Product Design Tricks-Getting the whole story..

One of the traps we get sucked into as product folks is looking at the focused slice of a problem that we are working on, and not looking at the whole job that our beloved customers want to get done.  In looking at the bigger picture, making the small decisions becomes a lot easier.

Here is a very specific example of and idea that I don’t really mind if anyone steals.   The notion was called “A hard letter to write” and it focused on that moment in time when someone gets bad news from the doctor and needs to let their friends and family know what is going on.  The core problem in that moment is that most people are in shock and don’t real have it together to write what the need to, so the idea was to create what was essentially a prompting wizard that would help people get most of the things that their friends would want to know in one place so they wouldn’t have to go through the story over and over again unless they felt like it.

So the first step was figuring out what people would want to know:

1. What was the diagnosis?
2. What is the prognosis?
3. How did they find out?
4. How do feel about this?
5. What are the next steps?
6. What can we do to help? (Talk, don’t talk, support, etc.)

This is all pretty straight forward, but when we dig a little deeper, more of the real needs start to make themselves known.  What someone is doing when they write this kind of letter is cutting off conversations they don’t want to repeat, setting the tone that they want people to react to them with, but most important, they are setting out the call for support.  They often want their coworkers to cut them a break on the days they have chemo, their bosses to understand if their work and focus slips, and the help to come from their friends and family without having to ask or beg for it and feel even worse then they currently do.  They don’t know how they will be feeling, and need the world to catch them a little as they get buffeted around.  Side by side with this, the people in their lives want to understand what is going on and know as much as possible the best way to do something in the face of something that seems out of control.  They want to say the right things, they want to offer support without adding more burden, and often they want to spit at the disease that is hurting their friend by donating or volunteering or just feel like they are doing something.

When we, as product people start thinking about the problem in this way, we realize that the service that helps to write the letter is just the tip of a complete solution.  What is really needed here are a set of follow-on items. 

• A proxy service that lets the sick person designate someone to be their scribe and buffer to the rest of the world.
• A method or place for people to find out what is happening on an ongoing basis.
• A way to organize help…
• Prompting the patient to know what kinds of help people can bring (meals, sitting while going to appointments, phone trees for emergency support, friend date nights, people to chat with at 3 in the morning, rides to the doctor)
• Logistical support for organizing the help (a calendar to see what days a meal is needed, when sitting etc.)

In looking at that, we not only really solve the core needs of the people we are building for, but the monetization becomes much clearer.  We can’t really advertise to the sick person, they are in no mood, and frankly it would be wrong.  But the support groups, are in the moment of looking to help, and ads for the National Cancer Society, Waiters on wheels, florists, etc…things that would actually help to give those folks a focus for their desire to help, provides a very real revenue stream.

The “I really need to get around to figuring out a good title for the procrastination section” Post

As I embark on this brutally honest guide to the wonderful world of Product Management, the first place I need to apply that honesty is in an area far to many of us share, but we all hide like a substance abuse problem. Hello, my name is Ben Calica, and I’m a procrastinator. Its not one of those things that you list in a job interview when asked your weaknesses,(“Some people say that I’m too dedicated to my work.” Or “I can be too passionate about a project.” ), but the reality is that product management requires a blend of very anal skills and wildly creative ones. For those of us who lean in the latter direction, procrastination can be a professional hazard. And for those who lean the other way, dealing with procrastination within the team can be an ongoing and potentially dangerous area.

Being very direct about it, there are several specific reasons that people tend to procrastinate.

• · The Paralysis of perfection
• · Deadline Junkies
• · “This is dumb”-passive resistance
• · Plain old Fear-Show work not, Lest yee be judged..
• · Quack Quack-The Too Long Duck…

The Paralysis of Perfection:

I've struggled for years trying to help people with this problem with the work we've done on photo sharing. In the old scrapbooking days, people would put off doing the scrapbooks until they got all the “right” photos together. That quest to get things “right” before anyone else sees is the Achilles heel of even the most super organized. I’ve been working on the various elements of this blog for weeks, but a big part of me was spending so much time fussing over whether it was ok to use off the shelf blogging formats or whether to start working on the evolution a blog and web-born journalism blend that I’ve been playing with for a number of years. “Getting it right” can be the death of so many projects and our desire to not have anyone see something that is less then our self perceived best work can be a significant trap. Anne Lemott, one of my favorite writers, as a book called Bird by Bird, in which she talks about intentionally writing “the shitty draft”, giving yourself permission to fail the first time around to remove the power that trying to be perfect holds over you.

Deadline Junkies:

If we didn’t enjoy being the Fire-fighter-in-chief, none of us would be drawn to this profession. Again, being honest, most of us thrive in that high-pressure, high intensity environment. For some of us, that sweet spot of full engagement doesn’t kick in until that pressure starts to mount. These are the deadline hogs, who need that jetted flame of a looming deadline to get the gears kicked in. If you, or members of your team are like that, BS deadlines don’t do the trick, we can see right through them. What is needed is some other energy source, either the stick or the carrot. Interestingly enough, for most of these folks, the stick just falls on increasingly thick hide. On the other hand, they love the challenge, so setting a stretch goal with something fun as a reward works like magic. (I won’t go into the debate on “but they’re getting paid and they are professionals, do they really need extra goodies?” in this post…but the short answer is life works better when it’s lubricated by fun stuff along the way.)

This is Dumb— the passive resisters:

So in the world of most projects, where we are only going to get to 5% of what we want to accomplish, if you think something is really dumb, there is a tendency to keep putting that at the bottom of the list of priorities. This is usually an issue of lack of communication. I was Principal PM on a big project recently, and there was part of the project that didn’t make any damn sense to me. It was reformatting our spec in a certain way for the engineering team, where I had seen the previous spec lead the way and end up completely ignored. In a world where we were understaffed to about 20% of what the team should have been, it just drove me bonkers to waste my time on what I knew was a totally valueless exercise. What I didn’t know was that the Project Leader who was asking for this, also knew it was a waste of time, but he needed it done to claim high ground over the engineering team, in a world where Product Management were the ugly step-children of the company. I could have understood that, but it wasn’t something that he could admit as a manager. Most projects are rife with passive resistors, and the tendency is to want to take a stand and bend them to your will to show who’s running the damn show anyway. This kind of belly bucking just ends up with both people knocked down on the ground and creating people within the team who are deeply motivated for management above you to see how wrong your judgment can be. To get rid of this, you need to go straight at the resister, and not only listen to why he/she thinks this is a waste of time, but make sure they feel heard.

Fear, just plain old fear:

Carol Dweck, in her book Mindset, talks about what happened in the last generation of too bright for their own good kids, which, let’s face it, is most of us working in tech. When kids are told how smart they are when they are younger, they like being thought of in that way, and get more and more afraid of doing anything that will get that label stripped off of them. As a result, we go back to our first problem, that strong desire to have everything that comes out of them be great, and the very real fear of looking foolish and getting that belief in them stripped away. This is especially bad for PM’s, who live with the whole team watching them and looking for signs of hesitancy and weakness. Thus MRD’s need one more day to polish, reports need to be checked through one more time, and specs are always almost done. Again, fear needs to be faced head on, or it gets a ton of power. Knowing that it’s ok to fail, that there is a reason we work on machines that have the ability to backspace and delete, and that we have each other’s backs, not waiting to stab in that same location, makes all the difference.

“Be like a duck”

You can lose friends though this insidious little beast. You mean to call, but it goes a bit too long. Now you can’t call, because it’s been so long since you were supposed to call, and when they call, you duck it because you are embarrassed about how long it has been. I lost touch with an Aunt that I love quite a lot, because I didn’t call when I was a younger guy going through a long and painful break-up, and it became so long that each day it was just too much emotional baggage to handle today. I had a friend who was doing some programming work for me on the start-up I was recently working on, and she didn’t get me what I needed in time. She became so embarrassed about that, that she stopped taking my calls, and it was only because I hosted a brunch for a mutual friend’s intro of their new baby, that we were able to get face to face and work it out. This does not go away unless one or both of the parties “man-up’s” and gets face to face to break the cycle. It’s going to be hard and embarrassing, but it will remove the nagging guilt that ends up being much more costly.

Ah..and in writing this…my procrastination is over, and I can go have my lunch. Let’s see if I can do better with my writing tomorrow…whether it’s perfect or not.