This is a shortlist of my personal operating principles.
#1 Make a Proposal
I’m a firm believer in starting with a proposal rather than a blank page. As product managers, our responsibility is to guide the team towards experiences we believe to meet our customer’s needs, and this often starts with us making a proposal and revising as new information arises. We often juggle requirements and perspectives from different teams, all of which is important to factor into our decisions, but I have seen time and time again in my career that starting with a proposal (even if it is a SWAG) is the best way to align disparate groups together. It is my expectation that by default, any problem or decision is accompanied with a proposal, even if it is a draft. This is a great article expressing a similar mindset (Level 4). One of the side-effects of this principle is you must be willing to put yourself out there and get bruised along the way, which takes courage and discipline. I personally have never had a proposal document come back from management without dozens and dozens of comments, which is very much to be expected, but requires a thick skin. The trade-off of making a proposal is getting your ego bruised along the way, but the best leaders take this is in stride, putting the quality of the product higher than the optics of being right.
#2 Lead with Relationships
I’m a firm believer that great teams build great products, and I personally choose to lead with relationships in the way I interface with teams. My expectation is that we treat each other with respect and candor and hold each other to account, but also get to know each other as people. We’re not robots, and despite our best efforts everyone we work with is a human underneath (at least for now), which means we need to be mindful of personalities, emotions, ways of working, and context. This is sometimes referred as Nemawashi, which in my mind translates to “having the conversations before the meeting”. This is the art of being a strong product manager, and something I expect of the people I work with and manage. I’ve seen consistently in my career that leading with relationships will buffer other issues.
#3 Clear Thinking Starts with Clear Writing
I like to think I’m a decently intelligent human being, but I am very confident I am not nearly as smart off the top of my head as I can be when I write things down. The ability to edit our thoughts over time is one of the markers of the advancement of the human race, and something we should leverage extensively. By default, and in almost every case, the correct action is to write your thoughts down. I read much faster than I can listen, and editing is much easier than writing, so when in doubt put your thoughts into a document. Seth Godin also notes that written documents allow us to transcend and overcome the barrier of time, which is a cheap, effective, underrated superpower we should leverage more often.
#4 Ownership and Responsibility
Product Managers often wear 3 hats: Product as owners of requirements and stewards of customer value; Product as leaders within the program; and Product as caretakers, who clean up at the end of the night and turn off the lights once everyone has left. My rule of thumb to act like an owner: if this needed to happen tomorrow, what could you do to make that happen? Tactically, this means we should strive to do the following: set clear expectations on roles and responsibilities within the organization, and work with stakeholders to ensure this is upheld; delegate responsibility and hold others accountable to it; if something falls through, lead with a posture of picking it up for the time being with expectations to delegate in the future.
#5 Sense of Urgency
I stole this from Thomas Keller: everything that is worth doing, is worth doing with a sense of urgency. Deadlines are one of life's greatest tools, and highly underrated in my opinion. Acting like everything we are work on is due imminently is the best trick I've learned to ship work that matters. I demand of myself and those around me that we move quickly and with purpose on everything we do, whether it is due in minutes, hours, weeks, or years. The moment I stop acting in this way, the quality and quantity of my work falters, without exception. When in doubt, act like you're already late, work hard, and then ship.
#6 Decision = Argument + Evidence
I learned this during my time at Mosaic: every decision can be boiled down to an argument, which is a proposal on the way the world works or should work and how we plan to get there, and supporting evidence. Decisions without evidence are prone to failure, and show a lack of discipline in the decision-making process. When we push for decisions without backing them with evidence, we are believing that luck or fate or circumstance will bail us out. Decisions without strong arguments are often easy, low-hanging fruit, that is not worth the time we allocate to them. If a decision is so easy to make that you can do so without a strong argument, you should make it and move on. This shows a lack of courage within the organization to surface the contentious points and debate the stuff that matters. This simple formula has also been useful to indicate, with no feeling of personal attack, that a decision requires more work before it can be made. Saying "a decision = argument + evidence, and some of those pieces are missing here" is a criticism of the work, not of the person, and encouragement to regroup and try again.