I would leave these initial one-on-ones and immediately try to solve these problems. It made me feel like I was adding value early on.

But this was my fourth team at Facebook alone. This wasn’t my first rodeo 🤠. I knew that to best support a team, sometimes you need to let fires burn.

I first heard of this concept in an episode of Masters of Scale, a podcast by LinkedIn Founder and prolific investor Reid Hoffman. He makes an excellent point for startup founders:

If you spend all your time fighting fires, you may miss critical opportunities to build your business. You’ll be all reaction and no action.

This advice applies perfectly to the PM discipline. I’ll explain with an analogy and then some strategies to better fight fires.

🏡 Building a Neighbourhood

Imagine your team is building a set of houses. As you go to survey the houses, you notice that one is on fire. Someone outside asks you to put out the fire.

Oh no! You can spring to action and start pouring water on the fire. With some time and effort, you may get the fire to die down. 

Or instead, you can look at all of the other houses in the block. You may notice something.

Helping put out one fire is good. In fact, it’s what’s expected of a junior PM.

But surveying the scene allows you to take two other paths:

🔑 Prioritize

If one fire is especially concerning, start on that one. If you sequence things correctly, you can minimize damage. 

Note that not all fires need to be put out. As you’re firefighting, more pressing ones may spark up. Use judgment to know when to leave a small fire burning.

⚖️ Find leverage

Are there actions that can put out multiple fires with a single action? These are often found when problems share the same root cause—more on this in a minute.

One high-leverage activity in this analogy: call the fire department.

Remember: your job as a PM isn’t to put out fires. It’s to build the product (in this analogy, the neighbourhood). Don’t get addicted to checking items off of a to-do list. Instead, look for the way to prevent the most damage across the whole area.

🧯Two ways to fight fires

Reid Hoffman’s Prioritization Approach

In Masters of Scale, Reid shares a simple way to catalogue and prioritize your fires:

1. Assign probabilities for each of the risks becoming a reality

2. Assign vectors of possibility (is the probability of catastrophe going up or down?)

3. What’s the damage if it hits?

4. Is it correctable?

From here, you’ll find a scorecard of the most pressing fires to tackle.

Brian Chesky’s Simple Leverage Approach

Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky has a simple trick to fight the most fires at the same time:

1. Make a list of all tasks (be as exhaustive as possible)

2. Group them by their root cause

3. Then it becomes a game of leverage: ask yourself what one action can take care of these 3? What about these 5?

4. Do it again and again.

5. If you do this enough times, a list of 20 to-dos becomes a list of 3 actions that handle most of them.

📝 Summary

A good product manager firefights. They see a fire, they try to put it out.

A great product manager surveys, prioritizes and finds leverage to minimize destruction. Importantly, they let some fires burn while they tackle others.

Key points:

• Don’t tackle the first problems you see. Survey the scene to see the whole picture.

• Learn to be comfortable with a persistent problem. 

• Prioritize the largest fires to tackle first. These are the ones that have the largest potential impact on your product.

• Explore high-leverage actions that solve multiple problems in one go. Try the Brian Chesky method for a simple way to find leverage.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

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What’s a surefire way to better support your team, deliver value for users and help you land your next promotion?

Have fewer meetings.

Hear me out. 😁

One Friday afternoon, I spoke to a well-respected product manager on my team and mentioned I’d be working on a strategy deck on the weekend. He was visibly disgusted.

If you can’t get it done in the workweek, you’re doing a bad job managing your time.

He was right. I looked back at my calendar for the week and saw that over 50% of my week was spent in meetings. This meant that all of my actual responsibilities were crammed into the other 50% of the week. Something had to change.

So I culled my calendar of bad meetings. On average, this helped me save 3-5 hours a week.

With this saved time, I’m able to spend more time on long-term strategy, recruiting and carving out new scope for the team. In other words: culling bad meetings helped me be better at my job.

As a PM, you’ll attend and lead many meetings a week. Not all of these are worth your time — or the time of your teammates.

By cutting low-value meetings, you can increase the velocity of product launches, give builders more time to build, and land more impact in less time (helping you land that promotion 😎).

Here are the three tactics I used to cull low-value meetings from my calendar:

1. 🙅‍♀️ Decline- do you need me here?

2. 🤝 Delegate - can you lead this?

3. 🧐 Decide - do we need to have this?

I’ll share templates on how to use these tactics to reclaim time and create more impact every week. 

But first... spotting bad meetings

Some meetings have value. Others don’t. Here are some ways to spot the bad apples on your calendar:

• 15+ Attendees: Jeff Bezos famously said that the most productive meetings can be fed with two pizzas. If a meeting has more than roughly 15 people, it can get unwieldy and unproductive.

• No Agenda: No agenda is synonymous with no clear purpose or deliverables. Avoid these at all costs. If you lead a meeting, make sure to have an agenda!

• Meetings with "Sync" in the title - Often put on calendars to show Facetime with a group. Weigh the value of this Facetime against the cost of the meeting for you and your team.

• One-on-Ones: this may be a 🔥 take but most teammates do not require weekly or bi-weekly syncs. What I've seen work well is only having one-on-one syncs with 1) your manager and 2) your direct reports. Try moving others to less frequent cadences (ex. monthly, quarterly) or cancelling them (more below).

Now to the three tactics…

🙅‍♀️ Decline

Here's something I wish someone told me earlier in my career: you don't need to attend every meeting you're invited to. 

If you notice that you're attending a meeting where you don't participate or don't receive useful information, try declining the invitation. Say no to low-value meetings.

Here are some templates to decline:

🙅‍♀️ Invite to a low signal meeting: "Hi Maya. Do you need me here?"

🙅‍♀️ Request for a one-on-one: "Thanks for reaching out, Tim, but I'm trying to limit meeting time. Feel free to send over questions via chat.”

🙅‍♀️ Getting out of large syncs: "Hi Grace. I won’t be able to attend Sync X moving forward. I’ll review the meeting notes offline.”

🙅‍♀️ Turning a recurring meeting into an ad-hoc one: "Hi Jane. Can we cancel our recurring meeting on X and instead connect when an urgent item comes up instead? I'm trying to find more time to prioritize Y.”

🤝 Delegate

Leading a meeting can be time-consuming. It requires creating agendas, follow-ups on action items and taking notes live. 

If you find yourself leading too many meetings (often the case with PMs), try delegating. Ask a teammate if they would like to lead the meeting. This gives them an opportunity to develop leadership skills while freeing up your own time.

Asking teammates to step up is also a great way to build capacity on your team. This means more team members will have leadership, communication and project management skills to tackle problems in the future.

Here are some templates to delegate:

🤝 Ask a teammate to lead a meeting: "Hi Jordan. Would you like to lead Meeting Y? It’s a great opportunity to develop your project management skills and can also establish you as the point of contact for the topic. I'll support the transition." 

🤝 Ask a teammate to represent the group: "Hi Shantell. Are you able to represent the team at the weekly check-in? It’s a good opportunity to build relationships with leadership. Let's chat and I can drop off the invite moving forward.”

🤝 Ask a teammate to present: "Hi Angela. Would you like to present at the product review this week? This will give you and your work more visibility. I can drop off the invite moving forward.”

🧐 Decide

Often, meetings no longer serve a useful purpose. But we continue to have them because of habit, politeness or inertia.

Declining and delegating will help you get out of these bad meetings -- but your team may still be losing productive time.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to help your team perform to the best of its ability. This is where leaders need to decide to cancel a meeting for the sake of the team. If you don’t own the meeting, leaders need to force a decision on the future of the meeting.

Here are some templates to decide or force a decision:

🧐 Cancelling a meeting you own: "Hi all, I’m going to cancel this recurring meeting. I'll email updates to this group bi-weekly on Wednesdays. Enjoy an extra 30-minutes a week!"

🧐 Asking a meeting owner if the meeting is necessary: "Hi Priya. I feel that meeting Y has lost its value. Can we cancel and schedule meetings for urgent items only? This will save folks an extra hour a week."

🧐 Asking a meeting owner to switch to email updates: "Hi Lisa. I feel we can better share out updates in meeting Y via email. What do you think of cancelling the meeting? We can alternate who writes the weekly email."

🧐 A power move that I've seen work: A PM on my team cancelled all of her one-on-ones and switched to a weekly "Office Hour" style block. This way, any of her colleagues could sign up for an office hour slot if needed. She reported saving hours a week and her team preferred this model (they got time back too)!

Summary

Good PMs meet regularly with stakeholders to keep them informed. Great PMs kill bad meetings to increase the velocity of their team.

Here are some takeaways to help your team deliver more value:

• Protect your time (and that of your team) from bad meetings. This will help you deliver more impact in the same period of time.

• Bad meetings are vague, big and directionless. Cull these.

• Get out of the meeting by declining and delegating.

• Protect your team's time by deciding to cancel bad meetings.

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Until next time,

Will

At one level, the responsibilities of the product manager are pretty straightforward. He or she is responsible for evaluating opportunities and determining what gets built and delivered to customers .

- Marty Cagan, Inspired

How do product managers decide what gets built?

I've been a product manager for 1.5 years and I'm still trying to learn how to do this well. Fortunately, I’ve had the chance to work with (and learn from) great PMs during my time at Facebook.

I observed a reoccurring playbook these PMs use to solve problems. Some things I noticed:

• No decisions were made in isolation — they were linked to a higher purpose or plan.

• All moves were intentional and the team understood why something was being built.

• It was easy to decide what to build because the team knew why they were building anything in the first place.

This playbook has a name: product strategy. It’s a master plan for intentionally bringing change to the world over a long period of time.

You’ve probably heard the term product strategy before. But relearning this concept from first principles makes it 10x more useful in practice.

It can help answer many questions that arise during product development:

1. What should we build next?

2. How do we know if we're successful?

3. How can we differentiate from competitors?

But there's no reason to limit this playbook to product management. It can also help navigate tough questions in life:

1. Should I stay at this job or quit to start writing a novel?

2. How can I become happier?

3. What city should I live in?

At the end of this post, I’ll answer these exact questions using product strategy to demonstrate how it can help make principled decisions.

An Overview

Over the last 5 weeks, we've dived into each of the five components of product strategy in detail. Today, I’ll share an overview of the entire process.

If you’d like to dig into the details and work through the exercises, here are the five components with links to their respective deep dives:

1. Vision - What is the change we want to bring to the world?

2. Mission - How will we make this vision a reality?

3. Strategy - What are the levers we will pull to achieve our mission?

4. Goals - What milestones indicate progress on our strategy?

5. Tactics - What specific projects can help us achieve our goals?

A Helpful Analogy 🌄

I like to visualize abstract concepts with something I'm familiar with. Luckily, product strategy is a lot like a cross-country road trip.

On a road trip, you choose a destination - usually one that is far off and foreign. You decide on a route to get there and then choose your mode of transportation based on this route - you could fly, drive or even skateboard to your destination! You're also going to need a way to track the progress on your journey (a GPS might help). Finally, you're going to need to do a set of actions to get to your destination - like driving, stopping for lunch and booking hotels along the way.

Here's how these concepts correspond to a product strategy:

I'll build up this analogy as we move along using the 🌄 emoji to refer back to it.

Vision (link) 🌟

🌄 You can't set out on a road trip without a destination in mind. Where is the final destination of your journey? This north star destination is your vision. 🌄

A vision gives you a north star to shoot for. All actions, projects and late-night grinds are in service of getting to this north star.

In a road trip, this is a concrete place (ex. Anchorage, Alaska). When thinking about your long-term plans, however, this is more likely a concept or a world state. Here are vision statements from some great companies as examples:

Great visions share these qualities:

1. Outcome-oriented - Focus on the desired outcome they want in the world.

2. No specific tactics - Be flexible on "the how", but never "the why".

3. Shared purpose - A vision creates unity across thousands of people who are all working to advance this vision.

How do you create a vision?

1) Identify your true passions

1a) List the activities that help you get into a flow state

1b) Ask yourself why you enjoy these activities. Tie your enjoyment to values you may have.

2) Bring the key values you've identified into a single phrase — your vision.

Mission (link) 🛣️

🌄 Once you've decided on a vision, choose a route to get to that vision. There are many potential routes but which route you take depends on the specific assets and knowledge that can help you make the journey. This is called a mission. 🌄

A mission is a chosen route for getting to your north-star vision. It is more actionable than a vision and ties your specific assets to the vision you want to reach.

Great missions share these qualities:

1. Inspirational - The journey to the vision is long. A mission needs to keep people energized.

2. Opinionated - Don’t include everything in your mission. Take a stand for the specific problems you care about.

3. Unique - Be specific about the way you are going to tackle the problem by bringing in your unique assets and experiences.

How do you create a mission?

1) Start at your vision

2) Identify the root problem you want to solve

2a) Use root-case analysis - ask "What are the barriers to reaching your vision?"

2b) Prioritize the root-cause you want to solve

2c) Flip your problem into an opportunity. This framing will help make your mission more actionable and inspiring.

3) Identify what you can do about this problem

4) Combine the root problem you've identified with your assets to land on a mission

Strategy (link) 🚗

🌄 How are you going to traverse this route? You may need to focus on a few things - your mode of transportation, staying healthy and having enough money to name a few! Bucket the items that are essential to successfully achieving your mission into a few pillars. This becomes your strategy. 🌄

Strategy has become a loaded word but at its core, it’s a high-level plan to achieve your mission. Build strategies in a way that can help you start learning from execution quickly (quadrant 1 below).

Great strategies share these qualities:

1. Imperfect - People get paralyzed creating the perfect strategy. Spending time creating a strategy is the time taken away from learning, experimenting and failing. Spend time focussing on perfect execution instead.

2. Dynamic - It updates based on new learnings, failures and constraints. This is why it's better to start moving and update your strategy as you go.

3. Not the starting point - Without vision and mission, the strategy doesn’t achieve anything. You need to know where you're going before you take the first step.

How do you create a strategy?

Note: To make strategy, goals and tactics more widely relevant, I switch from my own personal vision/mission to Twitter’s for the last three pillars. Hope this helps!

1) Start at your mission

2) Build a low fidelity strategy ("a 40% strategy") using the D&A Method

2a) Break down your mission statement into two sections: Definitions and Actions

2b) Add: Definitions + Actions = 40% strategy

3) Add details to create a low fidelity strategy ("an 80% strategy") by deciding how to execute on each prong of the strategy

Goals (link) 🎯

🌄 You'll also need to know if you're making progress on your journey. This is where different measures come in (ex. distance travelled, gas in the tank, days on the road). It is useful to decide checkpoints to know if you're making a progress on your journey. This is the power of goals. 🌄

Goals, like a GPS, can tell you if you’re making progress. But they’re only useful if you’ve already defined a route you want to take (mission) and how you’re going to move along that route (strategy). Imagine using a GPS without a destination in mind or without choosing if you’ll drive or bike to your location — not the most useful!

Great goals share these qualities:

1. Proxy for value created - Does the thing you’re measuring actually create value? For example, if 1 billion people shared an additional link on Twitter a day, would the world be a better place? Probably not.

2. Measurable - “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” - Peter Drucker. The ability to quantify a goal makes it easier to track progress.

3. Sensitive to Change - Moveable measurement is much more useful at tracking progress because your efforts lead to changes in real-time.

How do you create goals?

1) Start at your mission and strategy

2) Brainstorm goals for your mission and strategy pillars

2a) Avoid jumping directly to a number by brainstorming Human-Language Goals

2b) Kickstart brainstorming by tieing keywords in your mission and strategy to ways of measuring them

3) Prioritize a topline goal (for your mission) and subgoals (for your strategy pillars)

3a) Prioritize against the qualities of a good goal: a proxy for value, measurability and sensitivity to change

Tactics (link) 🏃‍♂️

🌄 With a goal in mind, it’s time to start moving towards the first one. You may need to get gas and then spend the day behind the wheel on the interstate highway. These actions are tactics. 🌄

Tactics are specific actions you take to make progress towards your mission. If you’ve already created goals, then tactics should be hyper-focussed on moving goals. This allows you to creatively explore ways of solving small problems.

Great tactics share these qualities:

1. Impact > Cost - The expected impact on your goals exceeds the cost to execute the tactic (resources, time, energy).

2. Hypothesis Driven - Tactics should be built on a testable hypothesis (ex. making this button bigger will cause more people to tweet).

3. Executed Perfectly - If your execution is sub-par, you will never know if the tactic worked.

How do you create tactics?

1) Use funnel analysis to visualize the user journey

1a) Map out each step of the journey and note the attrition

1b) Plug-in real data to identify the points of highest friction

1c) Prioritize one point of friction

2) Reduce frictions

2a) Brainstorm tactics to improve the frictions you've identified

2b) Start experimenting with these tactics

Bringing it all together

The principles of product strategy can be deployed to solve all types of problems. It’s robust and can bring clarity to nuanced life decisions.

To demonstrate, let’s revisit the questions we had at the top of this post and apply product strategy to it:

1. What should we build next?

   → Ideate tactics based on our strategy and goals.

2. How do we know if we're successful?

   → Success = advancing your mission. We can measure progress towards our mission with a topline goal.

3. How can we differentiate from competitors?

   → Build a strategy based on our unique mission.

4. Should I stay at this job or go quit to start writing a novel?

   → Identify which tactic (staying at your job or writing a novel) will advance your subgoal more.

5. How can I become happier?

   → Proxy happiness with a goal (ex. physical health). Brainstorm the tactics to move this goal.

6. What city should I live in?

   → Identify which tactic (city) is best aligned with your mission and topline goal.

Start using this playbook to intentionally bring change to the world!

Thank you for reading ☺️. If you want to support Product Life or have any questions, you can like and leave a comment below!

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1. Vision - Your Northstar: The change you want in the world.

2. Mission- Your Route: The way you decide to bring your vision to reality.

3. Strategy  - Your Transportation: The ways to move towards your mission.

4. Goals - Your GPS: The ways to measure progress on your strategy

Today, I want to share the final part of a product strategy: 

Tactics - Your Gas Pedal: Actions that help you achieve your goals. 

Ready, Set, Action!

Imagine you’re a new product manager for Twitter. Your VP has asked you to increase the number of people who tweet by 200%. That’s a big number - how do you do it? 

You could start adding in features that you think solve the problem (ex. make the “Send Tweet” button 5x bigger 🤮). Or you can default to projects that sound great, like a major marketing campaign.

Here’s something that I’ve learned for situations like these: moving your goals stems from fixing user problems. 

Here’s an approach that I use to find tactics that solve user problems:

1. Funnel analysis -  visualize the user journey and identify frictions in it.

2. Reduce frictions - brainstorm tactics to improve the frictions you’ve identified.

Let’s give it a try! 

Build the Funnel

Let’s return to Twitter’s strategy and goals that we identified last week:

Tactics are useful in advancing a single goal, so let’s work through Strategy Pillar #2 together. The goal of this strategy pillar is to increase the number of tweets created. How can we do that?

It’s always helpful to start with the user journey. A user’s journey to create a tweet likely involves the following steps:

1. Go to Twitter

2. Open the tweet composer

3. Write Tweet

4. Add media (photo, video, link etc.)

5. Click send

These steps are sequential. This means that the number of people on Step 1 (People who go to Twitter) will always be larger than the number on Step 2 (opening the tweet composer) which is always larger than the number of people on step 3 (writing the tweet) and so on. We can visualize this idea using a funnel:

The bottom of the funnel is our goal. This is because everyone who goes through the entire funnel sends a tweet and therefore contributes to our goal.

This funnel helps us visualize the purpose of tactics: advancing our strategy by getting more people to accomplish the goal (i.e. go through the entire funnel).

Funnel analysis is a framework for incremental improvements. This framework can be applied to many goals in life — waking up at 6 am, getting a 90% on an exam or even finding a romantic partner (top of the funnel could be # of swipes on Tinder 😆). Today, we’ll just apply it to Twitter to keep it simple.

The benefits of a funnel:

1. Identify frictions - once we know the steps of the funnel, we can pinpoint the spots that are causing friction for users.

2. Breaks down the problem - increasing the number of Tweets is a problem that’s too big to tackle by itself. But focussing on steps is much more palatable (ex. increasing the number of people who click "Send" from the tweet composer).

3. Focus on your goal - Narrowly focusing on your goal allows you to drive your strategy and mission.

Fill the Funnel

Next, we need to add in real data about the number of people at each step. This will help us identify the right tactics to achieve our goal.

If we plug in fictional data, our funnel for Twitter may look like this. (for simplicity, assume 1 user = 1 tweet).

Looking at the funnel, we can see that we lose the most people at the bottom of the funnel: 50% of users who add media don't click send.

This appears to be the main problem stopping us from furthering our goal.

Brainstorm Tactics

Our funnel analysis gives us an extremely clear problem: how can we get people who attach media to click send?

It’s time to brainstorm tactics to answer this question. In this context, a brainstorm identifies as many tactics as possible to solve the problem. Here are some principles for a successful brainstorm:

1. Bring in other people (from different backgrounds if possible)

2. All ideas are good! There are no bad ideas

3. Quantity > Quality

4. Build on other people’s ideas

5. Suspend all judgement

Here’s what I have:

You now have a list of potential tactics that may help you achieve your goal. Next step? Start trying them out!

Zooming Out

5 weeks ago, we started at a very high level by defining a vision. We've now come to the lowest level of strategy — tactics — where we have specific projects we can use to start advancing our strategy. 

Whether you’re a PM or you just want to add some structure to your life, I hope these frameworks give you a way to realize what you care about and actionable ways to reach your goals. ☺️

If you’re new to Product Life, subscribe below for concise, actionable and often surprising lessons for product managers.

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Will

Hey there, I’m Will!👋🏽 Welcome to my weekly newsletter where I write about product strategy, career advice and frameworks I'm using to navigate life.

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Over the last few weeks, we’ve gone deeper into product strategy principles. Here’s a tl;dr on the concepts we’ve discussed (with links if you want to learn more):

1. Vision - Your Northstar: The change you want in the world.

2. Mission - Your Route: The way you decide to bring your vision to reality.

3. Strategy - Your Transportation: The ways to move towards your mission.

Today, let’s add a fourth key concept to our product strategy toolbox:

Goals - Your GPS: The ways to measure progress on your strategy.

Goals Measure Success

Whenever we set a goal, we define success. If I set a goal to land a specific job, I’m claiming that the job = success.

But how do we know if this goal is in line with our definition of success and not influenced by forces like vanity, peer-pressure or greed?

Here is a lesson I learned from product management that changed my life: success = advancing your mission. 

It is easy to be distracted by things that don’t matter. Anchoring on this lesson allows you to stay focused on bringing your mission to reality.

Adding Goals to Your Strategy

Goals, like a GPS, can tell you if you’re making progress. But they’re only useful if you’ve already defined a route you want to take (mission) and how you’re going to move along that route (strategy). Imagine using a GPS without a destination in mind or without choosing if you’ll drive or bike to your location — not the most useful! 

This is why it’s helpful to set two goals: a topline goal for your mission and subgoals for the pillars of your strategy.

Let’s continue with the mission and strategy pillars that we defined last week for Twitter:

Now let’s add goals to this framework.

1. A topline goal that corresponds to your mission

2. Subgoals that corresponds to each pillar of your strategy

The topline goal is meant to indicate progress on your overall mission while subgoals track progress in different legs of your strategy. If your strategy is aligned with your mission, moving these subgoals should also move your topline goal!

To add goals into our product strategy, we’ll go through two steps:

1. Brainstorm Human-Language Goals for our mission and strategy pillars

2. Prioritize a topline goal and subgoals

Brainstorm Human-Language Goals

When choosing goals, it’s tempting to jump straight to a number (ex. “Our topline goal is $1 billion of annual revenue”). But doing this, like my job example, assumes a definition of success (and you know what happens when we assume). 

Let’s be intentional with our definition of success and start by asking ourselves two questions:

1. What measures progress towards our mission? (topline goal)

2. What measures progress towards each of our strategy pillars? (subgoals)

To avoid jumping to a number, I find it helpful to answer these questions with human-language goals. These should be phrases (ex. “People using Twitter”) instead of numbers (ex. “500 daily active users in Q1”). Human-language goals prevent us from getting lost finding the perfect number before we define success itself.

Start by brainstorming human language goals for your mission and strategy pillars. A useful way to kickstart this brainstorm is to tie keywords to a way of measuring them. Let me explain by finding human language goals for our mission first:

This is not an exhaustive list of everything that Twitter may want to measure. Instead, it's a handful of goals that may indicate progress on this mission. 

Let’s do the same thing for each strategy pillar:

We now have a list of potential goals for our mission and strategy pillars. Let’s prioritize one goal from each of these lists.

Prioritizing goals

The best goals have three qualities:

1. Proxy for value created - Does the thing you’re measuring actually create value? For example, if 1 billion people shared an additional link on Twitter a day, would the world be a better place? Probably not.

2. Measurable - “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” - Peter Drucker. The ability to quantify a goal makes it easier to track progress.

3. Sensitive to Change - Imagine if your GPS only showed an estimated time of arrival by hours (ex. ETA: less than 1 hour). You could drive for 40 minutes and your ETA wouldn’t change at all! This is an example of why a moveable measurement (in this case minutes) is much more useful at tracking progress because your efforts lead to changes in real-time.

A great way to prioritize a single goal from a list is to see if they meet the three criteria above. Let’s try this with our topline goal.

🛎 🛎🛎 We have a winner! Looks like daily active users is the best topline goal from the list. If you repeat this for each strategy pillar, you’ll now have a strategy complete with goals. Congrats! Here’s what they looks like:

The last step in creating a product strategy is identifying the tactics you’ll choose to move your goals. Will explore this topic in-depth next week.

Summary

• Goals measure progress on your strategy

  • Success = advancing your strategy

• Don’t jump straight to a number goal. First think about what a successful strategy looks like.

• Choose a topline goal and subgoals to track your progress

  • Start by creating human-language goals to measure progress towards your mission and strategy pillars

  • Prioritize these against three criteria: 1) proxy for value created, 2) measurable, 3) sensitivity to change

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Happy December! ☃️

What was the coolest thing you saw this week? Shoot me a reply. For me, it was a view with a seal, the ocean and snowcapped mountains. God, I love Vancouver, BC.

If I haven’t met you yet, please reach out and say hello! Would love to hear your story and how I can help with your journey.

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Cheers,

Will ☺️

Summary: create a low-fidelity strategy with the D&A method so you can start executing (and learning) quickly. Don’t get paralyzed by creating a perfect strategy! This is part 3 of a series on product strategy (links for part 1 and part 2).

Quick confession: I'm not a detail-oriented person. I make typos, I forget birthdays and I once missed seeing Hamilton because I screwed up the dates (that mistake was costly).

Fortunately, a great strategy is not about getting every detail right. It's about giving yourself a way to get started. 

If vision is the destination and mission is your route, then strategy is your mode of transportation.

In a sentence, strategy is the levers you will pull to move towards your mission.

What Strategy Is Not 

Strategy is not the starting point

Without vision and mission, strategy doesn’t achieve anything. You need to know where you're going before you take the first step.

Strategy is not fixed

Strategy is dynamic. It updates based on new learnings, failures and constraints. This is why it's better to start moving and update your strategy as you go. 

Strategy is not perfect

People get paralyzed creating the perfect strategy. Spending time creating a strategy is time taken away from learning, experimenting and failing. Spend time instead focussing on perfect execution.

Building Strategy

When I'm building a product strategy, the first draft takes 20-30 minutes. That’s it.

This first draft, however, contains 80% of the information I need to begin executing. This is the Pareto Principle in full swing: 20% of the work leads to 80% of the results. I’m a big believer in a low fidelity plan thats lets you quickly learn from execution. 

Let's build an 80% strategy in a few minutes with one of my favourite companies: Twitter.

Twitter’s mission is:

Give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers

Let’s start by creating a 40% strategy from this mission using (what I call) the D&A Method:

1. Break down your mission statement into two sections: Definitions and Actions

2. Add: Definitions + Actions = 40% strategy

Definitions create the playing field. For example, Twitter created the field by defining words like information. Based on what the product allows, Twitter’s definition appears to include articles and quotes but excludes music or porn. Let’s start by defining the nouns in the mission statement given our understanding of the product: 

• Everyone - people, businesses, government, celebrities, politicians

• Power - access to information, ability to create and share, access to Twitter

• Ideas - tweets, multiple languages, inclusive (ex. not hate speech)

• Information - news, links, media, somewhat credible information

• Barriers - technology, removing censorship

Actions are how we play the game. Twitter has three verbs in their mission statement: give, create and share. These verbs are the key actions Twitter will do to advance their mission - making them the starting points of their strategy. 

Let’s add Definitions + Actions = 40% strategy.

An 80% Strategy

We're 40% of the way toward a full strategy for Twitter. To add another 40%, we need to understand how to execute on our strategy. We can get a sense of these by answering two questions for each part of the strategy:

1. What makes this possible?

2. What makes that possible?

Let’s try it.

Give Everyone Power

1. What makes this possible? Twitter being accessible to everyone via the Internet.

2. What makes that possible? Infrastructure, money, employees and users.

Create ideas and information

1. What makes this possible? Tweeting.

2. What makes that possible? Simple tweet composer, expressive tools (ex. Emoji, gifs) and a profile to store tweets.

Share ideas and information

1. What makes this possible? Retweeting and finding Tweets from others.

2. What makes that possible? Followers, tools for sharing and a feed of tweets.

Let's add some of the key ideas we’ve uncovered from this process to bring our 40% strategy to an 80% strategy.

And we're done! This isn't Twitter's exact strategy, but it's probably pretty damn close (80% if I say so myself).

Twitter could start executing on this strategy. They can assign a team to build the platform, a different team to build better tools for expression and a third to ensure reputable information. This gives the company direction.

Remember, strategies give you the levers to advance your mission. Begin pulling them rather than spending an eternity pondering the right next step.

Summary:

• Strategy is the levers you will pull to move towards your mission

  • Great strategies should kick off execution and learning

  • Don’t get stuck crafting the perfect strategy

• From a mission, use the D&A method to get to a 40% strategy

• Get to an 80% strategy by deciding how to execute on each prong of the strategy

With a strategy in hand, you can now determine if your strategy is succeeding with goals. We’ll dive into this next week.

Thank you for reading ☺️. If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my newsletter where I write about product management, navigating your career and solving life’s ambiguous problems, one mental model at a time.

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Last week, we discussed product strategy and the concept of a product vision - a north-star to shoot for. This week we will go a step further to define a product mission. 

We’ll start with the concept of a product mission and then apply it by creating a mission for your own life.

What is a mission?

Recall that Oxfam’s vision is a world without poverty. This is a big, inspiring vision — and there are a million ways of getting to this north-star! Oxfam could provide basic health services to all humans in the world, use microfinance to invest in female entrepreneurs or even build schools to educate the next generation. Each of these routes are viable and could help their vision become a reality. Whichever route you choose becomes your mission.

A mission is a chosen route for getting to your north-star vision.

To illustrate, think of a map. Your vision is a destination and your mission is your chosen route to get to that destination.

In product management, a mission enables a team to:

1. Align actions with desired outcomes - All actions should help you move along the route towards your vision.

2. Measure progress - A route enables you to see how far away you are from your mission at any point. 

3. Create strategy - With a route in mind, you can more easily understand what you will need to traverse this route successfully. 

How do you choose what route to take?

Its a tough question. But let's work through it together ☺.

If you ever need to break down a big, ambiguous problem try root-cause analysis. This is a fancy phrase for identifying the real problems ("root causes") behind a given statement. (Check out this great article from former PMs at Facebook, Tesla, and Google on how to apply a similar method to think strategically.)

Start with a question: What are the barriers to reaching your vision? 

List out as many problems as you can and try to group them into buckets of certain themes. For me, I’ll take my vision from last week (“Expand Access to Opportunity”) and break the barriers into economic, social and academic buckets.

From this list, choose the problems that you are most passionate about solving. While we'll go deep into prioritization in the future, one of the main factors in choosing a way forward should always be how excited you are about solving that problem. 

For me, I’m especially passionate about making tech jobs more accessible. Most of my PM colleagues are Americans with Ivy League degrees. This gives me chronic imposter syndrome amongst these incredible people. I feel a responsibility to open doors to other people like myself who want to be a part of this industry and improve their economic opportunities. For this reason, I’ll focus my mission around the barrier “Limited access to resources”.

But back to you - you've now identified what you want to change in the world! Congrats! 🎉 Pat yourself on the back, this is a huge milestone that many never get to.

Let's turn our attention to how we're going to address this problem.

First, flip your problem into an opportunity. This framing will help make your mission more actionable and inspiring.

Now ask yourself: What are you able to do about this problem? To do this, list out your assets - the unique things you possess that can help you make progress towards your vision. For simplicity, these can be bucketed into your skills and experiences.

Once you have a list, identify the skills that you feel are the most valuable in solving your chosen problem.

For me, I'm in a position to learn from great product strategists. The frameworks and advice I'm learning give me one vector of skills to address the problem I've stated. I’ll combine this with my teaching skills to land on a mission:

You’ve now landed on a mission for your life. If you can do this, you can easily do the same for any product you’ll be managing in the future!

Let's Recap

• A mission is created by identifying a problem to solve and matching those with the assets you have to solve it.

  • Try root cause analysis to identify the barriers stopping your vision from becoming a reality

  • Frame the problem as an opportunity for impact

  • Identify how you will address the opportunity with your assets

Spend this week thinking through your mission statement. Next week, we'll use it to dive into the big kahuna itself - strategy. I can’t wait to unpack this with you all.

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Until next time,

Will

Summary: bring focus to your product (and life) by creating a product strategy. Start with a product vision — a true north star to shoot for. A vision can unite thousands of people, help with decision making and focus your strategy around long term outcomes.

If I had to summarize the responsibility of a product manager into a single phrase, it would be: decide what to build.

Put yourself in the shoes of the product manager for Spotify Premium. She could invest in making song playback smoother, make following artists faster or develop new perks for members. What does she build and how does she choose?

The answer lies in creating a product strategy. If you leave this newsletter with only one core framework, I hope it’s this one.

The key components of a product strategy are:

1. Vision - What is the change we want to bring to the world?

2. Mission - How will we make this vision a reality?

3. Strategy - What are the levers we will pull to achieve our mission?

4. Goals - What milestones indicate progress on our strategy?

5. Tactics - What specific projects can help us achieve our goals?

While this framework is the backbone of product development, it’s also helpful in navigating life. I've used parts of this framework to grow my career, identify projects to work on and even improve my relationships.

Over the next few weeks I'll walk through each of the product strategy components - vision, mission, strategy, goals and tactics. We will learn about these both in the frame of product but also how these components can be applied to your own life.

Today, let's dive into the product vision.

Why your product needs a vision

When I first heard of the concept of a product vision, I rolled my eyes. I'm very logical (ENTP ☺️) and setting a vision seemed too abstract to be useful.

But this is a common mistake of junior product managers. We often focus too much on what we need to do not why we need to do it. The more senior of a product leader you become, the more you obsess about the vision and mission of a product. If you want to become a product leader, you need to understand how to create, communicate and deploy a product vision.

A product vision gives your team a north star to shoot for. All actions, projects and late night grinds are in service of getting to this north star.

Jeff Weiner, the Former CEO of LinkedIn, explains this best in his must read article:

One of the most valuable lessons I've learned in business is that managing a hyper-growth company is like launching a rocket -- if your trajectory is off by inches at launch, you can be off by miles out in orbit. In other words, when moving quickly, it's important to make sure you've got a firm foundation in place and a clear sense of your ultimate objective.

Tactically, here are three ways to use a product vision:

1. When a new opportunity arises, check if it aligns with the vision. If it doesn't, it may be a distraction not worth investment.

2. When communicating what your product does, start with the vision instead of the features you're building. It gives the audience a sense of the long term direction.

3. Unite all people — including the janitor — in your organization around a single goal. Inspire everyone and make them excited by the journey you’re all on together.

How to write a great product vision

Here are the visions of three organizations:

These visions give us the three characteristics of a good vision statement:

1. Outcome oriented- All these statements focus on the desired outcome each organization wants in the world.

2. No specific tactics - Patagonia doesn't mention clothes and IKEA doesn't mention Swedish meatballs. Be flexible on the how, but never the why.

3. Shared purpose - A vision creates unity across thousands of people. Everyone at Oxfam — accountants, event planner and program evaluator — can feel united in creating a world without poverty.

Now let's practice these principles to create a product vision for the most important product you'll ever manage: your life.

The Product Vision of You

What outcome do you want to see in the world?

It's a daunting question. I've spent the better part of the last two years thinking through this problem myself. It only clicked for me when I started to learn about product strategy.

Combining some of the product methods I've learned and concepts from Angela Duckworth's book Grit (would highly recommend this book) I've landed on a framework that helped me develop my own vision statement. Want to try it out?

First, list all the activities that help you get into a flow state. This is the state where you are so immersed in what you're doing that time flies by.

Here are mine:

Next, think about why you enjoy those activities. For example, I love chess because I can always feel myself improving and its extremely accessible.

Once you have a list of why you enjoy these activities, look for the broader themes that unite your reasons for enjoyment. These can help you determine what your values are.

Here's my process:

Once you have a list of your values, turn those values into outcomes you want to see in the world. I personally care about making sure people, regardless of their background, have the opportunity to succeed. This is clear in my values for equity and the success of others. I also value my own self-improvement, and this is an ability I can incorporate into helping others improve too. This helps me land on my real vision statement: Expand Access to Opportunity.

Voilà — you’ve landed on your very own product vision!

How to get the most out of a vision

1. Alignment - whenever you need to make a big decision, ask yourself if it is in line with your vision.

2. Share your vision - this will help you form a community of likeminded people who share a similar vision.

3. Revisit your vision once a year - make sure it’s still authentic to who you are and what you wish to achieve.

Next Steps

Vision is the first step in creating product strategy. Over the next few weeks, we’ll dive deep into the next steps:

1. Mission - How will we make this vision a reality?

2. Strategy - What are the levers we will pull to achieve our mission?

3. Goals - What milestones indicate progress on our strategy?

4. Tactics - What specific projects can help us achieve our goals?

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Thank you for reading ☺️. If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my newsletter where I write about product management, navigating your career and solving life’s ambiguous problems, one mental model at at a time.

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This article was originally published in Towards Data Science.

If you want to work in tech, you’ll be surrounded by tons of data, be it marketing campaign open rates, in-App user activities, or network performance. According to The Economist, data has become the new oil, with companies ramping up their data collection and analytics teams in order to optimize their platforms and create “data-driven strategies”.

I became a part of this trend during my internship on the Global Growth Strategy & Brand team at Tumblr. I needed to understand how our users interacted with the platform internationally in order to move the needle on user growth, retention, and monetization. More specifically, I needed a way to browse, organize, and make sense of the data coming in daily from over 350 million blogs worldwide, and for that I needed SQL.

In short, if you want to use large amounts of data, you need to know how to use SQL.

I want to preface with saying that I’m not an expert in SQL. In fact, most people in a tech companies don’t need to be experts. What’s important is that we know enough SQL to be able to extract, organize, and leverage the data necessary for our roles, be that as a business analyst, marketing manager, or product manager. In other words, we need to know “enough to be dangerous”.

What is SQL?

SQL, which stands for structured query language, is a language for accessing and manipulating databases. Don’t let this definition intimidate you — using SQL for basic functions doesn’t need to be too complicated. Think of it as a way to choose what data you want to access by providing a list of criteria. If you’re trying to understand how many of your users logged in on Halloween and posted a picture of their costume, your list might include:

• Logged in on October 31st, 2016

• Posted Picture

• Picture description included word “costume” or “#costume”

You would then produce a query that looks something like:

Once you get past the syntax, you’ll start to see how logical and simple extracting data can be. Where SQL gets really exciting, however, is when you start to piece together data from across the company in order to form new insights. Say for example you want to understand how your email marketing campaigns contribute to daily active usage in Mexico for Q2 2017. If the right data is being collected, you can stitch together data tables from across the organization to answer this question and optimize email campaigns in Mexico.

Why is this important?

There are two reasons why SQL is important to learn. The first is that it allows you to work directly with primary data, rather than requiring someone else to provide you with organized datasets. This allows you to move quicker on strategy, lead projects independently, and become a technical asset to your team.

Secondly, SQL increases your economic moat — a term Warren Buffett uses to describe your competitive advantage against others in your field. SQL is one of the most in-demand skills in the market right now and it is something that will surely set you apart from your peers.

How can I learn SQL?

There are a ton of free resources that can help you learn the fundamentals of SQL:

1. Khan Academy — This is the one I used to get started. The slow pace and sandbox system they use is especially helpful for those of us with little or no prior coding experience.

2. Code Academy — Code Academy has a great reputation in the tech community for delivering high quality lesson plans and projects. While you can start with a few modules for free, you’re eventually looking at $20 a month — which isn’t that bad for the amount of content they offer.

3. W3 Schools — If you have some technical background, I’d suggest W3 schools’ DIY list of commands and SQL features. They explain concepts clearly with examples and even have a SQL interface you can play around with.

Once you’ve got the fundamentals down, check out this guide for Google BigQuery, a tool that lets you run SQL-like queries on any datasets you may want to query. Its insanely simple and free for small amounts of processing power.

That’s all folks.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this, subscribe to my newsletter where I write about product management, navigating your career and solving life’s ambiguous problems, one mental model at at a time.

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