Lessons learned: Achieve clarity of focus with two simple questions
This post is about lessons learnt as a career Product Manager. While focused on PM, I think it can apply to anyone. Would love your feedback, and please let me know if you would like me to write more about PM topics.
Things were going poorly. Three months into my first job as a new grad product manager, I was working round the clock but wasn’t quite meeting expectations. I sought advice from a PM Lead on a different team, Jon. Not one to mince words, Jon said (paraphrasing)
Your job as a PM is to ship features that impact the business. That’s it. You can’t be successful if you don’t do that. Everything else is secondary. Sure you enjoy analysis and have great insights, but that’s secondary. You need to ship features that move metrics.
That ten minute conversation changed the trajectory of my career. I re-examined my prioritization and time management. I let go of all my excuses and focused on shipping. I re-negotiated my responsibilities with my manager so I could ship more and demonstrate impact.
This is a common problem. Product Manager or another function, early or mid career, many of us plod on without clarity on what truly matters. You get seduced by the trappings of the role. You want to be present in high visibility meetings, you excel at managing internal and external stakeholder relationships, you spend time creating compelling narratives or strategies, and so on. Often these are important, but not the most important outcome.
I advise PMs early in their career to achieve focus with two simple questions:
What is the most important outcome I can deliver to get promoted? Conversely, is there something that, if I don’t deliver, might get me fired?
How much time am I dedicating every single day to the deep work and creative focus that will help me achieve that outcome?
What is the most important outcome I can deliver to get promoted/fired?
The language of promoted/fired makes many managers uncomfortable. But if you have the right culture, it can be incredibly clarifying. This simple question is often very hard to answer. Sometimes managers don’t define the outcome clearly. Platform teams can be far removed from direct customer impact or outcome metrics. You might be a support function that’s not directly responsible for an outcome. As companies grow, teams and individuals have to specialize and outcomes become fuzzy or shared with other teams. Many teams in large companies focus on maintenance of an existing product vs new outcomes or growth. Corporate OKRs demand you to set goals that are measurable , realistic enough to manage expectations and fit the template of the day. Checking all 3 boxes in a way that makes everyone happy can lead to good short term goals that are inconsequential to the big picture.
All those reasons notwithstanding, if you can’t articulate an important outcome that you are responsible for, it will limit your rate of learning and growth. If you find yourself in such a position, you need to work with your manager to redefine your role or objectives to capture an outcome that truly matters. If that’s not possible, navigate your way into a role that has a clear and important outcome.
How to have the conversation?
This is highly context dependent, but here are a few examples.
Example 1
PM: I don’t think I’m maximizing my impact for the company. I have a few ideas on how my role and charter could be changed to improve our impact.
Manager: That’s really interesting. Let me run this up the chain and see if we can make it happen.
Example 2
Me: Now that we’ve completed the platform transition, I feel like I am coasting in maintenance mode and not really driving impact.
Manager: That’s not true, your area is the backbone of our product. Keep doing what you are doing.
Me: I see. So what’s the outcome that my team is responsible for, such that if we didn’t achieve it, I would be fired.
Manager: That’s not the culture we want. We want to encourage risk taking in pursuit of innovation.
Me: I get that, and I agree. Consider this as a thought experiment to identify if we are working on something that’s actually critical.
Manager: Let me think about that..
A few weeks later
Me: Hey strategically I think this emergent New Product Line A could become the biggest growth big bet for the company. It obviously requires my team to build a lot of features. How about I align my team’s goals with the success of Product A, and also think a bit about what’s needed beyond my immediate team?
Manager: Sounds great. Why don’t you become the overall product lead for this initiative?
Managing your time
Once you achieve clarity of outcome, you have to allocate the majority of your working hours towards delivering on it. For an individual contributor, this might mean spending the majority of time talking to customers to discover unarticulated and unmet needs, creating designs or specifications for new products, or writing code. For a manager or leader, this might mean spending all your time on 1:1s to create the organizational buy-in and alignment needed to execute on a new strategy. Whatever the ‘one thing’ is, you need to spend a majority of time on it.
This is hard. The hyperactive hive mind1 of modern knowledge work produces an infuriating amount of distraction. I’ve done calendar audits and seen PMs realize they only spend 1-2 hours a week on product discovery and designers who barely manage 3-4 hours a week to actually design. No matter how much clarity you have on your most critical outcome, you can’t achieve it without spending sufficient time on it. Here are my 2 most effective strategies for ensuring I allocate time to the right things:
The Prioritization Matrix
Every time I feel overwhelmed, I plot all my projects on this 2x2. The x axis is the likelihood of the project being successful without my involvement. The Y axis is the impact of the project. This helps me identify what I need to focus on, what I can to delegate to someone else, and what I can drop completely.
People tend to allocate more time to the things they personally enjoy doing vs allocating time to the thing they uniquely need to do. The 2x2 analysis protects you from your blind spots by asking the question - is there anyone else who can do this or am I uniquely positioned to work on this task.
You’ll often need to work with your manager to make sure you are aligned on the highest impact outcomes and especially the things you are saying No to. Saying No is hard for most of us. A simple but effective script for saying No to your manager goes something like this:
Hey, I want to spend more time on <top priority X> as we agreed on. To do that, I have identified the following meetings and obligations I can offload. I also want to discuss how we could offload or reduce some of the following responsibilities that seem low value.
Another straightforward script for managing peer expectations is:
“Hey, over the next few weeks I really need to focus on X. To make time for that, I am canceling all my recurring 1:1s that aren’t critical to X. Hope you understand. Of course, if there is anything really important, we can get together to discuss that.”
Time block plans and batch processing tasks
Many of us are familiar with the maker mode manager mode framework. Most creative jobs today require a mix of both. However, finding this balance is incredibly hard. Early in my career, I created time blocks for batching all my “project management” tasks and long time blocks every afternoon for ‘core PM work’. Here is what a typical day looked like.
I found this cognitively demanding but extremely productive. The trick is to schedule the deep work blocks way ahead of time, before your calendar fills up. Recently, I have been using Cal Newport’s Time Block Planner. It’s been an incredible tool for managing time and focus. Your calendar is always a better reflection of your priorities than your to-do list.
Bringing it all together
Executing all the above tactics leads to a cohesive system. You start with clarity of outcome, then use the Prioritization matrix to identify the most important components of the outcome to focus on, and then you manage your calendar and coworkers’ expectations to optimize your ability to achieve those outcomes.
Here’s an example of a conversation starter that combines all the above tactics.
PM: I’m responsible for A, B and C. I’ve delivered a lot of amazing results on B, but every time we do a review, the focus is clearly on A. I agree that A is the most important thing for the company, and my top priority. However, continuing to manage B and C is really taking away my ability to focus on A. I have to maintain 1:1s with more stakeholders, manage additional PMs, and perform a variety of tasks that are draining. And personally it is clear that I can’t get promoted without delivering on A. So I’d like to hand off B and C to another team and focus all my energy on A.
I’ve been on both the PM and the manager side of this. It never plays out exactly as you want, but always leads to greater clarity and higher job satisfaction.