Creativity, conviction and confidence in product building
This week, in-person customer interactions boosted my confidence and productivity at work.
The conditions for the previous 6 weeks have been similar. What I didn’t feel till last week was a good handle on things at work. I had too many tasks in the work in progress state. I was spending long hours at work but not being productive. There was a sense of wavering and second guessing in the contributions I was making.
It changed last week after spending some in-person time talking about our product to people working outside of our product. It’s meant zooming out and outlaying stuff in more accessible manner. I spent time travelling last week visiting a customer with senior folks from my company. It was refreshing and fun to say the least.
I keep reminding myself how good it is to see people on their legs instead of seeing just their heads in boxes on video calls.
This led to an outburst of productivity at work this week. I am ticking off tasks and improving on my work in progress topics to near completion.
If I try to think of a probable cause since no new skill, creative inspiration or novel ideas were discussed, I would pick gaining confidence.
One of my major constraints was lack of customer facing time as a product manager. Since that constraint has been lifted with my recent move. I am able to find feedback and build conviction in the direction we are taking to grow the product.
Feedback is not just did the customers receive the message. It also deals with questions they raised, how they interpreted it and what are we clearly missing in our explanation. It’s more about how they view their world and where your product plays a part and are they buying your vision for the solution or not.
This type of framing helps because we can go ahead and solve the problem creatively. The customer and you will have a common language to talk through when you come back with a solution. This is where you earn trust of a customer. Instead, if you went ahead and handed them what they described as it is. You end up becoming devalued. They would start to believe that it was them who solved the problem, not you.
Value creation for the customer is the first step. Value recognition is where the money comes to you.
Now that I am starting to form a map of jobs to be done and different ways they are articulated by customers. I can increase my conviction which helps with the confidence.
I will go so far as to say. If an employee feels confident in their role, lack of skills is not a bottleneck. They will find a way to get the job done.
This makes sense because I was on the other side of the table when I was instilling confidence in my team to buy grade-wise when they experienced hurdles and rejection. The team running procurement and sales was fresh out college youngsters pitching to farmers set in their own ways. Yet, they got the job done. I would attribute it to them finding confidence in themselves.
Round up
Execution Growth and Product Market fit
I am continuing to build on top of 4 point framework. In this post I use the framework to define execution activities, the state of product market fit and how to grow the product.
Links that resonated
Jonah Mcintire talks about visibility and the implications of Project 44 pulling out of Gartner’s respective quadrant. Jonah has written a textbook on visibility and people should take note when he calls out the eventual consolidation in the future.
Visibility on its own not valuable so being served as a feature instead of a product is the way future unfolds.
Vaughn Tan is revisiting his goal setting process and framework titled Boris. I like the approach because it preaches for autonomous execution based on trade-offs
Sign off
I was skeptical about my exposure to regional nuances of other countries outside of India within logistics domain. As I am beginning to learn and grasp. It is building my overall confidence in the ideas we have as a product.
I was reminded of how local is logistics during this encounter. It reinforces how universal is the lesson I learnt early in my career.
Singing off till next time,
Vivek, parting ways with coffee