S1E8: And Then I Went Ice Skating

sometimes that's when the Muse hits and you have that amazing idea that's like,
if we just did this, we'd solve the problem. So always have a way to write that down when
it happens. The Muse is not a silver bullet. When that hits, it hits and it's great,
but you can't rely on it because it doesn't come when you want it to.
It is funny. I tend to take a Sharpie everywhere. I don't very often take a handbag out that
generally I keep things in my pockets, but I will always have a Sharpie about my person
in case I get struck by something and I'm like, quick, write it down. The canvas is my skin,
it doesn't matter. I'll sacrifice the back of my hand for this idea.
Hi, I'm Karl. And I'm Danielle. And this is Productly Speaking. We're product managers by
trade and here we explore the world of product management. It's people and their stories.
We promise to keep it entertaining and maybe you'll learn something. Shall we give this a go?
Let's do it.
Yeah. I mean, I feel like we should be professionals at this point.
Kick us off.
So in this episode, we take a look back at our first season, a recap, if you will.
But before we get going with that, Karl, why is this episode called,
and then I went ice skating?
Because I went ice skating? Yeah, I actually, I did go ice skating as everybody who knows
anything about recording a podcast season, especially the way we've done it here.
There's been a lot that's been going on that doesn't necessarily make it into the podcast.
And on January 6th, I had the opportunity to go ice skating. Now, my wife and son had been ice
skating before and they'd gone without me and I was maybe a little bit jealous of that fact and
I'd wanted to try it. And so we got the opportunity on that Saturday to go and I got there and I put
on a set of skates and the left skate wasn't working at all. I wasn't able to stand up on it.
The skate was just wrong. So I took the skate back and got another skate. And this one was a
little bit better, you know, got it as tight as I could. And I started going around the ice skating
rink, holding onto the side. There were a lot of people there though, so it was a lot of traffic.
Held onto the side, went around maybe eight or nine times, was starting to get a little bit more
confident because there were a lot of people there. I started trying to pass people, you know,
grab the wall again after you finish the pass, but just kind of starting to learn to glide.
And then on one pass I didn't make it. I landed right on my butt and I looked down at my leg
and it was pointed the wrong way. And I said, I broke my leg. And they came out and put cones
around me so that people wouldn't skate into me. I kind of wish I had a picture of that.
I'm glad you didn't.
I laid there for about 25 minutes waiting for the emergency services to get there and get me all
split it up and taken out into the hospital. And I eventually made it to the hospital and I had
surgery on Sunday because I broke my leg in three spiral fractures and I went home on Monday.
I only expected to be gone for about two, two and a half hours and I was gone for a weekend,
which was not exactly what I expected.
Yeah, not the holiday weekend you were expecting.
No, no, it wasn't.
It's been a long road to recovery, getting you up back and walking. How has the experience of
your temporary disablement changed your approach to product management?
Yeah.
It's a product management podcast after all.
It's a product management podcast. How do we connect these things? Well, yeah, I mean,
when you have that type of temporary disablement, it definitely causes you to slow down. I mean,
I literally could not do anything for myself at first. And luckily I have a great wife who
was able to help me out and do these things for me and help me do these things. But I mean,
even things like getting in and out of the bed, this thing was just a big weight that wouldn't
move. And at first it was like, okay, now help pick my leg up and put it in the bed.
The physical therapy people came by and kind of gave me some tips on how to do this myself.
So over time I started being able to do things a little bit more by myself. And as the weeks went
on, I was able to do more and more. And finally I'm back up and walking again, which is amazing
because there were seven weeks where I could not walk without a walker. And it's been kind of wild.
This will sound kind of cliche, but I never really thought about how important
accessibility was before all of this. Everybody says accessibility is important,
and I would never have denied that accessibility in your product is important and that you need to
take these use cases into consideration, whatever they are for the type of product you're designing.
It's an important thing. Never would have said it's not. But once you live the need for
accessibility technology or accessibility workarounds, like just learning to use my
good leg to pick my bad leg up and get it into the bed, things like this, just once you actually
have to use that, you get a different perspective on it. And it really shows you that until you've
had that lived experience, it's really kind of difficult to understand that. We've spent a lot
of time in this season talking about what are the things that are needed to make product management
really work. And we've talked a lot with John Cutler about this, but lived experience, a desire
to tinker, that innate curiosity that is always trying to figure out how things work, those are
really key things for product managers. And I think that if you're looking at product management
as a discipline, and there's been a lot of discussion recently about what makes a good
product manager or a great product manager, or maybe there's product managers out there that
don't really do product management, and so they're rife for being removed from the industry as their
jobs get eliminated. If you have these things, this enables you to be a great product manager.
These are the things that the AI cannot replace. Yeah, an AI could probably write a feature or an
epic or some of these templates. This stuff has gotten pretty good. But if you have that
lived experience, you have that desire to tinker, that innate curiosity, those are things that are
pretty human qualities that are just going to be hard to replace. And that's the part of product
management that you really can't teach in school, but that gives you that ability to go into a
difficult situation and make a good decision. Yeah, I think we've accidentally found a theme
of the season to be empathy, and I'm so glad that we did. But it's if you can't have lived experience,
how do you get empathy for the people that do have that lived experience so you can bring that
into your solutions and to your products? And that's where empathy is key, like understanding
what other people's contexts are, what the problem is that they're experiencing, why they're
experiencing it, how they're experiencing it, the solutions they have today, just really truly
understanding the problem that you're trying to solve. And that doesn't apply to just end users,
but also customers as a whole and even team members. And I think that's the reach of product
management is it's internal team members, it's your own management team, it's your leadership team,
your end users, the customers you work with, it kind of touches everybody in slightly different
ways. And as a product manager, you can really own what that looks like and own that narrative
in order to then own and build that perfect product. Yeah, I thought a lot about that ahead
of our recording this episode today. And it really kind of hit home that best case scenario,
you have the problem yourself that you're the product manager for, that you are one of the
people that has the problem that you're trying to solve, because you're going to know that problem
very well at that point. And you're going to know what would solve it for you. That gives you a
little bit of a bias because it might not solve it for somebody else that has the same problem,
but at least you're pretty close to the problem at that point. Outside of having that type of
experience, because not all of us are lucky enough to work on products for problems that we actually
personally have, you've got to actually care about the problem. It's got to be a problem that you
find personally interesting. And if you're a product manager on a product that solves a problem that
you don't care about, then you need to find a different product to go be a product manager of
if you really want to be happy in the role. When you actually can care about the problem that
you're solving, that's when you can make an impact. Totally. What I think is really interesting is
that a lot of people who jump into empathy and who spend a lot of time in emotions often struggle
and suffer from burnout. It's something that you and I both experienced. It's something we've talked
about. It's something that you lean on your team members to try and help share that burden,
especially as within a PM team you share that burden of emotion. But what are the other
things when it comes to burnout that could help stop people from suffering from burnout,
but still continue to be empathetic with customers and users and team members?
Yeah. I keep quoting the Harvard Business Review, but here we go. There was a Harvard Business
Review article on the difference between emotionally empathetic and having empathic concern.
The key difference here is that emotionally empathic is where you're basically experiencing
the same distress as the person who's unloading on you. You're trying to help somebody out and
they're getting you just as riled up as they are. That is a recipe for taking a lot of energy out
of you because when you get emotionally riled up, it takes your physical energy, it takes mental
energy. There's actual physical reactions that happen in your body that do cause you to be tired,
that require calories for these things to happen. You start burning through what you've got and it
is actually something you can feel. The empathic concern, which is a harder thing to pull off,
is not taking on the emotion of the person that you're talking to, but being there to listen
and being there to care and being there to show that concern of wanting to help, but just trying
to keep yourself completely separate from what they feel and trying to come at it more pragmatically.
It's hard because when you're helping somebody who's in an emotional state, we have a tendency
to get carried away and to want to take that emotion on, but if you can not take on that
emotion any more than you have to, then this is the way to keep from getting burned out in this
emotional role because, Danielle, you've mentioned plenty of times before that product management is
an emotional role. I mean, you end up dealing with so many different people in so many different
places and so many different situations and it's filled with emotion.
Yeah, you kind of have to figure out a way to harness it for fuel so that you store it as energy
for later and you apply it in a really purposeful way that helps with the problem instead of
echoing the problem. I also think we need to take time for ourselves. It's one thing you can find
yourself doing in product management is you can find it just completely taking over. You can find
yourself thinking about this stuff all the time. You can find yourself never really turning it off
and I think that you need to actually take the time to turn off. I know, Danielle, that you are
exceptionally good about turning off on the weekends and I actually kind of envy how well
you are able to do with that, but yeah, actually being able to unplug on a regular basis is probably
quite helpful. I think I didn't used to be, right? It takes a lot of work to be able to put the phone
down and respect work-life balance boundaries. There was a period of time where I was so intensely
thinking about work that I was going through three times as much shampoo because I couldn't
remember if I'd washed my hair already. I was stood in the shower and just so thinking about
what I was working on and getting stressed about it that I was just not focusing on life tasks,
basic life tasks, and so I kind of had to push through that. It still takes a lot of effort
and I don't think I've got the balance right. Ignoring your friends on the weekend or for weeks
on an end because you don't have the space or because they're slightly related to work isn't
the right balance, but it's practice and hard work and you eventually kind of get there.
I think a point you've already made as well is finding the joy. It should be fun. Work on a
problem that intrigues you, that you can be curious about, that you can be excited about,
because if it's fun, then it's not as tiring. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're in kind of a spot
in the industry right now where there's been a lot of layoffs in tech and so for product managers
in tech, there's just a lot of fear of what's to come and fear of difficulty moving around and
whatnot and it does kind of create a culture where fun is like the last thing people are
thinking about, but it's like, folks, this is supposed to be a lot of fun. You're supposed
to be excited to actually do this and if you can't do that, well then try to figure out how to do it
and that's easier said than done. We've also talked about how we don't have the silver bullets for
anything and this is one of those things where there's not a silver bullet for it, but if you
can find something to get excited about, something to get interested in, then that can help you and
sometimes that's as easy as just going and talking to other people on your team that maybe you haven't
talked to as much before. Sometimes there's a bad situation, but you go talk to somebody and then
they've got an idea that gets you excited and you've got an idea that then it gets them excited and
the next thing you know, you've got two people that were not excited before that are now excited
about doing something and move forward. Yeah, there's not a silver bullet to it because it's
so personal, right? Where each person finds fun is going to be slightly different. I know you
experience a lot of joy when you can tinker and find a cool solution to a cool problem
and my fun, in quotes, is slightly different. I really enjoy getting other people excited about
stuff and so I kind of don't care how interesting the problem is to me personally because if somebody
else is interested and I can get somebody else excited, then I breathe off of that joy and so
even just between the two of us, we work so well together, but we still find joy in different
places. I think that's why there's no silver bullet, but also in there not being a silver
bullet, there's a lot of room for creativity, which can be quite cool as well. Yeah, that's a
good point. We spend so much of our time being empathetic and having empathy to other people.
Something else we've talked about in the background while we've been doing these
recordings in these episodes is having empathy for yourself and making sure that you're not
gaslighting yourself. That's something that we were really keen to talk to John Cutler about in
that episode because of his article on self gaslighting. I think it's so common now to
get in your own way and to get in your own head. There's all of these different phrases around it
and there's all of these potential solutions, mindfulness and being really purposeful about
where you spend your energy that we haven't brought to the forefront in any of our episodes
specifically, but it's something that you and I have been talking around in the background
because each episode these themes are coming up and it's so easy for us to forget to be empathetic
to ourselves. Cutler brings up, and to quote that Cutler article because it is really good
and if you haven't read that, I would encourage you to read the whole thing,
but it's easy to beat yourself up if only we could be stronger, have better control of our
emotions, understand people better, lead better, make fewer excuses, show up better,
manage up better, have a better presence. We can be better, better, better, better, better, better,
better, better, and it's easy to get into a world where you feel that, where you feel like everything
you're doing isn't good enough and that if only you could be just a little bit better here, if only
you could be just a little bit better there and to not really see the impact of your actions.
I mean, that's just really, I think that's the natural state of a product manager because to
some degree, you're supposed to make things better. You're supposed to be taking a current
state and making it better. There's always an iteration.
Yeah. This is a good problem to have because you want to be driving forward, but you can't
let it get to the point where you start to feel that your own value that you bring to the table
isn't there and that kind of goes back to the point of not taking on the emotion too much.
You got a product, you're moving it forward. Some things aren't working as well as they should be
because there's always going to be that scenario in any product. You can't take that personally.
You have to separate yourself from that and you have to be able to draw that line to where
you're working on it, you're making it better, but that it's not better yet isn't necessarily
a reflection on just you. And I think that that's where we tend to want to go with that,
that if only we could be better, this would be better.
There's a lot to taking stuff personally too. Something that I feel and I know a lot of people
do it is when you get customer feedback or end user feedback and trying not to take that
personally is so hard. You think you've done all of the groundwork with finding the problem,
you've been empathetic in understanding the problem space, and then you come together with
the solution. You could have even done it all by the book perfectly well, going back and forth
with iterations and customer research and all of this, and then you push it and then you get one
piece of feedback that just breaks all of your confidence or just says that you were off the
mark somehow, somewhere, whether it's one piece of feedback, whether it's the whole market rejecting
the idea, it can be so tough. I loved chatting to Jennifer about that and all the way back at
the beginning of the season, just understanding how you find the signal in the noise and how you
listen to which piece of feedback and how you identify which pieces are true, which pieces are
important, which pieces you do iterate on and which pieces you can safely ignore. I think it's
fascinating. I loved that conversation. That ties back to what Amy and Trevor were talking
about with customers, because if you've got the wrong customers for what you're trying to do,
they're going to give you feedback that what you're trying to do isn't what they want,
and so you're going to find yourself getting the thought you did what you were supposed to. This
is what the company wants to do. You were in line with that, but the customer is not in line with
it, and so the feedback is, hey, this didn't work, or this isn't all that good, and it would be hard
not to take that personally, like you just pointed out.
Yeah, and that links to Bob's episode of understanding product market fit. Once you've
chosen that right customer, what is it that they're trying to achieve? What are you trying to
achieve as a company? And then narrowing on that and having focus in that, which is also
where we touched with Adam, right? Speaking about the Bob episode, my mind is still
blown about that whole operational piece. They had the product that was 10 times faster,
but because it didn't fit the operational workflow that everybody had ingrained in their
brains for so many years, we aren't going to adopt that. We'd have to retrain all these people.
Are you crazy? It may be 10 times faster, but it's too much of a cost to bring it in.
It brings us full circle back to empathy again and that understanding the environment, because
while the product was 10 times better, data says it's 10 times better. The environment is such that,
yeah, but we've got a hundred people trained on how to do this. We don't want better. We don't
want faster. We can do this already. It just is fascinating. It all seems to come back to the
customer unsurprisingly, right? It is the whole point. We're here to solve problems for people
that have those problems and the people that have those problems become your customers when
you actually have a solution to the problem. It's no surprise, but going back to the Cutler
self-gaslighting bit, one thing that he says that I really do like is that there are times that we
experience joy and pride at work. To quote him, the moments when we feel fulfilled and our needs
are met, we were experiencing something real. We aren't second guessing ourselves. We're spinning
ourselves in circles with maybes and buts. You just have to kind of remember that there are these
moments and these are the moments to ground yourself in and to realize that that's real.
That's a big point that he's making there because the self-gaslighting thing is real,
but also those moments of joy are true as well. If you have that moment of joy, it's because
you've worked to get it that comes out of having done that work. Even the top performers, you look
around you at work and whatnot and you're like, oh, these people are doing so much better than me.
No, everybody pretty much has the same challenges and doubts and everybody has a lot of these same
feelings. Imposter syndrome is real and all of us feel imposter syndrome. Even if we go out there,
guns blazing, sticks raised high, ready to go, imposter syndrome is real.
Yeah. One of the words that's really stuck out for me on chatting to different folks this season
is authenticity. I think that ties really closely thereof. Even top performers see these,
have these challenges, have these doubts, have this self-gaslighting. If we're authentic and true
with each other, we don't have to be opening our hearts or crossing the work-life boundary
and letting people into our deepest, darkest secrets and sharing. You don't have to do that
much. That's not what we're recommending here. No, totally. But I think it's totally fair to
lean on your teammates and say, hey, I'm feeling a little less confident in this decision
because of I don't have this data point. Give me your feedback. Can we do this together? Can we
learn together? Where can we plug the holes? Where can we better understand the gaps?
Just being authentic is another word that's really stuck out to me this season.
Yeah. It does make a team stronger when people are willing to lean in a little bit. Like you said,
not necessarily about your deepest, darkest personal secrets. No, not that at all. But if
you come in and ask about how would I solve this work, Challenger, this is not something I've come
into before. Have you seen this before? Because you never know. People on your team may very well
have seen this 500 times and know all the ins and outs of how to do this. And on top of that,
be very willing to share that with you. And there's probably things that we've seen that
they haven't. So you could help them out at some point too. It may not be right now,
but maybe somewhere down the road, you've got something to contribute back to it. And I think
that having that collaborative function within a team is super critical. But you have to be
careful with how you do it because you don't want to be appearing to open everybody's pickle jar
going back to season zero. You don't want to be the person that looks like all you want to do is
say, here, give me the pickle jar. I can do it. I'm better than you. So be careful with how you
phrase these things and come from a place of truly wanting help and a little bit of humility. It goes
a long ways. Yeah. And I think that's where we kind of chatted with Johannes and Callum this
season is the value of teamwork and the value of bringing people from different segments of
the organization together in order to do this together. It is not one person's responsibility
to open the pickle jar. We are all having to kind of get a hand on it, get a finger on it,
get an understanding of why the jar isn't opening itself. And then we're not frustrating each other
because we're all working in the same direction. We're all pulling in the same direction, which
means that, yeah, there's less territorialness about it. There's less stepping on each other's
toes because we all understand what the goal is and we trust each other. We've built that teamwork.
We've built that rapport. We've built those relationships with authenticity as it's like
underpinning and those partnerships are just critical, especially in this remote world where
we're not meeting each other physically. We're not having those water cooler moments. So you
have to put so much more effort in to creating those connections with people. And you don't
always have to be the one with all of the answers. So you have to be able to know who you can trust
and build those trusting connections to build the answers together. Well, to your point, I mean,
that's so much more difficult in the remote working world as opposed to seeing people on
a day-to-day basis in an office, but it can be done. I think that the last company we were at
was proof that it could be done because it was a completely remote company. And if you couldn't do
it, then you probably weren't going to last there because you had to be able to build those
relationships remotely. And the way you do it is by talking to people. And yes, that means more
meetings on your calendar. It means taking more one-on-ones, but it's time you would have spent
in the hall talking to these people anyway, if you were actually at the office. So by actually
booking it on your calendar and taking the time, I think you can make the connection
reasonably close to what you can make the connection in person.
Totally. And that's where Theresa's idea of the two-hour design sprint, I think is really
valuable because you, I mean, the five-day design sprint is definitely not a waste of time. It's
valuable and you get so much from it when you do them. But the two-hour design sprint says,
I care about your time, but I also care about our ability to work together. So let's go ahead and
dedicate two whole hours, which when you're remote feels like a lot of time, it really focuses you
on what's important and then making sure that you're all aligned. We're starting to touch on
focus there, which I think was an interesting undercurrent as well. And I don't know if any
of our guests kind of called it out explicitly, but it definitely comes through when you start
to piece them together of focus and clarity and being really distinct on your customer,
the persona that you're building for, having a harmony of products that work together and
features that work together and just really understanding the one person or the group of
people that you're solving for. I just, I started to see that focus theme. Did you see that too?
Yeah, I agree. There's definitely that theme of focus in product management. One of the worst
things you can do is to lose focus. You know, you want to be focused on getting something out and
getting it right, going back to the whole perfect, perfect, perfect and be better, be better, be
better. But you want to get something out there and right because to get something out there and
wrong, which you will inevitably do, means that you have to iterate on it and iterate and iterate
and get it back to right. But as soon as you start having something right, now you've got a foundation
you can build on and you can keep shipping more. But if you've got like five things you're trying
to do right all at the same time, you got a much higher degree of shipping five things that don't
work at all versus if you've got one or two things that you're trying to get right, you've got a good
chance of getting that right. And if you don't get it right, it's a lot quicker to fix one or two
things that aren't right than it is to try and fix five things all at once. So I think you're
right to point out that focus is just a key thought that keeps recurring because it's like,
you know, focus on one area, get that right, however much work that takes, then move to the
next area and focus on that and get that right. And just having a high degree of prioritization
and constantly revisiting your prioritization because that could change from week to week or
month to month as you continue to move through the market changes, the product changes, the
prospects change. There's a whole lot of things that could change. So just keep revisiting that
to make sure that what you're working on right now is the thing that needs the most attention
to be right and have the focus. Yeah. And I think just even on a really practical and like
low level tactical sense, we often call this context shifting at work where you're asking
people to have a lot in their brains and the effort it takes to move from one subject to the
next subject, stuff is going to get dropped and it's really hard to do. So the more subjects you're
asking people to keep in their head at a team level, the more likely it is that something's
going to go wrong or you're going to forget something or it's just not going to land the way
you wanted it to. The narrative isn't going to make sense. It's not going to play well to different
team members. It's just, it's a lot to put on people. I don't want to say it again, but empathy
for teammates, right? Like if you're all thinking about one thing and then moving onto the next
thing, it's great because if you're thinking about seven things at once, that's when stuff starts to
get really messy and difficult to control. And oftentimes we don't have the choice not to think
about seven things at once. Yeah, but this is where the work life balance comes in. If you think,
and I can't remember where I heard this, I'd probably have to dig out of something, some sort
of article, the regular human can remember seven things at once. And so if you think, oh, I've got
to remember to take the dog out for a walk and I've got to remember to take my laundry out and I've
got to remember to fill the dishwasher. And I also have to remember to email Karl back and I have
to remember to call my mom and I have to remember to, and suddenly you're up to five things and we
haven't even started thinking about work yet. That's even more prevalent in a remote environment
because we're not leaving our houses. So all of those house things are taking up those seven
spots. If you're in an office, then maybe they're different, but also it's not really practical to
leave your home life at the door when you walk into the office anymore. That's not how it kind
of rolls. Even if you've minimized the amount of home things you've got in your list of seven,
there's still going to be some there. You still haven't actually got seven things to remember.
You've maybe got two or three. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean,
I've never had a time where I've gone into the office and it's just been office thoughts only
the entire time I'm there. There's always some thought back to what am I going to be doing this
evening? What am I going to be doing this weekend? What's going on at home? Those things are always
in the mind. You shouldn't be trying to get those out of your head, with the exception of
taking care of them. This is where things like getting things done come into play, actually
being able to have a place where you store your thoughts so that I know my thought is in the
system. I will come back to it at a later time and date and deal with it then. For most things,
this works quite well. Obviously, if you've got something that's really big and really taking up
a lot of brain space and it's hard to move off, systems like this don't fix that. But for the day
to day, it works out really quite well. We could certainly do a whole episode just on getting
things done and how to stay organized and how to keep your tasks straight so that you can
walk away from this stuff. Though it is still hard, you're literally trying to solve a problem.
Yeah, you can break it out into tasks, but just that general, even when you're out there doing
something totally unrelated to work, your brain is still working through those threads. Sometimes
that's when the muse hits and you have that amazing idea that's like, if we just did this,
we'd solve the problem. So always have a way to write that down when it happens.
There's that silver bullet again.
Well, the muse is not a silver bullet. When that hits, it hits and it's great,
but you can't rely on it because it doesn't come when you want it to.
It is funny. I tend to take a Sharpie everywhere. I don't very often take a handbag out that
generally I keep things in my pockets, but I will always have a Sharpie about my person
in case I get struck by something and I'm like, quick, write it down. The canvas is my skin,
it doesn't matter. I'll sacrifice the back of my hand for this idea.
Yeah, having something to write on is key because if you do have this great idea just happen,
those ideas come at all sorts of random times and you almost never have something to write with at
that point. I have lost an idea or two for not writing it down, so always have something to
write it down on. There's that bit in Friends. I hope you enjoy Friends the TV series, otherwise
this reference isn't going to make sense. There's an episode about a cheesecake. It's the best
cheesecake in New York or something and Joey just always has a fork in his pocket and so he's just
always ready with a fork to eat the cheesecake and it's just any food you put it in front of Joey,
he's prepared. I think it's that for me of I'm always prepared. It's just a Sharpie rather than
a fork. Other permanent markers are available.
Let's just be a brand commercial.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there are other permanent markers available.
Sharpie has just become synonymous with it for now.
Sharpie's worked pretty well though. There's a reason. I mean, just like
Band-Aid over here is synonymous with Band-Aid. It's because the brand has become so ubiquitous
and you only get to ubiquity because you work extremely well and people know that they can
rely on you. You solve the problem, right?
Yeah, you solve the problem. That's very true. The product managers for those products have very
difficult jobs. What new problem to solve with this thing that already solves the product?
Yeah, they've made themselves redundant because they nailed the problem.
Speaking of companies that have products that already solve the problem,
one of the things that you still have to do even when you've hit that point is identify the jobs
to be done. That was another key theme of our season this time.
Yeah, it seems to be really taking off as a way to think about user flows and user journeys in
product is to combine your persona and your understanding of the problem and the context
that your user is in with also their motivation and the thing that they're trying to do.
Jobs to be done is, okay, I've got this person with these demographics about them,
they're in this country, they're speaking this language and the thing they are trying to achieve
is dot dot dot and that's a really interesting way to get a product team around a problem and
to think about things holistically. I just think it's really fascinating. I'm really glad it came
up a few times over the season in various different lights as well. It's been really cool to see.
Yeah, it's a great topic.
So along with jobs to be done, we've talked about a couple of other tools and different
ways of thinking about user problems and user flows. One of the things I really loved in the
Johannes and Callum episode is allowing us to focus on what is the superpower of a product
manager? Why is a product manager critical to a product company? Which, product manager,
product company, you put the two together, but I think it's such a subtle job and the industry
is still changing its description of the job. So I loved that we were able to talk in that episode
around what does a product manager bring to the table?
Absolutely. In that episode and talking with all the other people that we talked to this season,
we've really started to see that product management is the application of tools,
frameworks, intuition, and a lot of lived experience as well to try and make a difference
in the lives of people through these inanimate things that we call products. The magic of product
is the people making the inanimate things seemingly come to life and having fun doing that.
Because if you think about a software product, it's a bunch of bits. It's a fairly abstract thing
a software product is. Bits and bytes.
But when it solves a problem, it becomes useful to the customer. When you can then call somebody
to ask for help when it doesn't work the way it should and you actually get somebody to talk to
that knows what you're talking about and can help you, it's no longer this inanimate thing.
It's this group of people using this technology to solve this problem and help each other out.
That's where it becomes kind of magic because at that point you've taken all these things,
you've brought them together, and now you're actually solving the problem. That's fun.
That's where the fun is, is in seeing that come alive because if you remove all the people out
of it, it's back to just being an inanimate set of code that sits on a computer and doesn't really
do anything. It is bringing those people in there that makes it so exciting.
Absolutely. You want to wrap us up, Karl?
Sure. Yeah. In closing, life is short and it's a great honor to get to help people.
It's really kind of the whole point of the product manager job. It shouldn't be about ego stoking or
about who can get ahead the fastest. It's really about going out there, finding problems you care
about, finding the people who have those problems and solving them. But in taking on such work,
it's easy to let the mission get the better of us and we can't really let that happen so that work
doesn't turn into drudgery because that's a possible outcome here. Or like Danielle was
alluding to before, work is the thing that we must always be doing without a break to the point we
don't remember if we use shampoo or not. You don't want to get there either, and you can.
You can easily get there. Product management really requires that you be good at work-life balance.
It's not really an optional, oh, I'll get better at that someday type thing. No, you're going to
burn out fast if you can't take a break from it all. And yet this is the very type of work,
this work of solving problems that matter and all the people wrangling involved that can very much
consume you and put you on that path. In fact, I was reading something about burnout the other day
that basically product management is like the perfect storm of things together to enable
burnout. So like possibly one of the easiest to burn out from careers out there. So you really
do need to think about these things. So in closing, I mean, take good care of yourself,
take time for yourself, find other product people who you connect with to talk about these things,
and let us know your thoughts. So drop us a line at hello at productlyspeaking.com
or join the chat on matrix at hashtag productlyspeaking colon matrix.org. Also
follow our page on LinkedIn to get the latest updates. We'd love to hear from you.
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matrix.org. Thank you all again. And until next time, cheerio.