Apply Leverage to Maximize Your Impact as a Product Manager
If you prefer watching, check out a quick video version of this post.
This is part 2 in a series about mental models for Product Managers. Check out this first part covering Inversion and First Principle Thinking.
Let’s talk about leverage. And no, I’m not talking about getting dirt on your political or business opponent. I’m talking about creating things, processes, and relationships that create outsized impact over time.
Eric Jorgenson’s Twitter is a masterclass in leverage. Here’s a nugget from his intro thread on the concept:
But why does leverage matter for Product folks? Well, most answers to “What’s a day in the life of a PM” include phrases like hectic, putting out fires, running around with my head cut off, and the like. Being a PM is a hard job. On any given day you might be…
- Working with marketing and sales to understand your biggest competitor’s threatening new product announcement.
- Dealing with an important stakeholder’s very urgent request of the week.
- Helping craft a support plan and marketing response to disastrous issues that made their way to production.
- Jumping from meeting to meeting with different types of folks, problems, environments — constant context switching.
Amidst all of that, we struggle to find time for strategy, customer research, and deep thinking. Enter leverage. Build leverage in your daily life as a PM to help you scale and focus on what matters most.
Communication Leverage
How do we stay Aligned in an ever-changing landscape? How do we educate, inspire, and evangelize at scale? These tactics can help keep folks moving in the same direction without it becoming your full-time job. (Disclaimer — most of these tips work best in an environment that’s comfortable with async collaboration).
Level up your documentation game. This shouldn’t be a hard sell for most PMs. We love an old-fashioned google doc. But I’m not talking about writing a 10-page strategy magnus opus that no one reads. Mastering concise and impactful documentation that gets folks engaged in the discussion can be the ultimate time-saver. One of my favorite resources here is On Writing Well. It’s a must-read for any leader who wants to turn their communication into leverage.
A way to go a level deeper here to harness the power of modular writing. Create valuable content once and then reuse it everywhere where it’s relevant. For example, grab that paragraph from your strategy document that perfectly describes the user problem and drop it into the epic description. This has made me a much faster writer. And once you start, you’ll recognize leveraged atomic units of content that can be reused again and again.
Pivot to video like it’s 2016. While the written word is effective, there’s definitely a time for moving pixels. Do you need to do some internal dogfooding for that new feature? Instead of setting up 30-minute 1:1s with 10 folks, record a single video and send them a link and a quick survey. That video can be re-used with actual users in a few weeks. What about that wild idea that’s not ready for a structured doc? Instead of creating zoom fatigue for you and your team, create a quick video and start an async discussion. Loom is a game-changer here. Open the webcam and hit record.
Make scheduling as easy as it should be. This one is simple but so magical. Set up a Calendly account and never spend another minute asking, “what’s your availability look like”. Connect your calendar and send them your link. They’ll be able to find an open time. Seriously, it’s free. If you don’t do anything else from this article, do this now. Time is money. This is free money.
Discovery Leverage
One of the most important activities PMs and their team do is product discovery. But it can be massively time-consuming. And most of that time is well spent, but there are ways we can apply leverage here to be even more effective.
Think of your vision and strategy as leverage. This is the ultimate leverage for product leaders. Without it an outcome-based strategy, you will spend countless hours trying to make sure your team is rowing in the same direction. You’ll get pulled into side conversations questioning what the team is working on. Your teams will thrash and you’ll be left picking up the pieces. An IC product person who can’t connect their work to strategy will struggle with evangelism and prioritization.
But having a clear strategy communicated and bought in on makes everything easier for you and your teams. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. It allows you to start using things like Opportunity Solution Trees. This discovery method established by Teresa Torres helps your team create an asset that accelerates learning and communication. It’s one of my favorite PM leverage tools.
Set up interviews like a recruiter. Finding folks to talk to and organizing interviews can be tedious and time-consuming. But it’s a necessary logistical evil if we want to build great products. Try these methods to reduce the pain.
- Use the Calendly link we just talked about for scheduling (Pro tip: send users a reminder 24 hours before the call to increase attendance).
- Build a set of reliable reference customers. Read Marty Cagan’s post to learn about the power of this. TL;DR — find users you can go back to over and over for insight. Spend the initial effort building these relationships and then reap rewards long after.
- Write great email copy once and save it somewhere. Then modify it when needed for feature-specific context.
Master note-taking to build a second brain. High-quality notes are the gift that keeps on giving if you actually use them. This is true for team meetings, stakeholder calls, and especially user interviews. Having an actual system in place to leverage those notes is key. I’m a big fan of tools like Roam, Notion, and the Second Brain system. Whatever you use, make sure you can easily index and search what you capture. Having an a-ha moment during a user visit and being able to easily find the notes from an interview two months ago is wonderful.
Building With Leverage
A good PM looking for leverage won’t just find it in their own processes — they’ll see it all around them. Here are a few key themes to be on the lookout for with your teams.
Advocate for design systems. There’s validity behind the industry buzz for systems with design leaders. Having a quality system in place that helps your team avoid debates over the size and color of buttons is a big win. It allows the team to focus on the actually challenging product puzzles and move faster.
Heed the call for APIs and platforms. While design systems might be fancier, a solid engineering team is looking for leverage every day. This could look like building a feature in a way where it can be reused across your product suite. Sure, it might take an extra week now — but if it saves you months down the line, it’s worth it. Another example is looking for ways to automate manual processes, even internally. It might not be a fancy feature, but if this new support tool lets the team solve a problem in minutes that previously took an hour, that’s a win for everyone.
Figure out the sweet spot of “just enough” process. Good processes can be leveraged. Partner with an Engineering lead or Project Manager to build healthy team rhythms that apply reusable processes like design reviews, WIP limits, and healthy planning culture. If it’s process for process sake, throw it out. If it saves your time and helps you move faster, cheer it on.
Relational Leverage
Healthy relationships can turn into massive leverage for you in a product role. But we have to be careful here. People are people and worth more than their efficiency value to you. I.E. — don’t be an asshole. But the beauty of real relational capital is that it requires truly investing in people to build. It’s a virtuous flywheel.
If you show you care about folks, understand where they’re coming from, and look for ways to help — they’re likely to do the same. Having a pal or confidant in sales, support, engineering, customer research, or on that other product team can be so valuable in getting things done as a PM.
When to Invest in Building Leverage?
So now that you know about the secret sauce of leverage, when should you use it? It’s tempting to try to automate everything and over-build. But the paradox here is that you can actually spend too much time here and end up with diminishing returns. This defeats the purpose.
Instead — simply ask, “What’s taking up most of my time?” on a weekly basis. My equation is: Complexity + Regularity = Opportunity for Leverage. Is this thing a pain in the ass, but I’ll never have to do it again? I’ll figure out how to get it done as quickly as possible with as little investment as possible while maintaining quality. Is the situation a pain in the ass and I need to do it at least a few times a year? I start to think about building leverage.
The other framework is to think about what will have the biggest impact and reach. Is it something that saves you a few minutes each day or provides you a tiny bit of continuous value? It could be worth automating. But is it something that will save your entire team or organization hours and drive major impact? It’s a no-brainer and you should prioritize it ASAP.
Wrapping Up
What other types of leverage have you applied or built as a Product Manager? Does it fit into one of the categories above or is it an entirely different type of leverage? I’d love to see examples. Leave a comment below or find me at @Nichols_austinj on Twitter. Let’s discuss!
This is part 2 in a series about mental models for Product Managers. Check out this first part covering Inversion and First Principle Thinking.
