PoC - #2 - Incomplete Information
Thoughts of a Product Manager
Welcome to Pursuit of Curiosity - #2. Firstly thank you for subscribing and for the conversations of last week. This newsletter is meant to be an iterative exploration of thoughts. This week I write about
Dealing with incomplete information as a Product Manager
Article I am writing exploring link between motivation and curiosity
A note I read on decorative hand towels
The art of incomplete information
As Product Managers , my work primarily involves making a decisions with incomplete information. Incomplete not because I am lazy ( a debatable topic ) and haven’t bothered to figure it but that is the nature of the beast.
Incomplete information on the market you are serving
Incomplete information on user needs and motivations
Incomplete information on your technical ability to deliver
Incomplete information on the what the future looks like
As Product managers you are betting on the future state of your users. As with all forecasting, there is an element of unknown. What makes it more challenging is you need to channel all this incomplete information into coherent information to your team and stakeholders.
How does one manage this ?
Firstly being self aware of your limits. Operating in product teams makes you quickly aware of your limits of your competence. Warren Buffet calls it the Circle of competence. He defines it as an area where you have significant experience and studied deeply. In my case, I might understand how data is used to deliver insights to develop products, but I may not know about entering a new market. I might understand what it means to develop an MVP for a complex enterprise API but it doesn't mean I could do the same for a B2C SaaS. What is crucial is not the surface area of the knowledge but a clarity on the limitations of your knowledge.
Secondly be aware that product management like many other disciplines is a collaborative sport, you need to recruit your own board of experts for different areas of the product. An engineer on the team might have an uncanny expertise in a specific domain, a sales rep might have a deep knowledge of customer problem, an engineering manager might know how to scale a solution and what to avoid. It is your job in product to recruit the right expert for the problem at hand. The iteration one uses in experimenting and testing should be extended in information discovery.
Lastly being directionally accurate with incomplete information is enough in most cases. It significantly better than analysis paralysis over completeness. Embracing the uncertainty is the best part about product management.
How do you manage when you have incomplete information ?
Curiosity as the main driver for motivation
Most of us admire the successful and the smart people in this world. Think Jobs, Bezos, Ambani, Newton. When you look at their successes they seem like individuals who seem to have achieved much with sheer motivation. Yet when you look at their life journeys a bit closer, to try to figure out the exact moment they got struck by motivation you would be disappointed. Those moments don't really exist. What does exist in the wake of their successes is the trail of a curious mind, a lifelong learner wanting to understand and master something.
That was a quote of an article I am in the midst of writing, where I hypothesise curiosity as a potent driver for motivation. It has been a theme that keeps running in my mind. What keeps you motivated ? What keeps you running ? Would love to hear from you.
Decorative Hand towels
I read this provoking piece this week by Charlie Bleecker* titled What is the point of decorative hand towels ? She uses the metaphor of the decorative hand towels to talk about ideas. I agree with her sentiment that Ideas like decorative hand towels are worthless when not used. Ideas by themselves only the starting point of a journey, it is what you do after that really matters.
Facebook started off as a college social website. Samsung started off as a grocery store. Twitter started off as a Podcasting company. It is what they did with ideas that came that matters significantly more than the original ideas. Ideas exist to spur action and other ideas .
Footnotes:
Charlie Bleecker was an awesome mentor to a bunch of us from Write of Passage Cohort 5. She published the above article with a week old baby in her lap !!!
Picture by @rosssneddon from Unsplash