Envy

The journey to be a better product manager or product designer, like most professional careers, is full of comparison. Comparison against others on the same career track, against other product teams and their resourcing or maturity, comparison against other products at other companies (which can be great research!), comparison against other areas of the business and their ability to drive or accomplish work, and the list goes on.

Comparison can often trap us in envy. You do the comparison, find your own lacking, and wish you had the other. This is how some features get put into roadmaps, after all. But looked at slightly larger, the comparisons that make us envious might also have something to teach us - especially if we think about it in terms of personal or professional growth. The twinge of envy is a trigger that we are unhappy or desire to change something. Can we spin that into an action?

A bite-size podcast I often listen to is the Before Breakfast podcast by Laura Vanderkam (episodes are around 5-10 minutes). She had a specific episode called “Understand your Jealousy”, which speaks to this idea of finding meaning in what makes you envious, albeit in a more personal setting. Finding your “pain point” of what makes you envious allows you to do something about it.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Do whiteboard exercises with your team to kick off a conversation. My team did this exercise over two different stand-ups, but you could combine to one, time-permitting.

The first whiteboard is asking folks what makes them envious. I put it on a scale of personal to professional, so we could spark conversation easily but still dig into the workplace-focused topics. The second whiteboard flips the idea, asking why might others be envious of you? This is meant to open up the understanding of jealousy (that sometimes what you perceive isn’t reality) and that it can also be a real driver for behavior.

What forward steps can we create from where we see our envy? And where can we help others by noticing their envy of us? How do we turn what can be seen as a negative emotion into a call for action?

Asynchronous Ways of Working

The most effective product teams know how and when to communicate with each other, which is why all teams should have agreed upon “ways of working”. This could be referred to as ground rules, or working agreements, or baselines, but they should define how the team wants to work together, what they want in the working environment, and what they want from each other. There are many templates out there, and perhaps we’ll revisit this broader theme in a future stand-up topic.

But I’ve recently asked my team to reconsider their ways of working in terms of the working environment. Much has changed in the last two years regarding virtual work, and our organization (which was previously quite location-specific) has hired folks from across the globe in that time. This means product teams span countries, timezones, cultures. Since some folks have begun returning to an office at least a couple days a week, and some folks won’t ever go into an office, it is an ideal time to revisit the topic.

One of the original principles of Agile was regarding physical co-location. That has obviously eased and been replaced by virtual co-location. But I asked the team to consider asynchronous communication for areas where they might never have previously thought of it. Geekbot published an article explaining how to run asynchronous stand-ups, that formerly sacred synchronous touchpoint of each product team member’s day. (Geekbot has incentive for this, as their product is a Slack plug-in to help automate/optimize this process.) Finding tools and processes that optimize for all folks on the team is necessary for an effective product team.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Have your team review the Geekbot article “Daily Remote Standups: Video Call Downsides & How to Run Better Remote Standups in Slack”, and then discuss if they have found any of the same challenges as the article outlines. Are folks getting burned out on all the video meetings? Is the daily standup timed appropriately for all team members?

And then look to them to push it forward - how can they incorporate solutions to some of these problems? How would you test async stand-ups within your own team? Can you begin running asyc stand-ups for Summer Fridays? Or on days that are already ceremony-heavy like the end of sprints? How can you pair with your Agile coach / scrum master to experiment with this?

What are other asynchronous tools that can be employed within your product team? Are these documented in your ways of working?

3w3 Framework

I often follow product managers on Twitter to see what types of interesting frameworks they are using for their own teams. Sandeep Potdar posted what he calls the “3W3 Product Discovery Framework” to structure the beginnings of product discovery. The left hand column is the basic structure of discovery - the who, what, and why. (Most product managers are familiar with the 5-Whys that help dig somewhat deeper.) However, it is the additional columns that make this approach interesting; the follow-up questions are the real meat.

Beginning to ask these questions can help direct a course to success. And the “so-what” / “now-what” are excellent jumping off points for a business case or rationalization. But even more established products can benefit from revisiting these questions, ensuring the answers are in the current targets and roadmaps, and keeping the team on track.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE
Ask your team to read through as much of the Twitter thread from Sandeep Potdar as possible before the meeting. Come prepared to discuss if they’ve answered these questions for their product and audience. By reviewing these questions, are they seeing any unexplored areas or opportunity for further investigation? Further, what key questions are missing here? What other research areas are necessary to explore? What types of “where” or further “when” questions could be formulated?

Envision the Future

For weeks where the team is feeling overwhelmed or when we are all approaching tight deadlines, I like to keep the standup topics lighter and the “homework” to a minimum. One way to do that is to bring in pop culture, or to have the topic be video-based. This week’s does both!

In the late 80’s AT&T ran a campaign entitled “You Will” that was their vision of the future, and how AT&T was going to get us there. It’s hard to find high fidelity digital clips of ads that were VHS- taped decades ago, but this is one of the best compilations I’ve found. The campaign centered around connecting folks in new digital ways, but also ease of transactions in regular life, and efficiencies in the workplace. It was like science fiction when it was released - in a land of fax machines and newly-minted touchtone phones, suddenly someone was talking seriously about retinal scanners and satellite technology. But there is much to discuss in this beyond the technology. (And if you have a multi-generational team, it is great to see those who remember these ads originally playing discussing them with those who laugh at the idea of AT&T being a major technology player.)

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Watch the video and then discuss as a team. Some potential questions to get you started -
- What did AT&T get right? What of these technology concepts do we see today? What did they miss?
- How are our personalized versions of these technologies different user experiences than the more public versions or community versions that AT&T imagined?
- What does it mean to vision this bold and then fall short? AT&T itself didn’t bring us these technologies, but would we still have these functions if someone hadn’t publicized them?
- How do we gamble on vision versus practicality?

How to Measure Team Health

Product team health is a much talked about topic. Healthy teams make better products, and everyone wants better products no matter where you sit in the business. There are many tactics published by various orgs and thought leaders that address this, and many tools/apps/add-ons created to measure. Some interesting or useful ones are:

• Danny Carvajal from Contentsquare details techniques used by Spotify and how to further workshop them

• Product School has an explainer on various team metrics and how to gather them

• Andy Cleff, an Agile leader, provides links to many different apps and methodologies to use within your product team

• John Cutler of Amplitude advocates for a daily health check-in via a simple spreadsheet, and he’s also written a longer post about maturity and general health signals

There are no shortage of think-pieces and tools to use to bring the idea of a “health check” to your teams. You could discuss and debate the merits of each for months. But I decided to strip it all back a little bit when engaging on this topic with my product managers.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Prior to stand-up I mentioned we’d be discussing the topic of team health and provided some of the above resources, but not the exhaustive list. Then during stand-up, I asked them to do their own thinking, to develop their own measures.

By creating a simple line with “immature” at one end and “mature” at the other, and a second line of “unhealthy” and then “healthy”, we whiteboarded features and characteristics of teams to add to the spectrum. We generally agreed, and maybe shifted a couple sticky notes based on other entries, but the idea is to get quantity here. Each product manager might view their team or metrics differently, and that is okay - we aren’t going for homogeneity.

Then, I asked the question, “how do we get there?” meaning how do we get to a mature, healthy team. This time the spectrum definition was from “difficult to achieve” to “highly feasible”. Again, each product manager’s suggested action items for their teams were slightly different, but the purpose was to generate the idea.

Then I encouraged each of the product managers to take this back to their own teams and look for those specific team-generated definitions of maturity and health to work toward.