Rob and Marc discuss the surprising things you can learn from chickens about UX research, project management, and software delivery – and how to write a book about SpaceX without mentioning Elon Musk.
Rob and his band of ruffian product mercenaries just added a new designer to a team and shares how he’s getting them up to speed quickly on the past and preparing them to rapidly contribute to the future. How do you take advantage of beginner’s mind? It’s a great opportunity to get a review of your processes and practices from the inside, but it only lasts for a few weeks. Sometimes though you just throw people into the deep end and get their observations along the way.
Rob’s been reading a lot of Carl Jung lately and ‘shadow archetypes’ – as a designer who appreciates product management and project ownership, he’s all in for people to take on whole ways of doing things and making them better.
Rob talks about the importance of balance. If you overcommit in one area, other areas suffer. If you’re not balanced and fluid while you’re executing, eventually you’ll spin out or blow the engine. Capacity management equals better output. It’s all about the outcomes – your output doesn’t matter if it’s garbage. However, if you only need ‘good enough’, then go ahead and floor it to increase quantity. How do you instrument capacity management to know when to burn hot and when to take your time? Two extremes – not doing enough vs too much. Also, when you slow down you create space to generate opportunities for the situation to evolve until there’s an opening to execute. Strike when the iron is hot. You can’t do it all the time. Like in sports, save the rock star plays for the rock start moments. Otherwise, burnout causes more expensive and weirder problems.
Rob journals in LinkedIn. Slowness gives a chance to scan the field for the opportunity. Slow down, focus, then deliver a game changing solution. Don’t burn out from always striking fast. Don’t try and make people like you by putting out their little fires while the lava pool bubbles up from underneath. Give the magma a place to flow to avoid eruptions. Start with the obvious, then expand out from there. Consider the holistic approach for the big picture, and then strike like lightning.
People talk about outcomes, rather than how the sausage is made. Everyone knows what Elon Musk says about how he runs SpaceX, but nobody knows how they run standup meetings or day to day design and development practices. What would a book look like about SpaceX that left out Elon Musk. Just the people getting it done underneath. Those are the most interesting people, the 2nd and 3rd in command, the ones with the playbooks in their souls and brains. That’s who enables novelty and ability to create stuff. All about the doers – “It will be done”. Product marketing execution strategy with a partner focused on doing more with less and leveraging AI and workflows and processes to command and govern the AI to get the most out of the team. Change the way people are solving problems and doing real human/machine teaming.
Everyone can benefit from the product manager role, but maybe execution manager would be better – the function of a PM is to get the most out of every opportunity and resources while managing the exhaustion threshold, it’s a beautiful balance. That could get companies away from quiet quitting and checkbox checking. There is a clear goal with clear risks. The backlog is the source of truth, and people are either building or they aren’t. Changes the mindset so people don’t expect the PM to make them happy or entertain them (are you not entertained?). The executioner encourages supplication. People can get outcomes from teams in a variety of ways. Some teams are killer engineers and a ruthless executioner manager can drives this culture to burn the ships and raid the island so long as everyone is aligned on the same mentality to move fast. But if that’s the PM and the team is thinking about vacations and other things it’s a problem. But if the execution manager is endearing and folks are motivated to not let them down, you can get the same outcome. Burn the ships or love and connection. Both are great approaches with same outcome. Like a Viking in a tutu. When you get it right, teams deliver.