Personal Prioritization

Product Managers are ace prioritizers when it comes to business requirements and feature requests. However, they, along with other product team members, can suffer when prioritizing their own work. Each day our schedule and our to-do lists are an exercise in prioritization. We can approach this work in a value/effort matrix or any other sort of prioritization framework, but things like scrum ceremonies and standing meetings have a way of skewing the results.

With a full calendar it can be difficult to see what modifications can be made, and even harder to follow-through on eliminating them. But, imagining a clean slate can be a way to think through prioritization. Use this stand-up exercise to spark a discussion (afterward, maybe think about beginning to default to no to protect your calendar).

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STAND UP EXERCISE

Invite your team to an imagination exercise. Picture waking up and all your responsibilities and obligations have vanished. What do you miss? What items do you immediately add back into your schedule / to do list / life?
After making a full list, contemplate the flip side of this question - what do you fight to keep off of your calendar?
Can you use this theoretical exercise to prioritize your calendar going forward? How do you add in more of or focus on the first set of items and deprioritize or cancel the second set?

Exploring Polarity and Strategic Tension

A topic we often dive into as a product team is competing initiatives, resources, or stakeholders. We attempt to remedy through prioritization frameworks, gaining further insights, and negotiation. However, some tension, some competition in these realms, is good. Tension keeps your rope taut, able to understand the push and pull of what you are tethered to, keeping you aware of your surroundings and its forces.

If we think about our goals or initiatives in the same way, we can explore the opposing forces pushing or pulling the organization or team in several ways at the same time. Product teams that address just one of the poles in a tension are apt to miss opportunities and fail to deal with threats. Looking for the tension between opposing forces broadens the search for strategic responses and increases the prospects of taking appropriate action.

A few weeks ago we explored polarity through contradictory users. The exercise below broadens our exploration into several different forms of polarity or tension, in terms of short term and long term initiative planning.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

John Cutler wrote a list of prompts for exploring tension as a part of the annual planning process. Distill the list into a handful you believe your team will find most valuable. Add them to a white board or virtual Miro and ask each team member to choose one fill-in-the-blank prompt. Though reticent at first, my team quickly began filling in multiple prompts. Discuss what the team came up with.
And remember, strategic tensions are dynamic - they can change as the strategy is executed or the initiative develops. Revisit these statements to edit or add as needed.

Office Personality

Recently the New York Times published a short quiz to help folks discover their “office personality”. Based on two elements of the Big 5 personality traits - extroversion and openness - the quiz is tailored to workplace behaviors.

As the NYT details in a separate article, personality quizzes have become de rigueur in professional settings. While arguments can be made about their efficacy in hiring or promotion decisions, using this type of quiz to ask questions of yourself and your colleagues about your inclinations or aversions can be illuminating. Understanding how your teammates might score themselves can give some insight into how folks might work together or their preferences for communication.

There are many different types of quizzes, from pop culture (What is your Hogwarts House?) to more scientific (What are your Clifton Strengths?). Perhaps the best way to use any of these is simply to encourage deeper conversations - not actually to be validated as a certain type, or to take seriously the animal you supposedly match with. Any shared experience and conversation starter with your team can be a good one.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Encourage your team to take the office personality quiz from the New York Times (or another personality quiz of your choosing that is quick and useful). In your stand-up, ask the team to anonymously indicate their final results on a board. Speak to the distribution across the answers - this is especially helpful with a quiz like the office personality quiz that essentially maps your answers across two axes. Ask if anyone disagreed with the result they were given, or if they took it multiple times and received different results. Anything about the results make them uneasy? Or proud?

To take it a step further, create some quick questions where team members can plot themselves. Use these questions to address challenges or tensions within the team - perhaps addressing preferences regarding remote work, group projects, or novelty. Ask the same questions as above.

Encourage the team to do similar activities with their product teams to create a point of connection.

Contradictory Users

Many products have multiple user groups. Occasionally, those users are at odds with each other. When designing it becomes a challenge to balance those groups. In this keynote for Figma’s Config conference, Sarah Wilson-Reissmann does a great job explaining how Canyon bikes audience changed over the course of the pandemic, and how they addressed the shifting needs.

Contradiction, especially in user experience, is a dynamic tension between two opposing needs / forces / actions. That means user needs are evolving, especially if the product is growing into more or new user groups. We should keep an eye on these shifts. It is important to note that this is slightly different than a design constraint, which is much more constant. Constraints have long been proven to enhance creativity, and we can take a similar mindset when approaching contradiction.

A research paper by Len Malinin, Design Under Contradictory Requirements, which focuses on physical products states: “It is shown that in many cases, the most important step is reframing of the initial problem, which can be done by listing contradictory requirements and indicating to which parts of the object / moments of time/ stages of its life cycle they apply.”

So the questions to be consistently asking when going through user requirements are:
- Do the contradictory requirements apply to the entire or different elements of the product? (Is the need continuous through the user journey?)
- Do the requirements need to be satisfied simultaneously or at different moments of time? (Does this need appear at different times for different users?)

By reframing requirements using these questions, it might limit the actual contradiction. We might find that they are not in fact wholly contradictory users, but users who prefer contradictory features at various parts of their journeys. They might not be diametrically opposed; there is a more complex interaction. Then we can work to prioritize or compromise as necessary.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask your team to watch Sarah Wilson-Reissmann’s keynote above. Together, brainstorm different behavioral spectrums for users of your products. Encourage the team to think on varying levels of detail to create these. Then discuss as a team how keeping in mind these different behavioral needs fit - or don’t - with your assumptions or previously defined personas. Has something shifted that you should continue to be aware of? How can you use these new definitions to help frame features and enhancements moving forward?

Job/Career Priorities

Job news is everywhere right now. The jobs report was released last week, showing lowest unemployment rate in decades, even as tech companies continue to lay off workers. The Great Resignation that began in 2021 continues, but recent reports have come out citing those who left their jobs feel regret about their decisions. Companies continue to update and mandate return to office policies as the pandemic wanes and a recession looms. All of this can lead to a very charged workplace.

Team morale is an outsized contributor to product team efficiency and outputs. How individuals feel about their employer, their position, their work life contributes greatly to their success on a product team. Even though these larger conversations might not feel like they directly impact a backlog or a sprint, they certainly affect the individuals managing that work.

This graphic by @lizandmollie of how we do and could measure success on the job is telling.

All workplaces are different. And what you need at different times in your life and your career might be met or not by your current workplace. Employees should understand what their true needs are and if the workplace can meet those needs or not, either now or in the future. Sometimes reframing the discussion in these terms can help an employee who was feeling anxious understand their stability; conversely it can also help an employee on the fence decide what is right for them.

This is not to take any responsibility away from the company. As product leaders, we should continue to positively affect the culture of a company in all the ways that we are able, advocating for our team members, their advancement, and their work life quality. Companies should of course be changing and adapting to an evolving workforce as well.

If possible, let’s continue to help contextualize the bigger picture to our product teams, and hopefully create a more stable engaged team by doing so.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Begin by showing your team the above graphic from @lizandmollie. Explain the concept of needs and priorities with a job changing over time or based on life circumstance.

Ask folks to on their own (not publicly) assign a percentage to their career priorities based on the list - Pay, Benefits, Title, Balance, Flexibility, Impact, Passion. Feel free to adjust categories, especially as it makes more sense culturally/regionally - countries with more standardized federal/state benefits might not have that as category, for example. After giving folks time to tally their responses, ask them to move a dot into the bubble that aligns with their number one priority right now. If you feel comfortable generalizing, you can talk about how this might compare to the company’s ability to respond to these needs/priorities.

Encourage folks to talk to their manager about their job priorities if they haven’t already. This is a good exercise to encourage folks to do every 4-6 months, to see if anything has changed for them.