Tag: product management

Product Toolkit: Quick Proposal

Product Toolkit: Quick Proposal

(if you’re just looking for a link to the QP template, here it is!)

This post is the first in what I hope will be a recurring series where I share some of the tools that I use, and work with my team to develop, in our product practice. In this way I hope to show our work, make the role of the Product org more transparent and accessible, and maybe help folks find success in their professional life (or maybe personal life, who knows!)

You’ll hear a lot of opinions about the role of Product Managers. They’re probably all right in their own way. Realistically, different teams will leverage the title “Product Manager” in really different ways. Sometimes it’s predictable; Product at a seed stage startup is going to be incredibly in the weeds and will wear about thirty hats. Product at a big legacy company needs to think more about organizational topology and cross functional buy in.

This is even setting aside the great controversy of “Product Work,” as in, “We’re not even spending our time doing Product Work,” which is a whole different and interesting conversation.

I’ve settled on a position, as one must, in these matters. It’s my sense that the most important thing a good Product team does, is they work very hard to avoid building the wrong thing. There are a lot of tools and approaches, mindsets and strategies, but a good Product organization should mostly be focused on maximizing a firm’s opportunity to get it right, and the fastest and most effective route there is to minimize time spent building the wrong thing.

There’s a lot written about Product Discovery (there’s even some right on this blog!) – if you’re curious more generally about how to assess opportunities, talk to customers, and why it’s important, I recommend starting with the singular Teresa Torres and her excellent book, Continuous Discovery Habits.

Discovery within an organization, finding ways to gain a better understanding of what’s going on within your company, how to get things done, getting sufficient input from the right folks, is a key input to Not Building The Wrong Thing. The thing is, it can be quite a lot different from interviewing customers and reviewing AARRR funnel exercises.

For one thing, these people have a fundamentally different relationship with you than your customers do. Ideally, they have an actual relationship with you! You work together, you have shared interests and (hopefully!) are aligned on what it means to find success in the upcoming quarter, year, and so forth.

They’re also busy, and unlike your customers, there can be a lot at stake in their interactions with a product person, even one with great intentions, even one with whom they’re aligned. Seasoned professionals are also very aware of the challenge of building things within larger companies, and the amount of uncertainty and potential risk to their own careers, especially around taking big swings.

There is a pattern of behavior here that I have seen myself, and have heard discussed many times in product circles, where it feels like nothing can gain purchase on the actual backlog of real, living engineering and operational teams. It feels like you’re stuck in a cycle of meetings, discussing at a high level the trade offs, propriety, the sensibility of a given possible piece of work.

You’re stuck in Abstract Land and just want to clear the air, and get something moving.

(There’s a blog post here about, platform product teams serving the role of uncertainty sponges, maybe?)

It’s not that your partners and stakeholders are doing anything wrong, or malicious – in fact, like you, they’re behaving in accordance with their rational incentives. It can be challenging to get out of high level abstract space and down to decisions, in part because:

  • Folks don’t want to get it wrong: the fewer calls you make, the easier it is to avoid getting it wrong
  • The abstract space is easier to be misunderstood / misaligned: if you and your colleague are saying things that are sort of aligned, in the fuzzy abstract, that’s fine.
  • Folks don’t want to give direct feedback to a colleague. It’s much easier to correct a representative from a company you pay for a product from, than someone you might work with or need help from in the future.

One way to get out of this space is with a Quick Proposal. A Quick Proposal is a tool in the product toolkit that leverages one of the fundamental laws of the internet:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”


Cunningham’s Law

A Quick Proposal is just that – a short written summary that offers your partners and stakeholders a chance to correct, update, and provide feedback on a document that takes a position, rather than staying in an abstract space.

Features of a good QP:

  • It is one page long, and dated
  • It is written in under 20 minutes
  • It is in a format that everyone at your firm can access and comment upon
  • It contains a brief round-up of what is known about the space under discussion
  • It links out to other existing documentation, research, data, etc.
  • It has a section called “Recommendation” which contains your best bet for the next action to be taken given the discovery and discussions that have occurred.

While a QP can help to spur action, it isn’t necessarily meant to be acted upon – it’s meant to:

  • Capture your best understanding of a situation in as specific terms as possible
  • Create at least one possible recommendation for next steps based on that understanding
  • Generate a target for stakeholder feedback that isn’t another person, but a document

The way to use a QP is to present it as a loosely held summary – not, “I believe this is what we should do next, what do you think?” but more, “We have a lot of threads here, so I’m taking a crack at getting everything together. Does this look right to you?”

I’d also recommend when requesting feedback that you ask specific, relevant people directly, you provide a date by which time you’d like to make a decision, and you extend the offer for feedback to anyone else they’d recommend as having a voice in the matter.

A QP sometimes ends up being developed into a go-to-backlog type document (a One Pager, a Product Brief, a Product Requirements Document) but it’s real capital-J Job is to get your group and project out of the strategic stratosphere of Abstract Land and down to tangible discussions of what to do, how to do it, and when it can be scheduled, or, in the pursuit of Not Doing The Wrong Thing, perhaps it is set aside for other, more appealing opportunities; that’s also a win!

Here’s a Google Doc Template if it’s helpful!

Incentives: Invisible and Important

Incentives: Invisible and Important

I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors.

During one of these conversations I was given the advice, to shift my thinking when it came to partners and stakeholders within the company, away from broader business goals, and instead try to focus on and get crisp on individual peoples’ incentives. Incentives, they pointed out, often illustrate someone’s motivation and behavior better than any other factor.

Teams at the end of the day are collections of people, and people (not teams) have relationships – but we have to remember that they also have motivations and incentives to do the things that they do. Especially at work, no one is a chaos agent, not really; folks are busy, and are trying to do the right thing for themselves, and for their team, and for their family.

I’m sure pure spite-based actions have happened, but the vast majority of the time, no one is actively working to frustrate or bypass you, your team, or your work. It’s true when we tell our kids and it’s true as adults: no one is thinking about you as much as you are. There is almost always a more parsimonious explanation that does not involve malicious intent. And, since malice and spite are not good predictors of future behavior, they’re not super useful in your mental model.

Like Heinlein tells us, we’re better off understanding and appealing to someone else’s self interest – similarly to how Ferrazzi describes co-elevation in “Leading Without Authority” (a great read for anyone working across multiple teams or organizations in any context), you have to understand what someone else perceives as valuable before you can start to explore what a mutual win would look like.

It feels obvious in retrospect – folks want to achieve a win, and we of course want to pursue our own success, but figuring out the way that those puzzle pieces can fit together can be much less clear. The problem of course, is that incentives are invisible. We don’t always even understand why we ourselves do what we do, how can we possibly hope to understand what is driving other people?

We have two kids (the featured image is us at Meow Wolf in March!) – they’re nine and seven. Our daughter, unbelievably, turns ten in May! They sometimes experience a flavor of this same social space. If a friend is unexpectedly unkind, or a coach or teacher says something that surprises them, we like to use the “Something Missing” framework to think it through.

“That doesn’t sound like something she would normally do – is there something missing that would help explain it?”

… often for kiddos it’s something like, having trouble with another friend, or losing in a game, and for teachers and coaches it’s often grounded in wanting a particular goal for the whole class or team. In a way that a lot of things start to stitch together, this Something Missing prompt also become a useful framework for me to think about my relationships in the workplace – “What incentive is missing here? What part of their landscape am I not seeing, that explains this behavior?”

Often the simple act of prompting myself to accept that there may exist some invisible factor that is not yet known to me, can be helpful to set aside my own (sometimes hurt!) feelings, and instead move into investigation and resolution.

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”

As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but it’s also true for inanimate things, like cars, and also things that aren’t things at all, but just, abstract concepts, like “New York State” or “HR”

“Everybody knows if Subscriber Acceleration is involved, our timelines will go out the window.”

This can be a nice way to make our lives more interesting – naming your car as a teenager felt like almost a rite of passage in the early 2000s! – but it carries some risk when we start to let our understanding of how humans interact and work over to more abstract concepts, especially in the workplace or when working with governmental or nonprofit organizations.

“Why can’t Global Avian Legal get their story straight?”

The problem is, when we start to think about “other teams” as singular, seamless atomic units, we start to make some simple mistakes:

  • We assume the whole team has the same opinion on a project or priority
  • We assume everyone on a team has the same knowledge and is equally informed
  • We begin to set up a mental model where teams relate to one another directly

But that’s the thing – teams don’t relate to one another. In some very real way, teams don’t even exist, they’re a collection of people, and people are complicated, and messy, and have differing incentives and mindsets. You can’t talk to a team. You can’t take a team out to coffee. You can only relate to individual humans who are a part of that team.

When I first started at Disney, in my initial listening tour, I asked a senior colleague of mine if he could recommend any books or blog posts that would help me to navigate working at Disney, which felt like a huge battleship compared to the tiny fishing boats I’d worked on before. He recommended Ferrazzi’s now-classic Leading Without Authority (which I would also recommend to any PMs or aspiring PMs!)

One of the pieces that Ferrazzi touches on repeatedly in the book is this idea of listening to pursue co-elevating, his model of finding opportunities to achieve shared successes. “To influence others, you must first build strong relationships,” he says.

The thing is, you can’t build a relationship with a team – only with another person. This is especially important for folks who work across many teams or business units to accomplish big initiatives and build big impactful solutions – you need to find ways to stay grounded to the actual folks doing the work, and push back (in your own mind at least!) on the anthropomorphizing of teams.

The best way to know that it’s time to build a relationship with another person, or to encourage a leader working with you to develop a 1:1 relationship, is when you start hearing people say things like those called out above.

When you yourself, or someone working with you, starts assigning motivations or personality traits to a team, be alert! An opportunity for greater collaboration and clarity awaits if you dig one layer deeper:

“Who on Platform Widgets did you talk to?”

“Who on Subscriber Acceleration usually sets timelines?”

…and then, go talk to that person!

The Time Brian Chesky Scared Me So Bad I Bought A Book

When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical.

Surprised in part because, AirBNB is a company whose product folks have had a serious impact on me and my own product practice – Lenny of course but also more directly Nick and James from the Transform team (who I got to know during my time in the modern data stack space). To think that a company that produced such thoughtful and successful product folks, was pivoting away from this mindset and methodology (which I’ve built my professional journey on!) was jarring, to say the least.

Was this part of a larger market shift? Was Product Management going the way of the Elevator Operator? Surely a little over-the-top, a dramatic overreaction from a former theater kid. But even so!

A quick Google will give you lots of hot takes and deep dives on what Chesky really meant, and how what they were really doing was shifting from the way that they had found themselves doing product, more intentionally to a revenue- and market-focused direction.

That being said, in hearing the news, my first reflection was more personal – I’ve had the opportunity to work with some world class product marketers, but that part of the overall Product Toolkit was an area where I felt quite weak – not for lack of interest or adjacency, but just, never happened to get around to it!

So, I did the thing any good Product person does when faced with uncertainty; I did some discovery! I reached out to the undisputed most talented product marketing professionals I know, and asked for help.

And help they did – after a few Zoom powered coffee hangouts, I felt as though I had passed through the Dunning Kruger horizon. The depth and complexity of the topic unfolded before me in an exciting (and nervous-making) way, like any topic does once you get close enough.

One aspect of my concern was validated almost immediately: while I had worked closely with marketing teams and marketers, my own toolkit could use some sharpening in this area. So, I set about doing just that sharpening – ingesting a lot of audio and text content, YouTube videos, and overall sort of soaking in the broad Product Marketing Content Ocean – and an ocean it is! There’s no shortage of folks who are happy to opine on the many aspects of the field.

Through this effort I did find two resources to be especially useful and continue to be folks I look to for expertise and value regularly, which I share here:

  • Jason Oakley of Productive PMM – I subscribe to his newsletter, which shares regular quick-hit examples and analysis of interesting things being done in the wild.
  • April Dunford – I will read, write, and listen to anything that April makes! I’ve been so impressed by her thinking, her storytelling style, and her deep and expert analysis. She has a podcast which is a great first stop.

It was through April’s podcast that I first started to think a lot about positioning – not something I had considered with much depth before, but something which, due to the topic itself or perhaps due to April’s natural charisma and engagement around the topic, really drew me in.

I think most folks have the experience of, occasionally, being really taken by an aspect of their own work, some line of thinking or research, or new approach or methodology, that can arise with a sort of renewed energy, a renewal of excitement and a new sort of lens on a great many things that you’ve been doing regularly without much new insight or novelty.

For me, the most recent example of this is positioning – in coming to better understand this line of thought and methodology, I’m find it applying to more and more aspects of my own work.

It has me so fired up, between the great fright that Chesky gave me, and the compelling nature of Dunford’s podcast, I did something I never thought I’d do. I bought a sales book.

I haven’t finished the sales book, but I am already seeing some unexpected intersections of how we thoughtfully market and sell to external customers, and how internal / platform product teams could more thoughtfully represent the value of their partners and work. There’s something here, and I’m stoked to dig in more.

All this to say, if there’s a kerfuffle in your industry, in your place of work, and it makes you nervous or anxious (as Chesky’s shift to Product Marketing did for me) it’s worth sitting with that internal landscape, spending some time interrogating that feeling, maybe having a coffee or two with friends or mentors. You may find there’s something new and exciting behind that anxiety that unlocks a whole new space in your journey.