Bias For Action — A Product Manager’s perspective

Simplify and streamline communications to have a bias for action.

Update: Recently, an article on Amazon’s decision making style and a key message is “disagree and commit”. It’s amazing how many times people debate a decision. If the decision is easily reversible, then people can disagree but commit so the teams can move forward.

A big part of a PM’s job is communicating. Balancing this with decision making and collaboration is not easy. Time management is a critical success factor, especially for PM’s. I’ve incorporated some of Julie Zhuo’s suggestions like saving 30 minutes every Monday to evaluate your calendar. Also, I’ve taken advice from Sachin Rekhi on how to organize and collate material to read. I read pretty much every night for a couple of hours before I go to bed. I use my new iPad with the “Night Shift” feature which has definitely helped me sleep better. Getting to inbox zero every week is my goal, that I occasionally let slip (hint: It doesn’t mean zero emails in the inbox).

At night, I tend to read either a couple of chapters of a book or read short articles on technology via various sources like Medium, Hacker News, FastCoDesign. I also read things of personal interest like Cycling, News, and Politics, etc. I use Flip-board to curate the content and if the article is long, I save it to Pocket for later. If I find something interesting, I share it right there and then using buffer. In the morning, I read some of what I’ve collated the night before.

Over the years, I have come to rely on different tools — be flexible — to help me be as efficient as I can. As PM’s, we need to focus on how to make the best of the limited time we have. Some of these are listed here.

Recommendation on what, when, how to simplify communications:

• Email
• Content Creation & Collaboration
• Chat
• Presentations
• Meetings

Email

Do not send attachments via email.

Consider that emails are read by people on the go.

1. Don’t send attachments, especially large ones — downloading that attachment on a mobile device and reading it on a tiny screen is a pain. Any email with an attachment will be de-prioritized. Most PPT’s I’ve seen, the text is so small and size so big as to be unreadable even on my laptop much less my iPhone.
2. Use Links — Attachments and references to articles etc for more details. Put attachments in the cloud storage drive of your choice. Preferably, your company has settled on one rather that multiple. Use forums like Yammer or Jive or Facebook Workplace for broadcast and general collaboration. If you’re sending an email with links, it’s a good idea to summarize (1–2 sentences) the content in the link so people can get the gist. The link is there if they want to dive deep.
3. Content collaboration — This can be done using Google for work (G Suite) or Office 365. Avoid SharePoint — it’s ugly and has un-friendly links (too long) — if you must, use a shortener to simplify the url link.
4. Email threads — If it goes into several threads with lots of people on it, that’s a hint to move it to a discussion forum (emails get silo’ed). If it’s with a few people, go Slack, especially if it’s with your team. With our team, we almost never have email exchanges. This also allows us to share the knowledge with others so everyone can benefit from our discoveries and learnings.
5. Email To’s, cc’s, bcc’s — Only put people in the “To” list for whom the content is actionable. FYI people can be put in cc. Bcc should only be used for broadcasting when you are sending something out to everyone. Don’t use bcc or cc for covering your ass — go talk to the person. I’ll ignore, delay, differ any emails where I’m not on the To: list.

Recipients: Try to minimize “Reply all”

Content Creation

A Wiki is a good place for documenting meeting notes, product requirements, how to articles, diagrams, specs etc. Wikis are good for knowledge sharing across the organization. The default being shared openly. Although, google drive or oneDrive works just as well except the default is private. Use tools that support @mention — supported well in Quip, Google docs. Here is a good comparison of Quip, Microsoft Word, Google Docs.

• Office 365, the online version — I’m not a big fan of Office 365 because of the dual mode operation. I get that they have legacy challenges. You can edit a document online or using the app. No feature parity. The problem with this is that if some people are editing online and others are editing offline, there can be conflicts. There’s also an issue when you edit offline. It doesn’t open the document from the original source even though you have synced it using oneDrive. It ends up creating a duplicate by dowloading it and opening it up in the app. I wish it simply opened it up from the original location on my machine. This is a real pain. The formatting also gets lost depending on where you edit — online or offline.

Use Quip or Google docs or a Wiki that also supports markdown

1. No attachments in Wikis — See the procedure for Emails (post a link)
2. @Mentions in wikis allow for auto-notifications to the right people for action items. This is not supported in any of the Office 365 products, except for outlook.com.
3. Facebook Workplace, Yammer, Jive are good as well for general discussions (friendly URL’s). Choose one and get on with it.

Chat (Slack, HipChat, Flowdock, irc, etc)

Slack is ideal for real-time collaboration within smaller teams. Our team lives in Slack and as a result, we rarely have email exchanges.

• Can use /hangout for launching a hangout directly from there
• Best for sharing ideas and making decisions quickly — Development friendly
• Use links to point to details in Google Drive, Wiki, paste screen shots, etc.
• Easy to integrate other things into Slack

There are great tips on how to use Slack. To avoid noise for the team, we use a private channel just for the team members.

Any team can use what they want. Tools like sameroom.io or zapier.com allow you to link channels and content from various app platforms.

Presentations — PowerPoint or Keynote (minimize)

1. Use for communicating conclusions/summary to external audiences and executives or as teaching/training. ie broadcast
2. Amazon Model — Use a narrative for strategic decisions. Write up a document. A 2–4 page document for something you want to discuss to arrive at a decision. For product development, write it in 2-page press release format. Amazon bans PPT’s for discussions. See more here, here, here
3. Use the 10/20/30 rule (Guy Kawasaki) — <10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. Use 1 graphic image per slide and 1 30 point short phrase (<10 words). If we can’t explain it < 10 slides then simplify it. It’s not easy but that’s what we need to do. There is logic to why ted talks are 18 minutes.
4. Avoid attaching PPT’s, Word Docs, PDF’s etc in email — Think Mobile First!

Meetings

Timebox your meetings

1. Default mtg time = 30 minutes. If you have 2 outcomes, then 1 hour. If it’s 3 outcomes, then 20 minutes. Apply the Ted Talk limit of 18 min per topic.
2. Days of week — Pick 1 or 2 days and schedule all your meetings on those days if you can. You want to have a couple of days free of meetings so you can have large blocks of time to yourself. Save those days for just emergencies.
3. Each mtg should have a goal/objective/outcome— What do you want to accomplish? Remember, you are taking up people’s valuable time by asking them to attend.
4. Respect people’s time — All meetings should have an agenda that is time-boxed. Provide links to back ground reading so everyone can come prepared. To attendees: Do us all a favor and come prepared by reading the material before the meeting. If you don’t, then we can follow the Amazon model and just have everyone take 10 minutes and read it at the start of the meeting. The organizer should provide the reading material (24–48 hours prior to the meeting), and hopefully it is not a powerpoint or more than a 2–4 page doc (send a link). If it has to be a PPT, then provide a link and not an attachment (remember 10/20/30 rule). Exceptions are training and broadcast sessions.
5. The organizer is also the time keeper so we don’t go down rat holes. If something comes up that may be a longer discussion, then “park it” and take it offline to follow up.
6. Make sure only the relevant people that can actually make decisions or complete the action items are there.
7. What is/are the decisions to be made?
8. Who is accountable for action items and when are they due? The next mtg should have completed action items from previous meeting if this is a series like for an upcoming event or something that requires all hands on deck.
9. Document meeting notes and share right after. Use @mention to notify the appropriate person for action items.
10. Good example of how to run meetings

The N-Suite — My Daily PM toolkit

Slack (for work), WhatsApp (for personal), Gdocs (Quip as alternative), Excel, Keynote (PowerPoint as alternative with PollEv plug-in), Bluejeans or Hangout, Apple Mail and Calendar (Outlook for Mac as an alternative), VisualStudio Code (Sublime Text, Atom or Brackets as alternatives), Sketch, Skitch (for markup), Balsamiq (for wireframes, whiteboard 1st), Evernote, Wunderlist, Screenhero, iTerm2, Flipboard, Pocket, and iBooks (reading). Buffer for sharing to linkedin, twitter.

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with Hugo, a static site generator. We used it to create Tugbot.io. It allows our team to work together and auto pushes to AWS from github and keeps every change in sync.

Hardware: A MacBook Pro 13".

If you have recommendations to either add or take away from the toolkit, let me know.

If there are more efficient ways to streamline communications that are biased for action, please post your thoughts.