December 2015 – How To Train a Product Manager

December 29, 2015

Resolve to Work Less

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As 2015 comes to a close, I’ve got New Year’s resolutions on the mind. There are many articles the days talking about setting Product Management resolutions, like keeping a neater inbox or setting goals. Personally I found this article from Slate the most inspiring – Leave It At The Office.

The article challenges us to make a resolution to avoid the temptation of an ever-connected work environment and put boundaries on work. Give work the time it deserves, and make sure you give yourself the time you need too. The author lists a couple great reasons, such as the power of having more time for hobbies and better health. There are many others too, such as setting a good example for co-workers who are also tempted to work late.

For me, it’s especially important to not work outside normal hours because it’s too easy to say yes to unimportant requests otherwise. If someone asks for a favor or a meeting, it often can mean that it pushes important items into after-hours work if I say yes. If I let this happen, I easily get into a habit of working later and later to keep up with all the little favors and requests that come in over a day. I like to use the phrase “death by a thousand paper cuts” when this happens. Instead, if I keep the 8 hours a day at work precious, it makes prioritization of time all the more pressing leading to nos to requests that really aren’t important. This limit on time cascades down to me focusing only a small number of items a day or week, and doing them really well.

For yourself or a new product manager, I encourage you to make the resolution to work less in 2016. Either as a skilled PM or a new one, it is very easy to get into a habit of working late and not having a boundary on your precious time to recharge and grow personally. Use the New Year as a time to reset your work/life balance to start the year off at your best both at work and at home.

December 23, 2015December 29, 2015

The Power of Ratios

Chapter 20 of On Financial Intelligence is all about the power and importance of ratios in financial analysis rather than totals. For instance, rather than looking at a company’s total earnings, it’s more telling to look at the ratio of earnings per share. Ratios are powerful because:

1. You can compare ratios to themselves over time. A ratio lends itself to self comparison because it’s unaffected by factors like company growth. If the numerator of a ratio grows, so too should the denominator. If the ratio changes over time, then you’re seeing a truly interesting trend in part of the finances becoming skewed.

2. You can compare ratios to what was projected. By setting goals and projections as ratios, it’s easier to make decisions. For instance, if you set a goals of keeping a product’s costs below $1 million, it’s hard to determine if you should make a $20,000 purchase without totaling your current costs and projections. However, if your goal is to keep margin for a product to a certain standard, you can look at the costs for an individual decision more discretely because the ratio (margin) goal can pertain just to a specific feature or decision.

3. You can compare ratios to industry averages. Public companies publish their key ratios quarterly and thus you can compare your ratios to theirs to determine if you’re on track, needing improvement, or have an advantage in the market.

These same arguments for why ratios are powerful in financial analysis also apply when setting KPIs for your product. When choosing a KPI around increased user activity for Facebook, for instance, it may be tempting to set a goals of 10 million posts in a quarter. Instead, if the KPI is to get to an average of 10 posts per user for the quarter, the goal gets the advantages of ratios as described above. You can compare this ratio over time and see if users are generally more active than the same quarter last year. You can use it in decision making by examining whether a feature is likely to make a user more likely to post and tracking posts per user in A/B tests. And you may be able to compare it to other social networks because, although they’re smaller than you and thus have less total posts a quarter, the ratio of posts per user is still comparable from one network to another.

So, when setting up the KPIs for your product, think about using ratios rather than fixed totals. Tracking totals is fun for milestone celebrations (like having the millionth user), but they’re far less actionable when making decisions.

December 18, 2015

All Night? All Right!

Sometimes you need to burn the midnight oil to get a project or release out the door. It’s part of life when creating exciting new products, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Here are some tips that I’ve collected to make late night work sessions effective. The list doesn’t even include caffeine or 80’s dance music.

Keep your eyes going strong

At night, your eyes can get tired quickly from your computer screen blasting white light at them. I either dim my monitor, or better yet use the High Contrast Chrome extension. This extension inverts the colors of you monitor, making your screen mostly black and thus easier to read. Instead of most websites or online tools showing black-on-white, they become white-on-black. For example, instead of reading a blog like this:

You can read it like this:

You can quickly toggle the color inversion off and on with the Chrome toolbar in case you need pictures in their normal colors. It’s a free extension, so give it a try. I even use it during the day if I’m going to be on the computer a lot.

Keep on target with Pomodoros

As I covered in a previous post, using the Pomodoro method can ensure you stay focused. You’ll work in 25 minute blocks, with 5 minute breaks, giving you a goal of focused work with a treat to take a break. I’m easily distracted late at night, so it’s even more vital to enact external systems to keep me on track. Plus you can set a goal of, say, 3 Pomodoros to feel accomplished before going to bed.

Save your typos for tomorrow

Working late at night also introduces common mistakes like typos due to your sleepy mind. If you’re working on emails, save them to the draft folder rather than sending immediately. In the morning, give them a quick proofread, and then press send. You’ll save yourself some embarrassing mistakes as well as wasted time explaining to co-workers what you really meant last night.

Block your temptations

Nighttime is also the time to be easily tempted, and for me it’s watching videos on YouTube with cookies and milk. There are many browser tools you can use to block access to websites that might distract you. Depending on your browser, you can make it a restricted site, or change your system proxy, to block the ability to get distracted.

If you have to pull an all-nighter, I hope you find these tips helpful, and you meet your goals.

December 11, 2015December 29, 2015

We Are All Human

Know your assumptions. That’s the first theme in a book I’ve begun reading: Financial Intelligence. Before diving into how to read and interpret financial statements, Karen and Joe (the authors) want to make it clear that all financial analyses are based on assumptions. Be it the depreciation schedule for a vehicle or what counts as cost of goods sold (COGS), there are judgement calls and assumptions that must be made to create a financial analysis. If you understand these assumptions, either by talking to your finance team or reading the footnotes for a financial statement, you can get the full context for the analysis and have conversations about whether those assumptions are accurate. Don’t just accept numbers. Instead, understand how they were chosen and question.

I believe this lesson can be extended farther to teams beyond finance. For new Product Managers, it’s likely the first time he or she will interact with teams like finance, legal, and security. These teams are often shrouded in mist as the common conception is that they speak their own language while making decisions that affect everyone. However, it’s important for a new Product Manager to understand that these teams are human. They must make assumptions and guesses to get their jobs done, and those assumptions are often wrong as assumptions often are. A new Product Manager should strive to form relationships with these groups to understand these assumptions as well as learn how to best inform them of their products impacts to their decisions. This relationship can be formed through informal 1:1s or lunches, or simply getting on the phone to talk to these teams rather than sending email. And even better is to read an intro book to those teams, like Financial Intelligence, to understand their lingo and the framework for their decisions.

So far Financial Intelligence is quite good, and I expect to have several posts about the parts of the book as I read through it.