Get weekly insights on modern data delivered to your inbox, straight from our hand-picked curations!
Find lessons for thinking broadly about data, embracing uncertainty, focusing on fewer distractions, communicating effectively, and weeding out unnecessary tasks.
An essentialist product manager plans what they work on based on high-level goals. This translates well into planning your roadmap, which should also be high-level and strategic. This is why your first step when road mapping is determining the most critical high-level objectives. By organizing your roadmap by themes, you’re guiding the decision process for your top priorities.
Think of themes for your product, you narrow down the themes to a handful of areas you want to improve for your customers, and you’ll be able to make significant progress. If you have too many themes and goals, your energy will be scattered, and you will make less incremental progress that may not give your customers meaningful value.
Themes are the higher-level objectives on the roadmap - and they should represent successful customer outcomes. For example, an e-commerce company’s theme might be “improve the shopping cart experience to speed up the checkout.” Themes help you stay on track with the bigger strategic picture for your product.
.png)
In their simplest form, themes are groupings of similar features, epics or initiatives. Ideally, themes describe customer value – what customers are going to be receiving or the job that you’ll help them accomplish. For example, “improve shopping cart experience” is an example of a customer-focused theme, and into this theme you would group the initiatives that support it.
Deep Dive
Themes: Organize Your Product Roadmap to Show Value
In the past, we’ve wrestled with needing to control uncertainty. For years, we thoroughly planned everything and needed to know the eventual outcome of decisions. We spent a lot of time that, in the end, wasn’t necessary.
“Uncertainty is uncomfortable.”
As a result, we found ourselves with a lingering sense that things were out of control. As a product manager, the uncertainty manifested in detailed and lengthy Product Requirements Documents. We’re not the only product managers with this challenge. The research, time spent writing long documents, and time spent worrying were non-essentialist.
Over the years, through observation and experience, the most successful and happy people are those who are willing to embrace uncertainty. They are the ones who make “risky” decisions without knowing 100% of the information. It’s especially true for product managers, entrepreneurs, and others who want to launch products or ideas.
Letting things unfold without knowing how the plan will eventually materialize.
If we can stop for a moment and change our thinking that we’re not in as much control as we think and surrender to it, we’re more likely to succeed because we’re open to change and opportunities we wouldn’t see otherwise. And these opportunities somehow align with our most important goals.
Here are a few thoughts on how product managers—especially those in an agile development environment—can embrace uncertainty and live with the inevitable discomfort. Hopefully, these ideas will help you focus on what matters.
One way to live with uncertainty is to relax about the exact plan and make decisions based on an outcome-driven goal. For example, rather than creating a list of arbitrary and disconnected features for your product, focus on your desired outcome for customers – what is the goal you want them to achieve? By focusing on an outcome-driven roadmap, you (and your team) have room to think about new possibilities about different and possibly faster ways of achieving the goal.
Stop spending as much time dwelling on problems at work and what-if thinking. You’re causing stress, affecting you in all areas of your life. Spend more time working to solve the problems your customers are facing. Those are the fun problems.
If you’re a worst-case-scenario planner—cut the negative thinking. Why worry about all the endless gloomy scenarios your (fearful) mind can create? Plus, if you expect the worst, you’ll put yourself in a position of being close-minded to recognize new options and opportunities. We’re not saying that you should avoid realistic contingency planning, but the five per cent chance of a worst-case scenario is unlikely to unfold. Spend your brainpower toward an optimistic outcome. And your nights will be more restful.
Product managers expect to spell out our products’ vision and what the product looks like one or two years later. But it’s problematic if this planning is too detailed. One or two years out, any plan is only a fantasy and a waste of time.
There’s no way things will go exactly to plan, and the goalpost will probably change along the way. You’ll never achieve perfection. Unfortunately, this detailed planning sets an expectation that won't come true in your head (and your stakeholders’ heads). It sets up everyone for the disappointment.
Our advice: Don’t plan too far ahead. Focus on the big-picture vision in broad terms. Then, focus on what is in your control today to meet that vision. For your product planning, a few sprints out are far enough.
Essentialist product managers initiate the conversations they know they need to have. We’re not saying to pick fights but rather address conversations directly. Rather than avoiding conflict by saying yes, have an honest, upfront conversation about the situation.
Cutting out many distractions can help us focus on the tasks that matter.
Everyone has a different way of defining a “distraction.” We can free up hours every week by cutting out most television and only occasionally relaxing with a movie. For some, it may be hiring someone for landscaping or limiting social media.
At work, many of us have typical days full of back-to-back meetings. We’re also constantly distracted by the ding of chat applications and email notifications filling our inboxes. As product managers, it’s tempting to believe that every request from a customer is important. The customer is not always “right” in the sense that their ideas might not be the ideas that move your product ahead.
You could review your schedule next week and opt out of a few. There are many great examples of business leaders who take limiting distractions seriously, focusing on only the activities that matter.
When Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky had lunch with Warren Buffett in 2014, he was struck by the lack of distractions in Buffett's life. “There are no TVs anywhere,” he said. “He spends all day reading. He takes maybe one meeting a day and thinks deeply.” That’s a great description of an essentialist's life.
Most product managers have a product backlog that lists prioritized opportunities for your product.
But has your backlog become a dumping ground for every random idea from every stakeholder? Sure, it feels good to be able to tell a vital stakeholder you’ve “noted” their opinion (and, in a sense, avoiding the responsibility of saying, “No.”) Is the minuscule, incremental cognitive overhead worth it if you do that 100 or 1,000 times?
If you have items in your product backlog that you realize you won’t get to within the next six months, that’s probably a sign that you’re committing too much to stakeholders or yourself.
When the product backlog is too long, it clouds your vision and creates underlying stress of what’s not getting done. A shorter backlog frees you up to think about what’s most important. It improves creativity. Think in time-frames of perhaps three to six months out.
Imagine a product team with a product backlog of 600 items. They diligently prioritized and managed the epics and stories, moving them into the next two or three sprints. As the months passed, it became clear there was no way they’d develop what was in the product backlog over the next few months. There was rising frustration from the whole team at the pace of development, partly from the perception that we would never get to everything.
Every day, their stress grew as the backlog ballooned. What was the point of diligently managing the backlog when accomplishing it all would be impossible? Especially when everything a few months in the future would likely be different?
Stressed and over-committed at that point, they declared “backlog bankruptcy.” They deleted every story, issue, bug, and idea they weren’t planning to release in a near-term sprint. Clicking Delete was one of the more challenging things they’ve done. Over 600 items… gone.
But then something interesting happened. There were no repercussions from that decision. No stakeholder brought it up—no one said, “where did my idea go?” They felt relieved after eliminating the cognitive overhead created by the backlog.
“After ruthlessly prioritizing and limiting what we added to the backlog, we got the product to market faster. Starting from scratch felt good.”
Declining backlog bankruptcy taught them that if an idea has high enough value for customers, it will return. It will bubble up to the top. They no longer keep massive lists of all the ideas and things they want to do in the future. Sometimes the simplicity this creates in your product is a positive customer experience.
Think about the conversations you’ve had this week with stakeholders and peers. How many had an impact on the direction of the product? How many had tension because there was a disconnect in objectives? In my experience, a few approaches to how you have these conversations can significantly impact the success of the discussions and help them truly matter. Here are a few.
We’ve discussed how product managers must say “No”. And maybe it’s time to stop. Sounds like a contradiction? Let me explain.
Most stakeholders don’t like it when the essentialist product manager shuts down their ideas. That’s true. It’s less about saying “no,” and more about the conversation.
Yet how can we navigate these conversations, maintain our priorities, and keep stakeholder relationships strong? Rather than saying “no,” it might look like this:
Product managers need to stay steadfast yet, at the same time, be open to change based on changing information. Your stakeholder may have a better idea that’s a lower risk or lower effort than something you already have planned. Be open to discussion and change.
A non-essentialist product manager will pause before eventually saying, “Yes.” An essentialist often says " No “, focusing on the vital few. Product managers will need to do this with empathy and reasoned explanations about why the answer is “No” (or “ not yet”).
Additionally, it’s not only about saying “No” to feature requests. But instead, not committing to projects and decisions that do not lead you towards the greater goal. By saying “No” and having a well-thought-out justification, you will foster more respect among your peers, stakeholders, and customers. Help them understand what the trade-offs are. What will they (or the company) give up if you choose one path versus another?
Small things that fall on your plate will inevitably accumulate. We’re more distracted and stressed when we let these little things pile up (figuratively on the to-do list or literally on the desk). One habit essentialist product managers have is carving out time to clean up these small things. They weed their garden for space for their most important plants to grow. Things that fall into this category include meetings to schedule, emails that pile up, articles to be read, and various administrative tasks.
The problem with having too many of these small items on your plate is that it feels good to accomplish them - you feel like you’re making progress. We know that feeling so well, cleaning out email inboxes and getting to the end of the day without working on the most important things. Leaving blocks of time on your calendar for weeding your garden can help. At the end of every day for an hour. That way, you can minimize the distraction that these weeds cause.
Another approach promoted by David Allen of Getting Things Done fame: if it takes less than two minutes to do, “Do it now.” The cognitive overhead of remembering to do it in the future isn’t worth it. Of course, it’s crucial not blindly to complete every item that piles up - using essentialism; you need to determine if it’s necessary for your goals to do it in the first place.
