Review
Roman is one of my favorite product management authors. His concise, to-the-point writing style is incredibly respectful of your time. He delivers wall-to-wall concepts without any storytelling fluff, providing just enough prose to get the point across.
This book focuses on the practical challenges of the product management role. To be a successful product manager, you need to work closely with your team and with stakeholders. Roman does a great job of identifying the challenges of working with others, and provides actionable advice on how to overcome them.
Key Takeaways
The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.
- Product management is hard because:
- You lack transactional power (you’re not their boss)
- You work with a large and heterogeneous group
- You have limited influence over the group selection
- You have a dual role (leader and individual contributor)
- You have to lead at different levels (vision, strategy, tactics)
- You have to be available to participate in agile practices
- Leadership is about influencing people to work toward shared goals
- Empathy is a key leadership skill. Empathy is our capacity to understand other people’s feelings, needs and interests and to take the perspective of the other person.
- Knowing your s#it makes it easier for people to trust you (users, market, competition)
- You have to choose the right leadership style for the moment: visionary, democratic, affiliative, delegative, coaching, pace-setting, autocratic leader.
- Build trust with your development team by leading with curiosity and care. Be open minded and act with integrity. Get to know people, and involve them in product decisions.
- Don’t take on scrum master duties. You’ll overload yourself while making it look like your team don’t need one
- The best performing teams are formed around products, colocated and stable.
- Collaborate with your stakeholders (don’t manage them). Involve the right people, build a stakeholder community and involve them in strategy. Leverage their expertise and creativity, build a shared understanding. It will make alignment easier.
- Goals are the key to guiding a development team and stakeholders. They create purpose, align effort and enable autonomy
- As a product manager, it’s your job to create a chain of goals, that stretch out into the future and make it clear where you’re going, and how what you’re doing will help
| Type | Goal | Description | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visionary | Vision | Ultimate purpose, positive change. | 5 years out |
| Strategic | User and business goals | Value propositions and business benefits, captured in the product strategy | For the life-cycle stage |
| Product goal | Desired outcome or benefit product should provide, stated on the product roadmap | 2 to 6 months | |
| Tactical | Sprint goal | Benefit of a sprint, shown on the sprint backlog | 1 to 4 weeks |
- Great goals are shared, realistic, inspirational, alignment creating, autonomy fostering and linked together
- Listen deeply. It helps you build connections, acquire information and garner support for decisions
- Covey’s listening levels: ignore < pretend < selective < attentive < empathic
- Listen inwardly → what thoughts and emotions are being triggered? are they helpful?
- Be mindful of your mood before you start a conversation. Your mental state changes how you see reality.
- Ask clarifying questions, summarize what you’ve heard, pay attention to body language
- Let people finish, don’t interrupt. Pause before you respond.
- Buddhist principles of ‘Right speech’
- Say only what you believe is true
- Only speak if it’s beneficial for the person listening
- Don’t use harsh or harmful words
- Make sure you speak at the right time and place
- Flipping and framing:
- Name it: What is the problem?
- Flip it: What is the positive of the problem?
- Frame it: What is the desired outcome of the positive opposite?
- Separate problem from person.
- Apply kind speech to not only the people who are present but also those who are not
| Paraphrase | Summarize | Clarify | Mirror |
| Draw out the other person | Acknowledge feelings | Encourage | Pause |
| Postpone if you need to | Chunk | Positive first | Flipping |
| Keep on track | Redirect |
- Conflict is normal, it can be a source of creativity and innovation if handled well.
- Win-lose dynamics create unhelpful strategies (Competitive confrontation, passive aggression, conflict avoidance, passivity). They don’t provide sustainable positive outcomes, they damage relationships, lead to a lack of trust and have a negative impact on well being
- We often think ‘we’re right’ because…
- We think our perceptions are correct
- We’re attached to our ideas
- We find it hard to admit that we’re wrong
- Bad behavior isn’t justified, it helps to understand how it developed. Accept some responsibility. Move from a blame game to a contribution mindset.
- Resolve conflict with non-violent communication.
- Look for positive qualities in the individual
- Stop reinforcing negative thoughts and emotions
- See things from the other persons perspective
- Be willing to forgive and ask for forgiveness
- Share observations (what you saw and heard)
- the less blame and criticism the easier it will be for the other person to hear you
- Explore feelings and recognize emotions
- Emotion: how do you feel?
- Location: where do you feel it?
- Tonality: Tone of the emotion? Neutral or unpleasant.
- Meaning: What word best describes it?
- Need: What is it connected with it?
- Share your feelings
- Uncover the needs at the root of your feelings
- We all need recognition, respect, trust, safety and financial security
- Make complex high impact decisions with your stakeholders and team. You need their expertise and their buy in
- Decide when to decide. Don’t rush, but don’t procrastinate either. Determine the last responsible moment
- Engage the right people in the right way → set ground rules
- Choose a decision rule: unanimity, consent, majority, PdM decides afterwards
- Disagree and commit. Even if you disagree… commit to it, accept it, follow through with it
- Delegate decisions that others are better qualified to make.
- Take the right decision making steps
- Gather diverse perspectives
- Build shared understanding
- Develop an inclusive solution
- Avoid negotiation if you can. Else try these techniques:
- The Principled Negotiation Method (1981 Ury and Fisher)
- People: separate people from problem
- Interests: don’t argue over positions, look for shared interest
- Options: invent multiple options, look for mutual gains. Don’t rule out options too early
- Criteria: use objective criteria for a feat standard to determine the outcome
- The Behavioral Change Stairway Model
- Active listening
- Empathy
- Rapport
- Influence
- Behavioral change
- The Principled Negotiation Method (1981 Ury and Fisher)
- Are you negotiating too much?
- Lacking authority
- Lacking vision buy in
- Not involving the right people in the process
- Individuals are not willing to be collaborative / transparent
- Develop options together
- Benefits of Developing Mindfulness
- Greater serenity → catch yourself getting tense and stressed out, stay calmer for longer
- Calmness → trustworthy
- Increased capacity to be empathetic
- Better decision making, so you can take into account your mood and bias
- Improved communication → you’ll be more considered
- Hold personal retrospectives
- What did you get done this week?
- What did you learn?
- What challenges did you overcome?
- How are you feeling?
- How has your mood and energy level been?
- What changes do you want to make?
- Be aware of your workload and manage your time
- Adopt a suitable pace, so you can go indefinitely
- Ruthless prioritization > cramming
