Learning by Shipping

Managing product development and management in general are ripe with clichés. By definition of course a cliché is something that is true, but unoriginal. I like a good cliché because it reminds you that much of management practice boils down to things you need to do but often forget or fail to do often enough.

The following 15 clichés might prove helpful and worth making sure you’re really doing the things in product development that need to get done on a daily basis. Some of these are my own wording of other’s thoughts expressed differently. There’s definitely a personal story behind each of these

Promise and deliver. People love to play expectations games and that is always bad for collaboration internal to a team, with your manager, or externally with customers. The cliché “under promise and over deliver” is one that people often use with pride. If you’re working with another group or with customers, the work of “setting expectations” should not be a game. It is a commitment. Tell folks what you believe, with the best of intentions, what you will do and do everything to deliver that. Over time this is far more valuable to everyone to be known as someone that gets done what you say.

Make sure bad news travels fast. Things will absolutely go wrong. In a healthy team as soon as things go wrong that information should be surfaced. Trying to hide or obscure bad news creates an environment of distrust or lack of transparency. This is especially noticeable on team when the good news is always visible but for some reason less good news lacks visibility. Avoid “crying wolf” of course by making sure you are broadly transparent in the work you do.

Writing is thinking. We’re all faced with complex choices in what to do or how to go about what will get done. While some people are great at spontaneously debating, most people are not and most people are not great at contributing in a structured way on the fly. So when faced with something complex, spend the time to think about some structure write down sentences, think about it some more, and then share it. Even if you don’t send around the writing, almost everyone achieves more clarity by writing. If you don’t then don’t blame writer’s block, but consider that maybe you haven’t formulated your point of view, yet.

Practice transparency within your team. There’s really no reason to keep something from everyone on the team. If you know something and know others want to know, either you can share what you know or others will just make up their own idea of what is going on. Sharing this broad base of knowledge within a team creates a shared context which is incredibly valuable.

Without a point of view there is no point. In our world of A/B testing, MVPs, and iteration we can sometimes lose sight of why a product and company can/should exist. The reason is that a company brings together people to go after a problem space with a unique point of view. Companies are not built to simply take requests and get those implemented or to throw out a couple of ideas and move forward with the ones that get traction. You can do that as work for hire or consulting, but not if you’re building a new product. It is important to maintain a unique point of view as a “north star” when deciding what to do, when, and why.

Know your dilithium crystals. Closely related to your point of view as a team is knowing what makes your team unique relative to competition or other related efforts. Apple uses the term “magic” a lot and what is fascinating is how with magic you can never quite identify the specifics but there is a general feeling about what is great. In Star Trek the magic was dilithium crystals–if you ever needed to call out the ingredient that made things work, that was it. What is your secret (or as Thiel says, what do you believe that no one else does)? It could be branding, implementation, business model, or more.

Don’t ask for information or reports unless they help those you ask to do their jobs. If you’re a manager you have the authority to ask your team for all sorts of reports, slides, analysis, and more. Strong managers don’t exercise that authority. Instead, lead your team to figure out what information helps them to do their job and use that information. As a manager your job isn’t a superset of your team, but the reflection of your team.

Don’t keep two sets of books. We keep track of lots of things in product development: features, budgets, traffic, revenue, dev schedules, to do lists, and more. Never keep two versions of a tracking list or of some report/analysis. If you’re talking with the team about something and you have a different view of things than they do, then you’ll spend all your time reconciling and debating which data is correct. Keeping a separate set of books is also an exercise in opacity which never helps the broader team collaboration.

Showdowns are boring and nobody wins. People on teams will disagree. The worst thing for a team dynamic is to get to a major confrontation. When that happens and things become a win/lose situation, no one wins and everyone loses. Once it starts to look like battle lines are being draw, the strongest members of the team will start to find ways to avoid what seems like an inevitable showdown. (Source: This is a line from the film “Wall Street”.)

Never vote on anything. On paper, when a team has to make a decision it seems great to have a vote. If you’re doing anything at all interesting then there’s almost certainty that at least one person will have a different view. So the question is if you’re voting do you expect a majority rule, 2/3rds, consensus, are some votes more equal? Ultimately once you have a vote then the choice is one where the people that disagree are singled out and probably isolated. My own history is that any choice that was ever voted on didn’t even stick. Leadership is  about anticipating and bringing people along to avoid these binary moments. It is also about taking a stand and having a point of view if you happen to reach such a point.

When presenting the boss with n alternatives he/she will always choose option n+1. If you’re asked to come up with a solution to a problem or you run across a problem you have to solve but need buy in from others, you’re taking a huge risk by presenting alternatives. My view is that you present a solution and everything else is an alternative–whether you put it down on paper or not. A table of pros/cons or a list of options like a menu almost universally gets a response of trying to create an alternative that combines attributes that can’t be combined. I love choices that are cost/quality, cheap/profitable, small/fast and then the meeting concludes in search of the alternative that delivers both.

Nothing is ever decided at a meeting so don’t try. If you reach a point where you’re going to decide a big controversial thing at a meeting then there’s a good chance you’re not really going to decide. Even if you do decide you’re likely to end up with an alliterative you didn’t think of beforehand and thus is not as thought through or as possible as you believed it to be by the end of the meeting. At the very least you’re not going to enroll everyone in the decision which means there is more work to do be done. The best thing to do is not to avoid a decision making meeting but figure out how you can keep things moving forward every day to avoid these moments of truth.

Work on things that are important not urgent. Because of mobile tools like email, twitter, SMS, and notifications of all kinds from all sorts of apps have a way of dominating your attention. In times of stress or uncertainty, we all gravitate to working on what we think we can accomplish. It is easier to work towards inbox zero than to actually dive in and talk to everyone on the team about how they are handling things or to walk into that customer situation. President Eisenhower and later Stephen Covey developed amazing tools for helping you to isolate work that is important rather than urgent.

Products don’t ship with a list of features you thought you’d do but didn’t. The most stressful list of any product development effort is the list of things you have to cut because you’re running out of time or resources. I don’t like to keep that list and never did, for two reasons. First, it just makes you feel bad. The list of things you’re not doing is infinitely long–it is literally everything else. There’s no reason to remind yourself of that. Second, whatever you think you will do as soon as you can will change dramatically once customers start using the product you do end up delivering to them. When you do deliver a product it is what you made and you’re not obligated to market or communicate all the things you thought of but didn’t get done!

If you’re interesting someone won’t agree with what you said. Whether you’re writing a blog, internal email, talking to a group, or speaking to the press you are under pressure. You have to get across a unique point of view and be heard. The challenge is that if you only say things everyone believes to already be the case, then you’re not furthering the dialog. The reality is that if you are trying to change things or move a dialog forward, some will not agree with you. Of course you will learn and there’s a good chance you we wrong and that gives you a chance be interesting in new ways. Being interesting is not the same as being offensive, contrarian, cynical, or just negative. It is about articulating a point of view that acknowledges a complex and dynamic environment that does not lend itself to simple truths. Do make sure you have the right mechanisms in place to learn just how wrong you were and with how many people.

Like for example, if you write a post of 15 management tips, most people won’t agree with all of them :)
–Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)