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If you’re getting writer’s block while drafting your New Year’s resolution, try flipping the problem and focus on failure over success. When we set our annual goals, we’ve been trained to look for success, and when that success doesn’t come we often just leave our goals behind. Defining success can be very hard even if you know tricks like SMART criteria, as shown by all the broken resolutions in February. So instead, make your goal to fail. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough, so resolve to try your hardest and fail gloriously. Be like Times Square, and ‘Drop the Ball’ this year!

Picture the fear of failure that’s holding you back. Is it looking like a fool? Losing money on an investment? Finding out you don’t have the skills you thought? Then set a resolution to make your fear a reality. Make yourself a fool in front of a large audience. Take a risky bet. Try something totally new or return to a skill that’s rusty. If you succeed, you learn a lot about yourself along with new skills. Or, you fail to fail and end up with a win, and another broken resolution to add to your list of incomplete ‘success resolutions’ from prior years.

If you’re helping a new Product Manager set their own goals, creating goals to fail makes a safe space for learning, personal growth, and expanding boldly into their new multi-faceted role. Even if the final goal is written as a success, thinking about failure can jumpstart creative juices and lead to key steps to achieving success.

Good luck setting your resolution this year. Failure awaits!

Over the last month I’ve found a delicious new recipe for continuous learning – popcorn and pints! Each week a couple Product Owners and I get together for 30-60 minutes to watch product videos and discuss. We’ve started by checking out the Mind the Product video archive. It’s been a fantastic way to stress forever learning, have a chance to learn from some of the industry’s best, and bond as a Product Owner group.

If you want to try it out yourself, here’s some tips:

• If you don’t have beer on tap at work, just call it ‘Product & Popcorn’
• Schedule it for a regular time. We do Tuesdays from 3-4pm (that way folks can leave early or talk to their Team afterwards before the end of the day)
• Get a variety of fun popcorns! I’ve had the best luck with Trader Joe’s popcorns which are all great and unusual. We rotate who buys the popcorn each week.
• Have each person pick a drinking word before the video starts.
• Take frequent breaks to discuss/laugh/cry about what you’re hearing.

Hopefully you and your Product team learn a lot from Popcorn & Pints. I hope to be sharing some of the best videos and thoughts here soon. If you have any suggestions for great places for Product Management videos, please let me know in the comments.

There’s always so much to test. From business models to user experiences, getting feedback early and often leads to the best designs. When you’re onboarding a new PM, you’ll surely have something that can be tested, and hallway testing is not only a way to test cheaply but also a fantastic way to have your new PM meet the organization. Hallway testing is doing quick tests, mainly for user experience designs, with your co-workers in the hall or at their desks. I love to use it for lightweight decisions, such as button placement or text. I’ll walk around with some screens, either digitally or on paper, going up to co-workers who seem to have a moment to get their feedback.

For a new PM, this is also a perfect way to start meeting others in the organization. It’s a great excuse to go say hi and have a productive conversation. They can also learn a lot about what others do by asking them about the application they have open on their computer. The co-workers also love getting to be a part of the design process, and get a peek at upcoming product ideas.

Recently I tried a new trick to make hallway testing even sweeter – candy! I bought two bags of candy, one milk chocolate and one dark chocolate, and began each test like this:

Me: Hi, I’m William, Product Manager for Team X, and if you have 5 minutes I’d love to get your feedback on some future product designs. Can I ask you a couple questions?

Tester: Sure!

Me: Awesome! First question, do you prefer milk or dark chocolate? Why?

Tester: Milk chocolate because I hate the bitter taste…

This opening has several benefits. First, the unexpected chocolate question gets them surprised and excited, and helps transition them from whatever they had been doing to the test with an open mind. Second, it gets them talking, especially with the question of ‘why’. It warms them up to think critically and answer ‘why’ a lot. Lastly, I get to give them candy after they answer, which not only gets a smile but makes the session fun. Especially for a new PM, these hallway testers will be sure to remember the PM who came and gave them surprise candy, and gets the PM off on the right foot.

Every customer call, no matter how mundane, can be a powerful opportunity to reconnect yourself and your development team to your customer. Outside of research calls where we get to show exciting new products, there can be many customer calls for things like hearing feedback from a frustrated customer to assisting with a tough sale. The bias may be to treat these as functional meetings, with the goal to end the call with as few action items as possible and get back to work. However, even though these calls aren’t exciting research calls, they still have a lot of value. By using some tricks to make exciting notes from these calls, we can make the call more informative and virtually bring the customer back with us to share with stakeholders and our Team. For a new Product Manager learning to take engaging notes is an important skill, and hopefully these techniques make it easier. Taking enhanced notes like this leads to a great first impression as well, especially if your development team typically has little customer interaction.

First, make your notes pop with visual elements. I like to include two main ones. First, if you’re a B2B product, grab a copy of the customer’s company’s logo off Google and include it at the top of the notes. This helps you and your Team remember that you’re working with real brands, and it’s very exciting when the logo is well-known. The second image I include is the customer’s face from LinkedIn. By inserting their profile picture, you reinforce that your customers are real people. It especially makes it more engaging for your Team or stakeholders who read your notes, and is an easy and unexpected addition. It seems like magic to them when you somehow got the customer’s picture from a phone call.

For the notes, they can be simple, but focus on a couple aspects. First, record any action items, to ensure you don’t forget to do any follow-up. The second is to capture the customer emotion and feedback. I like to be profuse in my note-taking, and later go back and highlight a couple items in particular that either have actionable feedback or are particularly powerful statements. Like an executive summary, they’re the two or three things I’d want my Team to read. It may be an emotional statement about the product, or a neat idea, or a workaround they’ve come up with. I look for items that will spark creativity in the Team and inspire compassion for the customer.

Be sure to save your notes in a searchable place. Google Drive is great, and you can make a folder that’s shared with your whole Team. I also like to put the date and customer name in the file name to identify them later. Be sure to notify the Team of the new notes too, as they will rarely proactively check Google Drive.

If you’re training a Product Manager or may be in the future, these notes will be a great resource for building their customer empathy and for reference when talking about why a feature was built.

I’ve been doing some research on performance testing, and found the excellent blog Web Performance Today. In particular, the post “You are the worst judge of your site’s performance. Here’s why.” was a great read. Product Managers are biased in judging performance, for the reasons explained in the article:

1. We have great tools, like Mac computers and the newest iPhones, that do better with poor product performance.
2. We’re too sympathetic to what it takes to make a fast site, and are willing to accept slow performance as we know how hard it is to make it fast.
3. We know how to work around slow performance by refreshing sites, closing other browser tabs, blocking ads, and other tricks.

Given the unsettling bias in our own judgement, there are ways to gain empathy and awareness of slow performance. With a new Product Manager, first it is important to make them aware of their bias. As users, we’re a small segment for most of our products, being early adopters and lovers of technology. We’re not the majority that will make our products cross the chasm. We must avoid letting personal bias substitute real user experience and feedback in our judgement of performance.

To help avoid our bias, here are some tricks to get a truer feel for your site’s performance:

1. Use a bad laptop for a day. Most Product Managers I’ve worked with use the latest Macs, which do a great job with websites and apps. Instead, leave your laptop at home one day, and get a loaner laptop from IT. You’ll likely get a PC several years old; the same type of PC your users have, that you can use to try your product.
2. Use a VM to access older browsers. Your dev team is likely already using VMs, and they or your IT team may be able to create an older Windows instance for you to use. It should have older IE, with the default privacy/performance settings, to give you a great taste for how the site feels. VMs typically also have bare-bones specs, or you can ask your team to make it lean by not provisioning many resources. If you’re feeling daring, you could even demo off the VM.
3. Use a slow connection. Go to a Starbucks, library, or public Wifi to avoid the speed from your work and home’s network. You may even be able to join one from your office depending on if you’re located next to stores.
4. Don’t multitask. Use your product, and don’t let yourself get distracted or look away while it loads. On one product I owned, a joke got started to sing “Loading Loading Loading” to the tune of Rawhide’s theme song whenever the loading spinner was shown. If you make yourself think or sing an annoying song while your product loads, you’ll feel the pain.

Of course, you should also have performance tracking and monitoring on your site, (Web Performance Today can tell you a lot more), but I’ve found numbers don’t make you really feel the pain. By making yourself see what it’s like for your customers, you gain empathy and remove your bias.

Sleep is extremely important, yet often not given the time it deserves. I’m often surprised when I talk to Product Managers about how little sleep they’re getting. The rule of thumb I like to use for a day is “8 hours for work, 8 hours for play, and 8 hours for sleep.” If you want to do more in any of these categories, you have to take time from one of the others. And yes, commuting to/from work is part of the 8 hours for play.

When mentoring a new Product Manager, it’s important to talk about sleep. Find out how much they’re getting, and if it’s less than 8 hours, ask if it’s due to work. Asking about sleep shows that you care about their health and well-being, and questions some of the common stereotypes that sleep must be sacrificed to be successful. If it does turn out that sleep is being lost due to too much work, it may be worth talking about how to say “no” more often to work requests and deprioritize tasks of little value.

If you’re not getting enough sleep, try getting at least 8 hours for a week and see how you feel. Be careful that you may feel great after one or two nights, and be tempted to get little sleep on the third night. Stick with the 8 hours for a week, and note how your health, energy, motivation, and creativity improve. If you think there’s no way you could try such an experiment, do an assessment of your work tasks, and stop doing the least important items. You’ll be surprised about how you’ll get creative about delegation and delay to make it happen, leading to better energy to focus on those items that are the most important on your list.

If you’d like to read about the origins of the 8/8/8 rule of thumb I use and where the 8-hour workday comes from, as well as why rest is so important, check out “The Origins of the 8 Hour Workday and Why We Should Rethink It.” It may also inspire a different experiment you want to run for approaching your days.

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.

It’s challenging to maintain healthy habits as a Product Manager. Not only can it be hard to find time to form work habits, like taking time for skill building, it can also be hard to create habits that promote a work/life balance. For a new Product Manager, it can be especially overwhelming as the excitement of a new position plus the never-ending list of things to be done can lead to burn out. It’s important to form sustainable habits as Product Management is a marathon.

Recently I’ve had a lot of success with a mobile app called Streaks. It’s a light-weight iOS app that helps you track how many days in a row you meet personal goals. For instance, you can set a goal to practice guitar on Monday and Thursday, or read a PM article every weekday. I’m using it for work-life balance, such as doing exercise every day, doing arts & crafts, and reading. It could also be used to help a new PM get set up with work habits, like “have lunch with a stakeholder” or “check up on competitors.” I’ve found it to be great encouragement to remember to do the important things that often get forgotten in favor of the urgent.

Even if you don’t buy the app, the idea is straightforward. The core to starting a habit is to have a trigger for the action, getting at least minimal reward for doing so, and making a cycle to come back to the trigger again. To set up your own system, give yourself extrinsic encouragement to start a habit until it’s met. It could be a friend or peer having regular checkins to keep you accountable, or giving yourself a reward for a job well done. There are even online programs like stickK where you can set a punishment if you don’t meet a goal. At the least, set up calendar reminders to make sure you do your goal everyday, and you’ll soon be on your way to a healthy habit.

I just finished a major release at work, so the last weeks have been crammed with helping the Team crunch out features rather than blogging. We don’t have QA analysts on our Team which means the PM and Devs must ensure a quality product is released. Testing can be intimidating to a new PM who has never been responsible for a release before, but there are key advantages a PM has when it comes to testing. Teaching these advantages to a new PM will help them feel confident and able to help make the product launch as success.

PMs aren’t responsible for the code – It’s very hard to test your own code. A developer doesn’t know what they don’t know. If they knew how there could be a bug in their code, they would have fixed it when they wrote it. Plus the sense of ownership for the code they wrote may make a Dev go soft on their testing so that their code doesn’t look bad.

A PM brings a fresh set of eyes to finding and exploiting soft spots in code, being able to ignore the effort that went into creating the code. Just because a new UI or process was hard to write, doesn’t mean a PM feels they need to go soft on testing it. I always enjoy this mental image of a Developer testing their beautiful product:

For a PM, it’s time to take a whack at the product and get that delicious candy inside.

PMs know what bugs are important – Rather than spend time on bug hunting for edge cases, such as clicking a button too many times too quickly, a PM can go for the stuff that’s really important. A PM knows what customers really value in the product, and they can thus ensure the critical features are working for launch. As an example in this last launch, I was sure to validate the main use cases of our API that a customer uses, rather than all the ways the API could be used, and found issues that would have definitely led to customer complaints. The Developers had tested the way they use the API internally, but didn’t know about common usage patterns for the API. By prioritizing testing on what’s important, a PM can make sure they give the most value to the Team with any testing time the PM can share.

PMs know the special customers – Every product has special customers, such as those with weird data or special integrations. The PM can make sure these cases are checked, simply by asking the Team “Did you think about X?” where X is a special customer. In this last release, I found bugs in customers who were special due to custom skins on their account and due to customizations they had to the product. A developer who isn’t used to the customer base wouldn’t know about these specials, so they wouldn’t think to test them.

Hopefully you find these tips helpful in inspiring your next bug hunt, or helping a new PM get into the right mindset for helping to test their first launch.

There’s nothing worse than having the message of your presentation or demo obscured by technical issues. Over time, I’ve collected some key tools and tips for presenting on a Mac to ensure computer gremlins are kept at bay. Hopefully you find them useful too. If you already knew them, tell a new Product Manager about them so they don’t learn the hard way how presentations and demos can quickly go bad.

These tips and tools are all compatible with Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10) and later versions. I hope they keep working in future versions too.

First, stop what you’re doing: Before using your laptop to present, stop what you’re currently doing to ensure none of your background programs get in the way. You’ll want to check for applications that can be quit as well as browser tabs like Google Calendar that can give pop-ups (such as when your next meeting is about to start.) When in doubt, I quit the program, and it may even be worth quitting and reopening web browsers to clear out any open tabs that may start playing ad music.

If your demo requires a first-time-user experience, you can use private browsing modes in Chrome and/or Firefox to ignore your saved cache and cookies.

There’s also a very handy built-in tool in the Mac Notification Center to mark yourself as Do Not Disturb. I always turn this on to avoid notifications from my applications. It stays on for 24 hours, but you can also turn it off after your presentation. You can access the Notification Center in the upper right under the icon of three lines. Here’s a screenshot of the setting, and you may need to scroll up in the Notification Center to see it:

While you’re on, don’t let your computer go off: During your presentation while you’re taking Q&A, your computer will want to go to sleep to save power. Don’t let it do so, leaving you with a black screen and a password prompt, by using a small app called Caffeine. Caffeine installs an icon in your menu bar that, when active, keeps your computer from falling asleep. I use this for much more than presenting, such as making sure my computer stays awake while it’s crunching data.

Make sure your audience can see: You can ensure the whole audience can see your demo with a couple quick steps. First, make your browser or application full screen by clicking the green circle in the upper left. This will remove any distraction for the audience from your dock or other open applications. You can then increase the font of most applications by using command+shift+’+’ to make it easier to read. If you need to shift quickly between applications, consider using command+tab and command+shift+tab to cycle through your open applications.

Sometimes a monitor or setup will be at a poor resolution, causing scrollbars or visual issues in your demo. Chrome has a nice add-on Window Resizer to quickly set the resolution for your browser. This can get you to your minimum resolution for your product or ensure you’re using the window size that works best for you. As a bonus it’s also great for testing responsive products such as mobile websites from your desktop by setting your browser to a mobile device resolution.

 

Hopefully you find these tips useful, and if you have any of your own tools and tips for great presentations, please let me know in the comments.