Bias For Action — A Product Manager’s perspective
Simplify and streamline communications to have a bias for action.
Update: Recently, an article on Amazon’s decision making style and a key message is “disagree and commit”. It’s amazing how many times people debate a decision. If the decision is easily reversible, then people can disagree but commit so the teams can move forward.
A big part of a PM’s job is communicating. Balancing this with decision making and collaboration is not easy. Time management is a critical success factor, especially for PM’s. I’ve incorporated some of Julie Zhuo’s suggestions like saving 30 minutes every Monday to evaluate your calendar. Also, I’ve taken advice from Sachin Rekhi on how to organize and collate material to read. I read pretty much every night for a couple of hours before I go to bed. I use my new iPad with the “Night Shift” feature which has definitely helped me sleep better. Getting to inbox zero every week is my goal, that I occasionally let slip (hint: It doesn’t mean zero emails in the inbox).
At night, I tend to read either a couple of chapters of a book or read short articles on technology via various sources like Medium, Hacker News, FastCoDesign. I also read things of personal interest like Cycling, News, and Politics, etc. I use Flip-board to curate the content and if the article is long, I save it to Pocket for later. If I find something interesting, I share it right there and then use buffer to publish. In the morning, I read some of what I’ve collated the night before.
Over the years, I have come to rely on different tools — be flexible — to help me be as efficient as I can. As PM’s, we need to focus on how to make the best of the limited time we have. Some of these are listed here.