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We are creatures of habit. Our days are defined by the simple repetitions we perform consciously or subconsciously. We may always drink a coffee at 2pm, read Facebook when we wake up, or go for a run on Saturday mornings. These habits don’t have to be “good” or “bad”, they’re simply who we are and have been formed for various reasons. But it’s up to us to create constructive habits for our personal growth and success. Let’s talk about how we can start our next new habit.

The basis of any habit is a three step loop:

1. Cue – These are external or internal triggers that cause us to initiate our habit. External triggers may be the clock striking 2pm for coffee time, a Facebook notification that your friend has made a post, or your fitness app reporting that your exercise has been low this week. These triggers become internalized as a habit is grown. For example, instead of waiting for the clock to strike 2pm for coffee, you instead feel your energy drop in the afternoon and grab that coffee. Or you wake up with the fear of missing out (FOMO) and check Facebook. Or you feel your legs being restless and get that run in on Saturday.
2. Routine – Whichever cue begins the habit, it produces a response from us. This is the action itself, whether drinking coffee, checking Facebook, or going for a jog.
3. Reward – After our routine, we receive the benefits of our habit. This may be a caffeinated energy boost, social information, or post-workout relaxation. This benefit motivates us to initiate the habit the next time we have our cue. If the reward is great enough, we will internalize the habit’s cues to trigger them ourselves without needing the external world.

With any habit you want to start, you thus need a great external cue to prime the pump. What types of cues support any habit and are easy to set up? Here are my top three ways to trigger a new habit I’m created:

1. Passwords – Make the creation and maintenance of passwords fun. Choose an inspirational phrase to trigger or remind you of your habit. “D0.N0t.R3@D.F@C3B00k!”, “Appreciate!Some1!”, “St@yC@lm” are all phrases you’d have to type 5-10 times a day to access your laptop. It’s a superb way to actively have to engage with your habit, and a regular cue for you. These phrases can make long, secure passwords and  as you make new habits you’ll have an excuse to change it often.
2. Alarms – Use your phone to set a fun alarm. Remind yourself to go to bed, or your morning routine. Make the messaging inspirational and add fun emojis, like “Go To Sleep Rockstar 😴🎸” or “Zen Into The Day 🧘🌅”.
3. Lock Screen Image – How often do you check your phone? Is it every hour? Minute? Second? What if every time you did you saw a trigger of your new habit? Make your lock screen image an inspirational trigger or reminder and your biggest challenge will be switching it so often as you master each new habit. To find a great lock screen image I search the internet for something like ‘iPhone yoga wallpaper’, save it to the phone, and set it as the lock screen image in settings. Often if I’m trying to get through a slog of a book, I make the lock screen the book cover to remind me to read on my phone rather than be distracted.
   

Hopefully your new habit gets off to a great start!

Learn More – Check out Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit for more on the habit loop. Nir Eyal’s book Hooked shows you how to leverage habits to build amazing product experiences to keep users coming back for me.

It’s time to plan your next big product release. You sit down, set a goal for 12 months out, and get to it. What happens next is one of the common fates for traditional product releases:

• Your  changes go slowly, leading to missed opportunity and demotivation
• Your funding runs out, and you have an undelivered, half-finished release
• You have to make so many compromises to keep on budget that you ultimately miss the outcomes you desired

And that’s why agile methods are used today. Rather than setting a target for a year out, we iterate and experiment with our product ideas to create the outcomes we desire more effectively and efficiently. So why do we still adhere to traditional personal resolution setting? It ends in the same outcomes as traditional projects with broken resolutions or spent effort without the results we wanted. We either stop going to the gym and feel like personal failures, or keep going to the gym and don’t lose pounds. And if you do keep your resolution and get the massive results you crave? Then your story is so unique its bound for the front page of Reddit.

The failure in your resolution isn’t your fault, its in the way we all set resolutions to execute on our vision for a better self. So this year, break your resolution early, and start experimenting! Instead of setting a 365-day goal, use a iterative approach and set a 14 or 30 day goal. For instance, rather than committing to a year of getting up early to write blog posts, commit to sleeping from 9pm-5am in January to get up early to write your blog. At the end of the month, have a personal retrospective. Did that work and you saw the benefits? Great, do it again in February! Did it not work? Then pivot and sleep from 10pm-6am, or find some other time to write blog posts! Whether your experiment passes or fails, you’re not a failure, and you’re sure to learn a lot about yourself. And now you get 12, 24, or more opportunities to find your next breakthrough in personal happiness, performance, or whatever your vision for 2018 has in store. Resolve to experiment!

Did you know that wearing a hat can lead to truly understanding problems and comprehensive solutions? Wearing a hat changes your perspective and stimulates your mind. And the best part is, it doesn’t even have to be a physical hat! With Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats framework you can focus your mindset on different aspects of problem definition and solution creation in a matter of minutes. Let’s take a look a brief look at the six hats and how you can use them every day.

The six thinking hats are six states of mind that we all go through, each represented as a colored hat:

White – a factual mindset. White is clinical and pristine without being sullied by opinion. What are the facts for our problem or solution? What, if we knew it, would change our outlook? How could we get more data? What do the trends of the past tell us about today and the future?

Red – an emotional mindset. Red is the color of passion and emotion. This hat gives credence to our gut reactions as we trust what our mysterious subconscious is telling us. How do we feel about this problem or solution? How would or do others feel about it? Is there FUD?

Yellow – an optimistic mindset. Yellow is the sunshine giving a happy positive outlook. What are the upsides of the problem or solution? What does stunning success look like? What advantages and opportunities do we have? How can we take advantage of our strengths?

Black – a pessimistic mindset. Black is the night casting shadows on your decisions. This mindset lets you play the devil’s advocate to holistically consider all aspects of your problem or solution. What does failure look like? What are the risks? What will be the first roadblock? Why is this an impossible situation?

Green – a creative mindset. Green is the color of life and growth. No idea is too crazy. What are we not considering? What are ways to avoid the problem entirely? What is the second best solution to our problem?

Blue – a control mindset. Blue, like a police uniform, enforces process. Did we consider all our hats? What do see after exploring all our mindsets? What outcomes or actions will we take going forward?

At work, I gave a mini-workshop on this framework and it was exciting for all of us to engage with our hats as the framework’s language is very accessible to everyone. We all have our favorite hats, and as product leaders we often find ourselves wearing different hats depending on our group. If a Team is being data-driven with white hat thinking, we can bring emotional red hat thinking to give passion to a problem. Or too much yellow or black hat thinking deserves the complement to ensure we’re being realistic in our assessments. Practicing the six hats can ensure we have the skills when a hat is needed. For example, I personally lean towards blue and green hats, and struggle with red hat thinking.

In our workshop, we took one of our company problems and trusted the process by going through the hats in order. We started with blue to outline the process for our session, went through each hat for about 5 minutes each, and finally came back to blue to tie it all together with an outcome or next actions. Using a whiteboard divided into 2 rows of 3 columns, one cell for each hat starting with white, is a great way to collaboratively take notes and show the progress through the hats. The results were great and we were all stunned by where we got in a short amount of time. It’s certainly hard to focus on only one hat at a time, but we got there after some practice.

If you’d like to learn more about the six thinking hats, there are many summary articles that go more in depth, or there’s the full book Six Thinking Hats. With it being such an accessible model, it can be a great choice for a new product manager as well as they learn decision making through shuhari. By starting with a semi-prescriptive framework they can build the confidence to start experimenting with their own decision making patterns. For me, the best way to learn is by doing, so take some time on your next challenge or opportunity and purposely think with all your hats and see how your decision improves!

What’s your favorite hat? What hat needs improvement for you? We’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Growth is a constant process. Everyday we strive to be our best, either succeeding or failing, but always learning. It’s important that we take the time to internalize those learnings lest we lose the day’s growth. And the simplest process, Think Time at the end of the day, can turn each day’s lessons into a habit for years.

Think Time is a daily ritual of spending 5-15 minutes at the end of each day reflecting on how the day went. Where did you win? Where did you fail? What can you learn? How can you take today’s lessons into tomorrow to continually grow? You can do it at the end of the workday, on your commute home, before bed, or whenever you’d like. Just try to make it a consistent time so you build a habit. I personally do it before leaving work, around 4:30, and use a set of questions to help me appreciate the day’s gifts and focus on where I want to improve. My current list:

• Where did I fail today, and what did I learn from it?
• Who did I appreciate today? If no one, who can I appreciate before I go home?
• Who inspired me today?
• What did I do today that scared me?

As an example of using these to enforce habits, the question “who inspired me today?” was added after I realized my natural reaction to others’ successes is to be jealous. To help break that reflex, I try to purposely frame that jealousy into inspiration at the day’s reflection.

Think Time is also a great way to help others in their career by coaching them on a set of questions they can ask themselves each day to create healthy habits, change mindsets, and always appreciate personal growth. Hopefully you have success with Think Time as well, and we’d love to know your favorite daily reflection questions or thought points in the comments.

Failing is vital. If your only plan is to succeed, you’ll never learn, and thus never have the crucial breakthroughs your product needs. Many enterprises only value success, so we fall into a pit of setting low goals to ensure success and hiding failures. In his excellent Mind the Product talk, Dave Martin goes more into why accepting failure is vital to a culture of innovation – https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/05/building-a-culture-of-innovation-through-product-management-dave-martin/

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.
-Michelangelo

So, how do we set our teams up to fail, when they’ve been in cultures of success for years? For me, explicitly calling out expected failures and a little bit of story structure goes a long way. Here’s what I do:

• Tag or name user stories that may fail as experiments. This helps the team open their mind to being risky and think about the minimal amount of work to test an experiment.
• Create two additional stories for every experiment. One story is the additional support we’ll do if the experiment is a success, like hardening the code, adding more tests, and checking performance. The other story is what we’ll do if the experiment fails, such as reverting tests and code. Ultimately you’ll delete one of these stories and execute the other.
• Ideally, these two follow-up stories should have the same estimate. This shows that the appropriate amount of effort is being put into the experiment and you’re not over-investing in the success or failure route. An ideal experiment has a 50/50 chance of success to optimize learnings, so we want both routes to have the same cost. If you need to track the total cost for an experiment, take the more expensive path of success or failure (not the cost of all three stories).
• Once you’ve done your first story and measured your results, delete one of the stories, and play the other one, and share the learning from the experiment’s success or failure with others.

Hopefully you find this framework for tracking experiments helpful too. It helps the Team get in the mindset for failure, and creates the plan to fail so they’re ready to aim high and learn together.

This week at Mile High Agile I had the honor to lead an open space session about how Product Managers and Product Owners can work better together. It was a great session, with about 40 attendees, so I want to share what we discussed with you. Hopefully you’ll find it useful for either thinking about having both Product Managers and Product Owners or helping a new PM or PO explore how they can work with their peers. Or you may even want to use this format to run your own open space session.

I start my open space sessions by asking folks what they want to get from the session as they mill in. This greatly helps me set a flow and tone for the session. The first goal that folks had for this one was learning more about the alphabet soup of PMs, PMs, POs, and BAs. I took the first stab for the group, defining each and setting the framework with the venn diagram of usable/feasible/viable solutions. When I’m working with a PM or PO, I see the PO taking the central intersection of the three circles, while the Product Manager focuses on viability. The Product Manager does vital tasks such as market analysis, customer segmentation, and competitive research to discover customer problems that they are willing to pay money to solve. The Product Owner works with the Team to create the solutions that meet the customer problems that the Product Manager has identified. This framework resonated with a lot of the audience, and some other suggestions were to think of Product Managers as outwards facing and the Product Owner as inwards facing, or the two on a scale from Product Manager strategic thinking to Product Owner tactical thinking.

I then had folks who work as both PMs with POs to rate their experience with fist-to-five voting. Giving a 5 means you wouldn’t have it any other way, and a 1 means your experience has been horrendous. Most people were a 3 or 4 on their experiences, and I had folks go around to discuss why. The main theme by far is that it’s all about communication. Having great communication between the PM and PO is critical and gets a 5 while poor communication and understanding of responsibilities leads to a 3. Thus we shared ways to improve that communication:

• Take time to get to know each other. Get beers, go for walks, and lunch together.
• Share ideas, both the good and the bad. Share a lot so you both get in the practice of giving constructive criticism and improve each others’ ideas.
• Make a regularly scheduled time to talk. Save the space so you always have a venue to share ideas and feedback so that you don’t have to schedule a meeting when there’s an issue.
• Set roles and responsibilities. Be sure that you’ve got each others backs, but also are sharing effectively. You could talk through one of the frameworks above to make sure it works for both of you. You also consider using a RACI matrix to structure and document your agreement.
• Learn each others values and strengths. My favorite is to use StrengthsFinder to not only learn about yourself but also about your product partner. Many other personality assessments like Myers-Briggs, work great too.
• Make sure your development Team gets access to customer interactions and research from the Product Manager. Having a sense of purpose is essential to being motivated at work, and this can get lost without great communication. Hearing about the impact of a Team’s deliverables in the market is the most important of all.

Overall, folks liked having Product Managers & Product Owners to get two minds on the challenges of great product management and ownership. They can divide the many demands of product leadership to ensure amazing successes in knowing customer problems and creating solutions. The challenges come from poor communication, such as not sharing product results or leveraging technical innovations to guide customer research. Hopefully by using some of the tips we generated above you’ll be able to ensure your own success, and if you have questions or your own tips, please leave them in the comments!

Sprint demos can be tricky. So much gets done in a sprint, but you have to condense it down into a consumable package for a mixed audience of different roles. Or maybe not much gets done, but you or your Team have to demo anyways. Or you might find yourself demoing for a customer on a moment’s notice. Much can be said for the technical preparation and structure of the demos, yet I think there’s a simple ingredient that makes a good demo into a great one: passion.

Bringing passion to a demo means your excitement is infectious, getting your audience on the edge of their seats to see more. And being passionate should be easy; you’ve built your product and it’s your baby. It’s great to get to show it off! So what makes it tough to be excited?

• Our expectations can be too high, and we know all the times we had to say “no” while building, making it hard to see the awesomeness that remains.
• The Team’s velocity was poor, and only a sliver of what was committed got delivered. Again, we know what might have been and yearn for it.
• We have to build our product on the decisions of others, that we don’t agree with. It’s hard to get excited about showing product that’s hindered by others.

So what can we do to get past these blocks?

• Celebrate what is, not miss what might have been. If you made your stories well, there should still be value delivered, which no matter how small will still impact your customers.
• Personify your audience and think about demoing to someone who you know would be excited about your product, be it a key customer or peer. Demo as if it was just for them, and think about the smiles they’d have to see what you’ve built.
• Understand why former decisions were made, even if you don’t agree, so you can frame your work on the foundation you were given and feel great about the progress you’re making.

And if all else fails, hype yourself up with some motivational music before you demo!

Passion in a demo is so important, as it celebrate’s your Team’s successes, gets your stakeholders excited, and engages your audience. If you’re making a demo or giving feedback on another Product Manager’s, try to make yourself bored (like your audience may be when they come to your demo through no fault of your own) and ensure your passion comes through in your voice, words, and body language.

If you have any tips for bringing passion to a demo, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Metaphors are an extremely potent tool for both communication as well as self-discovery. I’ve begun reading Your Brain at Work by David Rock, which gives the basis for an overall metaphor of how our brains work. Rock proposes we use the metaphor of a stage, with ideas coming, going, and vying for attention while we navigate our day. So far he’s doing a nice job relating several complex topics in cognitive science back to this metaphor to help readers heighten their understanding of themselves, and thus succeed.

In the first “Act” of the book, most of Rock’s tips have been codifying and justifying practices I’ve already done, like taking a walk over lunch to clear my head, but it’s helped me think differently about why these practices work (plus help me convince others to join me.) Going back to the metaphor of a stage, taking a walk basically gives actors a time to rest and your subconscious can have a breakthrough as other actors are allowed to mingle on the stage. There have also been several new tips and tricks that I can’t wait to explore:

• Treat prioritizing my day as one of the most energy-intensive activities. Do prioritization of todos early and avoid trying to reprioritize late in the day.
• Improve your mental braking system (not getting distracted) by practicing any braking, even physical braking.
• Think of your alertness level as an inverted U, where too little or too much alertness is an issue. Move your alertness level lower or higher through taking a break or visualizing a fear.

If you’re looking for a book to inspire you to think about your work approach differently, or help a Product Manager form their own best mental practices by laying a foundational metaphor, you should check it out. I’ll be making a couple more follow-up posts on the book as I read more of it so stay tuned for the final review.

One of my favorite email newsletters, Data Driven Daily, just posted its Archives! Data Driven Daily is a great way to get a little dose of statistics and data analysis each day with its extremely approachable and relevant topics of making better decisions through data.

Each week typically follows a theme, and some of my favorite series so far have been:

• Game Theory – A nice primer to get past this intimidating term and learn when and how to use it.
• Dirty Data – For those doing their first data analyses, a perfect reminder of what types of bad data to be on the lookout for.
• Funnels – One of my favorite data analysis tools and one that a new PM should know how to interpret.

Hopefully you find your own favorites in the Archives and it helps you or your new PM get more comfortable collecting, interpreting, and acting on data.

It’s mid-January, and New Year’s resolutions are starting to melt like snowmen. Reality begins to bite after the lovely winter time-off with the start of a new quarter. So what are we to do about losing our way? Recently a couple articles inspired me to get back on track by connecting one of a PM’s top skills, customer empathy, with setting and achieving personal goals.

First, The Atlantic published “Self-Control is Just Empathy With Your Future Self.” The article discusses the neuroscience between self-control and empathy for others. I found the analogy between our future selves and others to be fascinating as both are just as unknowable. If we treat our future like a potential customer, there’s a lot we can do to make sure we convert our future to a reality.

The New York Magazine also has a series “How People Change” with “To Change Your Life, Learn How to Trust Your Future Self.” This goes a step further by saying that not only do we have to listen and empathize with our future selves, we have to trust them. Make decisions that may have short term pain for increased gain for our future selves.

So, how can we take advantage of this connection between empathy for others and ourselves? We can leverage the tools we use to gain customer empathy, like an Empathy Map, and use them on a projection of our future selves. Make a vision for what you want the future to look like, and how you’ll feel when you realize those goals, to inspire yourself to make hard decisions today.

Another way is to build on the popular mantra of setting just three goals each day, and make them serve your future selves. For instance, each day you could:

1. Do something that will help you tomorrow
2. Do something that will help you next week
3. Do something that will help you next month

Of course, you can tweak the horizon for each item to fit your goals, even going out to a year. The advantage is to make a simple way to set goals to incrementally progress to your future self. By thinking concretely about what you want your future self to feel for each time horizon, you can more easily make concrete steps to get there.

If you’re training a new Product Manager, you can help them set their first personal goals by creating empathy for the Product Manager they want to be, and then deconstructing that vision into actions that help them get there one day, week, and month at a time. Hopefully you also get inspired to set your own goals, or get your New Year’s resolutions back on track!