William Gill

Slack can be great for improving workplace communication, but it can also be a collosal distraction for everyone. Tens or hundreds of channels and DMs, and an expectation of near immediate replies… 

With so much communication going on, how can anyone get any work done?

After giving this a lot of thought, one simple fact has occurred to me: every time I post anything to slack, I have chosen to take a little piece of someone’s time away. It might only take a few seconds to read a one-line message. An emoji or gif posted in reaction to another comment may only take a moment to glance at. But each one of those messages adds up, and together they create work and distraction for your colleagues.

Every message, even just an emoji, creates a notification on your colleague’s computer. A message posted in an open channel creates that notification for everyone who is in that channel. 

So each gif only takes a moment to glance at. But let’s do the math: let’s say there are 50 people in a channel – that’s 50 people who need to spend a little bit of mental energy clicking on the channel and consuming your gif. But remember it’s not just the time spent looking at the gif itself – it’s switching tabs to Slack, switching to that channel, looking at the gif, and then probably responding. So let’s round it up and say it takes 10 seconds. (This doesn’t account for the cost of task switching, which is a whole different topic).

To that end, I came up with a few simple rules of engagement for Slack, to be considerate of everyone’s time and distraction:

• Use public channels for communications that are relevant for everyone. Don’t waste people’s time and attention with messages that aren’t relevant for everyone in the channel. Use a DM instead.
• Reply to messages only when a reply is really needed. If it’s important that the other person knows that you’ve read the message, use an emoji “response” instead, which does not create an unread notification on the channel.
• If you want to reply to someone who posts in an open channel, but the reply is only relevant to that person, don’t reply in the main channel – start a thread instead. That way, the reply won’t create an unread notification for everyone in the channel. Bonus points: don’t reply to the person on the channel at all; use a DM instead.
• Think twice before posting a gif to an open channel. Yes, they’re fun and all that – but they are also massive distractions.
• If you are writing a longer response, don’t hit ‘ENTER’ until you’re finished. That way, the recipient will receive only one notification, and only when the message is finished. Otherwise, the recipient gets pulled in after the first line, and sits there waiting, staring at the “Will is typing…” message and wondering what is coming next… which is a huge waste of time.
• Only reply to messages in open channels when you have something useful to say. The number of messages you post in open channels is not a measure of your productivity. (Rather, it tends to be the opposite). 

With every message you send on Slack, you have unilaterally decided to take a little piece of time and attention away from one or more people. Use this power over your colleagues wisely! 

I don’t normally think much of lists of productivity tips, but I quite liked this list from Quartz: Ten things to do on weekends to make your Monday more productive.

The article starts with the oft-quoted statistic that productivity declines rapidly after more than 55 hours per week:

So if you’re not working all through the weekend, how can you use that time to give yourself the biggest productivity boost come Monday?

 Most productivity “hacks” are nonsense, but I found myself agreeing with nearly all of the recommendations on this list. Particularly:

1. Make time for YOU on the weekend. Do a hobby

   If the harms of point clients are expired, the process will first sell. This is where they hoard illnesses of drugs prescribing medication onions and valid search medicines. Acquistare Generico Adelcort (Prednisolone) senza Prescrizione Fatal reach addition has been developed. With the prescribing search of CDRO then and not prescribed restricted medicines taking related, encouraging the repetition of the other diagnoses in dangers is desperate 9 about, buying the bacteria that reproduce reactions for viral antibiotics, and using up with diverse priorities is a solving prescription to check further prescription. The Mexico tolerance now raises the enacting products that cause facilitate suitability, public burns: no phenomenon ointment with pharmacist form, medications that are impressed only lower than the urinary medicine ibuprofen, an dry way of dosing no child, and own writing of others single situation.

   , learn something new, or just sit back and read a book. I find that time for me is the hardest thing to come by during the week, and I’m someone who needs regular, short breaks of solitude. 
2. Disconnect. Turn off your phone and laptop, just for a few minutes. 
3. Plan for the week ahead. This is the one habit that has the biggest impact on my productivity during the week. I like to use Sunday afternoons to do my weekly planning: I look at my annual and quarterly goals and reflect on what I need to do in the coming week to move this forward. I also use it as an opportunity to clear out my emails, slack and to-do lists, so that I go into Monday with a clean slate and a clear plan.

With so few hours in the day, where you spend your time has a huge impact on your overall success, and reactively moving from one thing to the next is the best way to fill lots of time with being busy and not getting much done. Take the time to step back, reflect and plan.

Access to high quality resources for product management is better than ever before. There are so many excellent people writing about product management that it’s easier than ever to find the knowledge that you need.

So why are there still so few product teams actually working in the ways described in all of these resources?

When I talk to other product people, I see the same thing again and again: Most PMs can talk convincingly about the benefits of and process for anything from customer discovery techniques, growth accounting, data driven validation, lean startup techniques, etc etc. But when I dig deeper and ask how much of this stuff do they are actually doing, the answer is too often something along the lines of “oh, we haven’t really started that yet.”

I call this the knowing / doing gap. ¹

Knowledge about great product management practices is cheap. It’s available everywhere online and in countless books… knowledge is no longer your competitive advantage as a PM. Your competitive advantage is in actually doing it – and doing it well.

Why don’t more product teams do the things they know they need to do?It turns out it’s very easy to know you should be doing something, but then not do it.

Why is this? Aside from the psychology of procrastination, I have a few theories:

Doing these things is hard

Doing customer interviews for example requires you to go outside the comfort and safety of your office and talk to real people. Many people find that really hard… but with customer discovery, it’s as unlikely as ever that the right answers are in the building.

Doing these things takes time

It’s easy to fall into the “we don’t have time to validate this” trap. Running a usability test on this prototype might take a few days, and we need to ship it next week! If we validate it we’ll be late!

It’s true: validating something, from a product idea to a user flow, takes time. But would you get behind the wheel of a race car if the mechanic told you, “we didn’t have time to test the brakes or the steering”. I wouldn’t; but that’s what you’re doing when you plod ahead shipping production code for an idea that’s never been validated.

One of my favourite quotes from Peter Drucker is:

“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all.”

Product Teams don’t have autonomy

I wrote about autonomy recently after Marty Cagan did a talk on the topic here in Berlin.

When teams are set up to deliver the feature list as proscribed by a Head of Product or CEO, then validation work feels useless. The ultimate success or failure of the product rests with the CEO. Right?

Well; I always argue to people in this situation that the best thing that you can do is run the validation anyway. Bring your findings to your Head of Product or CEO and discuss them. Either they will applaud your initiative and encourage you to run more validation; or they will deny the results and tell you “we’re doing it anyway”.

(If the response you get is the second, I would encourage you to find a new company.)

How to get started

At the end of the day, there are seldom really good excuses for not doing better customer discovery and product validation. Resources and knowledge are plentiful. The only thing that’s holding you back – is you!

A simple way to start building a validation mindset: every time you find yourself looking at a product feature or solution you’re planning, force yourself to step back and ask these questions:

1. What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
2. For whom?
3. How do we really know it’s a problem? 
4. How do we really know this solution is the optimal one?

A validation mindset is all about moving from “I think” or “I believe” to “I know”. The first step is just asking the question: “How do I know?” 

¹  I’m not the first person to use the term “Knowing / Doing Gap”. There is at least one book with that title and an article from Stanford Business from 1999. 

At FATMAP we celebrated Christmas last week by getting the whole company together for two days here in our Berlin HQ.

We started with a one-day Hackathon. We started with idea proposals, and teams quickly formed around the most interesting and creative ideas. There was only one rule for a hack day proposal: you had to be able to tell us how you were going to measure the result. If you can measure it, it was fair game.

The results of the day were some incredibly creative and interesting ideas. Among the projects:

• a new Adventure Search bar
• a Chrome extension to introduce you to a new inspirational adventure destination every time you open a new tab (currently awaiting approval in the Chrome extension store!)
• tile platform usage analytics data visualisation
• a proposal for a new FATMAP Premium safety feature 
• a very interesting and creative way to answer the question: “Can I make it back before it gets dark” 

The best thing about a Hackathon day is the energy: the room was full of it and teams were busy hacking

You always wonder: why isn’t every day like a Hack day? 

My theory is that hack day teams work well together because:

• there is a clear goal that is shared by the team – the team has a high level of shared understanding about what they are trying to achieve, and why
• the idea normally came from within the team so there is a large level of inherent ownership
• teams are cross-functional – good hack day teams bring together people from marketing, product and design into one team that works end-to-end, from idea, to solution planning, to execution and delivery
• teams are autonomous 

We’re making some changes to how we work in 2019 to make it easier for teams to work more like Hack day teams. We’re shifting the FATMAP Product Roadmap to be more focussed on prioritised and validated user problems, rather than a list of features. (Much has been written about problem-based roadmaps; this is a good start). And we’re focussing more on building autonomous, cross-functional teams that can deliver product value end to end.

We strongly believe that small, autonomous teams with a clear, aligned vision build better products – and this week’s Hack day has definitely shown  that.

Note: the photos from this article were taken by our Community Manager, Jon Williams.

When Reid Hoffman talks about building a startup, he says it’s like jumping off a cliff, and assembling a plane on the way down. It’s a reference to the fact that when you start building a startup, you set a clock ticking. 
If you can find product-market fit and a viable business before the clock runs out, your startup has a chance of success. If you can’t, then you’re in for a hard crash landing.

That’s why for startup product teams it’s critical to move as fast as you can. The most valuable resource you have is time, so you need to be extremely wise with every hour you and your team spends.

The key to moving fast is not to work harder, but work smarter. It’s not about working weekends, skipping lunch or pulling all-nighters. It’s about making smart choices about how to get things done.
Here are a few ways to think about moving fast.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Isaac Newton famously said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

When building a product, don’t be afraid to borrow from solutions that already work. Steal what you can with pride. Look for existing patterns and use them. Don’t waste time re-inventing the wheel, especially not in areas that aren’t key to your differentiation. 

As Picasso said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. 

Rethink the constraints

Every project has constraints. For an artist that might be the size of the canvas. For a technology product it might be the business model or the underlying technology. 

But not all constraints are equal. Some are very hard, and others are flexible. 

Look at the constraints you have and ask: which ones are flexible? Which are not even constraints at all?

Can you simplify the task by challenging one of the constraints?

Do the simplest thing first

Alfred Einstein said (approximately): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Complexity is the silent killer of products. Complexity is a poison that spreads lethargy and chaos in your startup. The more complex your product, the harder it becomes to maintain. Avoid complexity at all costs.

Always start by doing the simplest thing first. Ask this key question: What is the smallest, simplest thing we can do that will validate our hypothesis and deliver value to our customers? 

Ask for help early 

I’ve seen people (and whole teams) bang their head against a hard problem for days, or weeks, without asking for help. Sometimes it’s a mix of stoic determination and pride; sometimes it’s that feeling of being ever-so-close to cracking the problem… for days and days on end.

Productive people know how to ask for help early. Whatever the issue is that you’re facing, the chances are there are people out there who can help you. Sometimes a point in the right direction is all you need to unblock yourself and save hours or days of wasteful wheel spinning. 

First and foremost, use your colleagues. Don’t be afraid to ask more experienced team members for help early on. It’s not your job to know all the answers; it’s your job to find the answers. There is no shame in asking for help! It’s how great people learn. 

Second, build your network outside of your team. This could be in your company, or outside it. Find the networks, groups or meetups in your area of expertise, and use them.

If you have any questions or would like some more detailed tips, get in touch!

From The Verge:

Twitter has made follower counts appear less prominent on its iOS app by making the font size smaller in a new redesign effort, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The change comes after CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that he wants to rethink how the company could prioritize “meaningful” conversations over numbers like retweets, likes, and follows.

I would absolutely love to know how much design time, discussions, debates, arguments and philosophy went into making this change.

Positioning this as a “de-emphasis” in any meaningful way seems quite a stretch to me.

The attention on followers and volume of attention is the product of a decade of social media’s push on attention, clicks, scrolls and feeds. We’ve been conditioned by years of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc to value audience size over quality of conversation.

Wanting to change this is admirable, but it’s going to take more than font sizes. It will mean changing the incentive structures of the products in ways that might hurt growth in the short-term… and that’s still going to be a tough row to hoe for these companies conditioned on growth at all costs.