My first proper tech job was at Wise (then, TransferWise). When I first started, I struggled to have a meaningful impact.
I would spend a long time pouring through data, checking out competitors, and speaking to various teams around the business. I was proud of my email inbox zero, and no red dots in Slack (or Skype, which we used at the time). Our team had lots of meetings and calls that ran smoothly. I was super busy, which made me feel productive.
The team I worked with were great, but we went through a period of not really knowing how to deliver value to customers. We’d ship small stuff that didn’t really move the needle.
By contrast, we had another PM. He was a machine, driving forward all the most important parts of our customer-facing product. It’s very hard to overestimate this guy’s impact on the business.
One day I leaned over his computer to ask him a question. I caught glimpse of his Slack and it was red dots galore. Unread messages from dozens of people, and channels unread for days. I asked him and his response was something like 🤷.
I was genuinely shocked, and went away trying to reconcile how this guy could be perform so well, yet have so many unread Slack messages.
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Over time I realised what probably should have been obvious.
I was filling my day with tasks that added some value but not a much. The value-per-hour-spent was super low. I knew all about what was happening around the business, but didn’t have time to do anything really useful with that information.
This is a problem with scale-ups. At the early stage you can keep up to date with everyone, which feels good. The business grows, you think “well that worked, so I’ll keep doing it”.
But communication lines grow exponentially, and it gets much harder to stay up-to-speed with everyone. Product and marketing used to be two people that sit next to each other, now it’s two completely separate functions.
There’s a very real tipping point in a business where it’s possible to fill most of your day keeping up-to-speed with Slack, emails, and whatever other tools you use.
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I like the old analogy of a jar filled with rocks and sand.
If you take a big jar and fill it with fist-sized rocks, you can say it’s full. But you can then add small pebbles until it’s full again” But then you can pour in sand until it’s full again.
The moral of this story is that if you fill the jar with sand, there’s no room for anything else.
Large rocks are the things that really add value to your company - e.g. shipping useful features to customers. Smaller rocks are things that multiply that value - e.g. communicating clearly, getting strategic people on board with what you’re doing. Sand is the never-ending stuff - e.g. noodling around your user data looking for patterns, understanding what every part of the business is doing.
I was filling my day with sand, the high-performing PM was filling his day with rocks.
Sand feels good but doesn’t add value. Don’t fill your jar with sand.
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There are a few tools that you can use to make sure you don’t fill your jar with sand:
1/ “Do your job”: A former boss once gave me this advice, after I became very worried about a marketing campaign’s effectiveness before it had even gone live. The New England Patriots have the manta “do your job” (a ‘well’ afterwards is implied). If you focus on playing your part excellently, every possible outcome will be better for it.
I realised that I wasn’t really able to influence our marketing team's success. Turns out that campaign was successful, despite my worrying from afar.
2/ Communicate like a pilot: This was great advice from a different former colleague. Pilots don’t tell each individual passenger a separate update. They communicate clearly, to everyone. They tell you only the information that you need to know. If something changes, they tell you once, clearly. This means less time chasing your tail making sure everyone is up-to-speed. Communicate with pebbles, not sand.
3/ Set goals: I’m not wedded to OKRs specifically, but having a clear goal as a team will help you to focus. Every week, you should check that goal, and see what you need to do to achieve it. The more frequently you check it, the less likely it is that you’ll miss it. At the end of the quarter your impact will be judged on hitting that goal, so make check in with it frequently.
4/ Get comfortable with fires: An early lesson for any product builder is that prioritisation is hard. It necessarily means choosing not to do things that would add some value, to focus on the things that would add lots of value. This is the reality, there’s no shirking from it. Get your head around the fact that there will always be something a bit on fire, and you need to let those burn. You’ll be much, much more successful in your job if you focus on maximising progress towards goals, rather than minimising things that you’ve missed.
Those red lights in Slack can feel like a fire, but they’re not.
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That’s it. If this is interesting or enjoyable, please feel free to share your own summary on whatever platforms you use.