Fixed mindset self-talk: “This is who I am and this is what I am capable of.”
Growth mindset self-talk: “This is who I am and this is what I am capable of at this moment.”
(Feel free to replace “I am” with “you are”)
It often amazes me how habitually adding or removing a few words from our self-talk can have a lasting impact on how we view the world and respond to it.
I finally got to reading “Ready Player One” over the last few days. It was a fascinating read – one for anyone who wants to geek out on some fun science fiction. I had two takeaways from the experience of reading the book.
The first was a quote from the creator of the virtual universe in the book – “I created the OASIS because I never felt at home in the real world. I didn’t know how to connect with the people there. I was afraid, for all my life. Right up until I knew it was ending. That was when I realized, as terrifying and painful as reality can be, it’s also the only place where you can find true happiness. Because reality is real.”
It was a reminder on the importance of thinking through the second and third order effects of technology we build. Ready Player One is set in a dystopian post climate change, post virtual reality world. Humans spend most of their lives attached to their VR devices – an idea that can’t be dismissed as improbable given what we’re seeing with device addiction today.
The second was a nudge to read more fiction in 2019. I hope to make that happen. And, I’m also in the market for recommendations – so, if you have a favorite fiction work of fiction you’d recommend, I’d love to hear it (rohan at rohanrajiv dot com).
I’ve been following Manchester United football club for 15 years now. While the regularity with which I watch games has waxed and waned over the years, it has been particularly difficult since our second baby arrived earlier this year. But, in this case, neither did I really want to watch the team play regularly. Watching the team play felt like a soulless experience.
The manager of a football/soccer club is the work equivalent of 3 levels of management. They are the soul of the football club and carry immense decision making power as long as they have the CEO and Board’s backing. And, for the past two and a half years, the manager of Manchester United sucked all joy out of the club. Worst of all, he alienated most of his players by repeatedly shaming them in front of the media.
So, it was truly wonderful to check out the highlights of the game yesterday as a new era dawned on the club. The team scored 5 goals in a single game for the first time in 5 years. And, the players seemed to have fun.
The saying – people don’t leave companies, they leave their managers – crossed my mind as I watched yesterday’s highlights for the third time. Playing for a manager who believed in them lifted every player on the team. We saw more creativity, more hustle, and more happiness than we’d seen in a long time.
Managers matter. Investing in finding and working for managers who believe in us can make more of a difference than we sometimes realize.
We faced a few situations in the past few weeks during which we were well in over our heads. These situations involved some combination of a sick kid or kids, visits to the doctor, cleaning up puke – lots of puke, and feelings of exhaustion.
I vividly remember a few moments during these weeks when it occurred to me that, sometimes, all you need (and have?) is a bit of perspective.
When many of these things are going against you, it is easy to drift unconsciously into zones that attract self-pity or whinging or general unhappiness.
The truth, however, is generally far from it.
In our situation for example – the kids are building immunity, we are learning plenty about each other thanks to an extended stretch in the trenches, we are lucky to not be stressed about affording medicines or insurance, and, most importantly, we are dealing with tractable, non-chronic, problems.
Once we summon that bit of perspective and realize that these brief (at least in the grand scheme of things) trysts with chaos and exhaustion will pass, we realize quickly that there is a lot to smile about. It is all relative – all is actually well.
All that leads to the following note to self – expect problems, eat them for breakfast, smile, hug, laugh, and go do things that makes this experience better for everyone else.
Quartz has a great piece today on “Monosodium Glutamate” or MSG. Here’s the summary –
Imagine a magic powder—colorless, odorless, and tasteless on its own—that you can sprinkle onto any savory food to make it taste even more amazing. Where could we possibly find this pixie dust of deliciousness?
In fact, it’s all around us. Monosodium glutamate, better known as MSG, is a natural component of foods from tomatoes to peas to walnuts, and appears in extra-high levels in foods that have been fermented or aged: think of flavor bombs like miso, parmigiano cheese, or preserved fish. For the last hundred years, it’s also been available dirt-cheap in the form of sparkly little crystals. And that’s where the story gets interesting.
The invention of pure MSG in 1908 set the stage for a global revolution in food, as the additive became a staple in Asian households and Western food processing facilities alike. Then, a few decades ago, MSG fell victim to a massive backlash, prompted by shoddy science and more than a little racism.
We’re only now starting to emerge from the scary days of glutamate hysteria, thanks to chefs like David Chang, and it may not be long before those tasty flavor crystals reclaim their rightful place next to the salt and pepper shakers.
I grew up in India at a time when MSG and, thus, Chinese restaurants had a bad rap. I had no idea that this was called “Chinese restaurant syndrome” in the US and wasn’t aware of the racism involved. Anthony Bourdain put it well when he said – “You know what causes Chinese Restaurant Syndrome? Racism.”
This story speaks to the challenge with food research and food trends. I have definitely seen this with Indian cuisine. There was a time when coconut oil (a staple where we are from) was labelled “bad” thanks to some shoddy science. Then, coconut oil became “in” again. There are multiple other examples.
As a result, I tend to view any new research on food with a large dose of skepticism. Food has a Darwinian nature to it – anything that survives many generations has survived for a reason. The problems we face tend to be due to new, often synthetic, additions to the diet whose effects aren’t well understood.
I saw an alternate route down on a “blue” (intermediate) slope the other day that had a sign that said “Advanced skiers only.” That typically means a few moguls/bumps and I thought I’d give it a try.
As soon as I got to the bumps, I fell. I got up and then promptly fell again. As I muttered to myself about my inability to tackle this slope, I looked down to see if there was an easy route I could follow.
As I looked further out, I realized I’d actually navigated a similar slope. The difference? That slope didn’t have an “Advanced skiers only” sign.
So, I reminded myself that I actually had this under control and went down without any further falls.
Sometimes, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Johnson & Johnson’s stock declined by 10% on Friday – its largest one day decline in stock price in 16 years. The reason? A Reuters investigation uncovered the fact that J&J’s famous baby powder was sometimes tainted by cancer causing asbestos and that J&J kept this information away from regulators and the public.
Someone high up signed off on this idea. And, they likely did so because they thought the decision to keep this information hidden from regulators and the public would be the best way to maximize shareholder value.
It did – for a while at least.
Until it didn’t.
Lawsuits continue to pile up against the company. And, it is hard to imagine if J&J’s famous brand will ever recover.
Every such crisis reinforces one lesson – decisions made to explicitly maximize shareholder value in the short term always hurt the same shareholders in the long term.
The open question for boards, then, is – how do we create incentives for the leadership of the company to think beyond their tenure in the hot seat?
Chef Andoni Aduriz (owner of Mugaritz, a restaurant near San Sebastian in Spain) is considered one of the most creative chefs on the planet. He has an interesting tradition – he shuts Mugaritz down for 4 months every year.
Chef Aduriz first shut down his restaurant for 4 months after a fire in 2010 and has made it an annual tradition. He has come to appreciate the need for a complete break to give the team the space to be creative.
Mugaritz, thus, is closed for business 33 per cent of the time and is consistently rated among the top 10 restaurants on the planet.
There’s a powerful lesson in there somewhere for me/us.
My first commercial mobile phone experience was with my mom’s now-iconic Nokia 3310.
Inspired by the simplicity of that experience, I am currently treating my phone as a 3310 until the new year. Outside of Waze for navigation, the 3310 only allowed for texts and calls. There wasn’t any email, browsing, or other media. For those things, I have to open up my laptop and do so. And, it’s been a fun experiment.
Two reflections – first, adding a relatively small dose of friction forces a disproportionate amount of intentionality. And, next, it is amazing how intentionally reading the same content on a larger screen feels slower and calmer.
Here’s to a slower, calmer holiday season then.
A note for new subscribers: This post is part of a bi-weekly Sunday series on my notes on technology product management (this is what I do for a living). You might notice that these posts often link to older posts in the series on LinkedIn even though they are all available on this blog. That is intended for folks who only want to follow future product management related posts. Finally, for all those of you who don’t build tech products for a living, I believe many of these notes have broader applicability. And, I hope you find that to be the case as well…
Over the past 6 weeks, I’ve made (and expanded upon) 3 points in this series on IC/individual contributor product management
1. A product manager brings together a group of cross functional stakeholders to build a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.
2. Of these 3 outcomes, building for value is the most important as there is no substitute for it. The fabled “product sense” skill is the ability to consistently identify and build for value – I term it “problem finding.”
3. Thus, the four core skills of a product manager are – problem finding, problem solving (solving for usability and feasibility), building effective teams, and selling (internally and externally).
As I spent my last note explaining why product sense is simply the ability to build for value, today’s post will be focused on lessons learnt on how to build for value. And, the three tools we’ll discuss as part of our problem finding toolkit are problem statements, hypotheses, and riskiest assumption tests. These are the first 3 and arguably most important steps of the product process.
Problem Statements: Good problem statements articulate 3 elements – i) audience – who are you building for?, ii) need/problem – what is the specific need/problem?, and iii) value – what is the value of solving the problem?
The worst case scenario for products is those that get built without a clear articulation of the problem. This typically happens when problem statements are written for the executive team or as a homage to the HiPPO / highest paid person’s opinion. And, the bad scenario is when product teams are unclear about who they are building it for. It is okay to be wrong about the target audience – that happens from time to time. But, it is poor form to start without a point of view.
Here’s an example problem statement from Amazon in 2004. I wasn’t part of the Amazon team in 2004. But, given how beautifully they’ve nailed the online shopping customer experience, I’d assume they started with a problem statement in a 6 page memo that looked something like this.
We want our loyal customers (monthly actives) to have a delightful shopping experience on Amazon.com. However, our checkout experience data and user research confirms that this is not the case. Customers hate paying shipping costs and this either prevents them from completing their shopping experience or forces them to redo their shopping to minimize shipping costs – thus creating a stressful and unsatisfactory experience. Solving this problem for customers would be worth $xxxM in the first year alone.
Hypothesis: A hypothesis is a proposal to the meet the needs of the audience articulated in the problem statement. A hypothesis can be expressed as a collection of assumptions that can be validated using experiments or data and can be thought of as an answer to the question – “What do we need to believe for this problem to be solved?”
Here is an articulation of the hypothesis of the Amazon free shipping problem statement above.
Our hypothesis is that offering free shipping to our loyal customers would result in a significant improvement in their shopping experience on Amazon.com while also greatly improving our ability to monetize customer engagement. This hypothesis is based on the following assumptions –
1. Free shipping will reduce the stress and anxiety that comes with shopping online and will translate to a faster, more efficient, check out experience.
2. Customers who are offered free shipping will have higher lifetime value – making it well worth the investment cost.
3. Our customers will be open to paying for a monthly/yearly subscription that offers unlimited “free shipping” for a reasonable price point
The Riskiest Assumption Test or RAT: The natural next step is to figure out how to test this hypothesis – ergo a “riskiest assumption test.”
The riskiest assumption in the 3 assumptions laid out above is (1) as it makes the case that free shipping has high customer value (2 and 3 are focused on value capture). And, we can now imagine tests to validate this. We could design an A/B test with “free shipping” in the treatment group or analyze existing data to plot the correlation between check out time and shipping costs.
As you can see from the flow from problem statements -> hypothesis -> RAT, a problem well stated is indeed a problem half solved.
How is an RAT different from a MVP? The main problem with the “MVP” term is that it is ambiguous and that has led to to memes like the one below (and articles like this).
(Image credit: Applico)
FWIW, I think the principle behind the “Riskiest Assumption test” is the same as the principle behind the “Minimum Viable Product.” These memes just underscore the importance of thinking about the customer user/problem (i.e. transportation) before thinking about the product/solution.
But, given my stated purpose in the series is to simplify how we think about product management, it means discarding more ambiguous terms like “product sense” and “minimum viable products” and replacing them with “problem finding” and “riskiest assumption tests.”
The case for problem management instead of product management. A consistent theme that has hopefully become evident through this series is the importance of focusing on problems instead of products. To that end, I recently came across a tweet by Isaac Hepworth, a PM at Google, that I thought was on point.
Companies that get disrupted are those that focus on owning product solutions instead of owning customer problems. I thought it was fitting that we used an Amazon example as we worked through the problem finding process. They are the textbook example of a company that has done a phenomenal job focusing on customer problems that are, in Jeff Bezos words, “things that do not change.”
A career and life sidebar. There’s a lot of conflicting advice on perseverance out there. We are led to believe that entrepreneurs who succeed never quit. But, we then hear stories of those who knew exactly when to quit and “pivot.” When do we persevere? And, when not?
Applying what we’ve learnt today, the wrong kind of perseverance focuses on the solution while the right kind focuses on the problem. Problem finding, thus, isn’t just a valuable product management skill – it is an incredibly valuable career and life skill.
