Sylvia Plath on product management
Many companies get stalled by indecision when faced with lots of options. This can be fatal - but there are simple tools to get you out of that logjam.
I recently read The Bell Jar, a phenomenal novel by Sylvia Plath, made that much more touching by the tragic circumstances of the book’s author. I would recommend you check it out.
Alternatively, you can stay here and watch as I defile this beautiful work of art by making a product management lesson around it.
Sylvia Plath's fig tree
One passage in particular in the book made me think of my not-so-poetic profession:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
Much like Esther gazes at these lives and remains paralyzed, many companies remain stuck when faced with multiple features competing for development. Maybe we should do this, and maybe we should do that, and perhaps that other thing entirely.
Too often, in these situations, meetings get called. Many people get invited because you wouldn't want any stakeholder left out of the decision process. The attendees will contribute to the discussion, offering their perspectives, their doubts, their concerns. These inputs will demand more analysis, some more work to alleviate doubts, perhaps a workshop or two for good measure, and, of course, more meetings.
So the company gets bogged down in analysis paralysis. Nothing meaningful gets done while everyone is furiously going around in circles.
If you find yourself in this situation, you need to snap out of it, fast.
Getting out of corporate analysis paralysis
I've written before that product management isn't about the features but about objectives, which is a first step towards getting out of that logjam. There are infinite features you could build, but they are only helpful if they bring you closer to your objectives - of which there are fewer. Getting in agreement on objectives is a crucial first step towards any development.
I’d like here to dig deeper into three other tasks managers should tackle if they want to keep their company moving ahead. They are:
Be clear on what you want to do
Experiment
Show leadership
Let’s go.
1. Be clear on what you want to do
The very first step is knowing what you want to do. What do you want to be, as a company? How is the future going to be different if you succeed? In most companies, this is either unknown or unstated, leaving each employee with their own idea of where the organization is headed.
In many cases, the lack of focus comes from the misguided idea that focusing on one thing will make the company weaker — wouldn't it be better to be everything, for everyone, at once? I’ve already argued at length against this line of thought, so let’s assume that this is not the problem.
Once you have defined what you want to do, you have to state it. Anyone in the company should have an intuitive understanding of it. For this purpose, statements like “We are the X for Y” are helpful: if you are building a new kind of fintech, are you going to be the Apple of fintech or the Linux of fintech? None of these is a priori impossible, but you can’t be both.
Be also clear about who your competitors are, which means asking yourself, “if we didn’t exist, what would our customers do?” For example, say you are a crypto exchange like Coinbase: your first reaction might be to think that competitors are other crypto exchanges, like Binance or Kraken. But dig a little deeper, and you’ll see that these cater to entirely different populations, so if Coinbase didn’t exist, the majority of its users most likely wouldn’t go there. It would probably be more accurate to see as competitors Robinhood, or maybe Revolut.
Understanding this, and stating it clearly, will go a long way towards explaining what you want to be doing and with whom you should be playing catch-up — Coinbase certainly doesn’t need the trading features of Binance but may take a page from Robinhood’s book.
But as Esther in The Bell Jar cannot get all of the figs, you cannot do everything, so you have to accept that defining what you want to do also means defining what you do not want to do.
If you are Apple, you do not want to have commoditized hardware, unlike Microsoft. If you are Airbnb, you do not want to lease buildings, unlike Marriott. If you are Vimeo, you do not want to have an ad-supported business, unlike YouTube.
If you are clear about that, you will see that you can prune out many branches in your tree of possibilities. Be ruthless in cutting out anything that doesn’t serve your vision.
2. Experiment
Even with a clear definition of where you want to go, you will still end up with tens if not hundreds of possible futures. Choosing among them is bound to be a daunting task!
It would be, if you consider an “all or nothing” approach, like what is favored by many large companies: we decide on a path and then commit to it for the foreseeable future. In such a case, taking the wrong decision would be an extremely costly error; therefore a thorough analysis is required before committing towards anything. Right?
If you are building a dam, you cannot half-commit to the project. You do it, or you don't; anything else would be pure waste. But when developing new products or services, that isn't the case. You can interview users to understand their needs. Ideas can be prototyped and tested with them. Hell, you can even throw a "coming soon" page and see whether people sign up, and therefore show interest for whatever value you promise there.
Limited initiatives can help you get precious feedback that will let you prioritize features relative to one another.
3. Show leadership
But even with a vision and data, it is more likely than not that you will still have to make judgment calls: decide between feature A and feature B, without either one having a clear advantage. In this case, the worst that can happen is weak, indecisive leadership.
I had one of my best leadership lessons when I first learned to dive blind. See, while the lake near Lausanne, Switzerland, is very scenic, underwater visibility is not its forte. Lesson one on diving with a compass is that one person should be the leader, and the other should follow them, no questions asked. Say you’re following, and you know that the leader made a navigation mistake: you should keep following. Maybe you won’t find your target, and you’ll get to make fun of the leader afterward, but the cost is much higher if you start debating the decision underwater.
The same holds for decision-making in a company. It should be clear who is responsible for what and who gets to do what call. You should listen to everyone who can contribute to the debate, but giving everyone veto power is just a recipe to get each project bogged down.
Not every decision needs to have unanimity, especially as a company gets larger. But this means that people should be able to make decisions in their area of responsibility, even if there are dissenting voices.
What is the risk of making the wrong decision? You’ll go in the wrong direction for a while. The time you lose depends on your agility: if you have clear objectives and are working towards MVPs, you should see quickly if some project is not bearing fruit. In that case, you will have lost some time, but you will have an additional data point: that this particular project is not the right way forward. On the other hand, remaining stuck is wasted time.
Finally, if you’re the decision-maker and still have several options ahead of you with no clear winner, know that you can also pick at random. If two features are perfectly indistinguishable by their expected impact, then it’s irrelevant which one you take first.
Again, ask yourself: what is the risk? You have several features tied on top of your priorities. If you have done your work correctly, and just pick one, it won’t end up being a colossal disaster — they are all good features! But, on the other hand, the risk of not doing anything is very, very real.
So, in conclusion, don’t be like Esther, don’t wait for the figs to dry on the tree while you wait. Instead, pick them, enjoy them: don’t let the choice stop you.
Also, do read The Bell Jar, and excuse me for using it to make such a mundane point.
