- Focus time is important for everybody, managers included. All meetings need to “pay rent”
- Some surface-level sniff tests for “should this meeting exist?”: can you write an agenda for the meeting? Is it as short as it can be (15 minutes)? Could this meeting have been a medium-length Slack supplemented with a Loom?
- Think of total meeting cost, in people-hours. There’s a reason this Tweet got 13.5M Views
- Meetings are necessary (we can’t Vulcan Mind Meld), but they are tools to increase alignment between independent and (hopefully) empowered and capable people; unblock people to keep work flowing; and to remind us that we are humans and we also work with humans. Don’t spam meetings, but also don’t avoid them at all costs because the costs are dear
- PMs, in particular, should not be in meetings all day. That’s an anti-pattern, and if a PM is in meetings >50% of their day, I immediately infer that they are not being as effective as they could be
- They might be in meetings they shouldn’t be, and don’t know how to politely excuse themselves
- Their scope may be too big, and they could benefit from trying to do one thing at a time
- They may be spending too much time on things that only need to be performed at B+ level (c.f. Half Assing it with Everything You’ve Got)
- A rough number of what I believe to be healthy is 60% Focus Time, 40% Meeting Time. Focus Time CAN include pairing and synchronous collaboration, but the key to that is that it’s ad hoc, timeboxed, and unblocks you from the thing you were focusing on
- I alluded to this above, but you are a human. I am a human. My partner, parents, friends, and (hopefully one day) children are all humans. Which means that we aren’t here on this planet to work
- We are here to eat croissants; paint amateur-to-good watercolors; watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on repeat (oh, is that just me?); laugh and cry with close friends; eat croissants; listen to music; take care of and be kind to as many creatures as we can; enjoy the rain and snow with a hot mug of coffee, tea, hot cocoa, with an optional glug of whiskey; eat more croissants; go for long and meandering walks; dance inexpertly but joyfully; foam roll; convince ourselves that we can pull off bangs; try to practice whistling; and did I mention the croissants? It’s also best to do these things with friends, family, loved ones, and if you feel brave, strangers
- In the times that we’re not doing the above, we try to build things that solve real problems for real people in the world. We hop on the phone or try to shadow in person (if they’re comfortable) to understand better what problems they’re running into. We try to remain in the mindset that treats feature requests as signals that people need help, as opposed to annoying pests that need to be shut down
- We bring a full effort to work. Not so much effort that there’s nothing left over for home, life, and our loved ones; but we care and we show up. We come to necessary meetings (see above for my stance on what meetings are necessary), and we try to be 100% present during those meetings. When we judge a coworker to be lazy, we dig in, and get curious about what might be going on in their lives that they’re distracted or tired
- I strive to be kind to myself and others. When I make a mistake, I attempt to honestly own my part in that mistake, but I don’t go further than that and tell myself “I’m stupid, or I should have known better, or that this is a personal failing on my part”. I try to nudge others to treat themselves this way as well. An easy test for this is: “would you say what you’re telling yourself to your little sister/a small child/your grandparent?”
- If I am managing you, I would LOVE to hear your feedback. I will try to model continuously asking for open and kind feedback. At the same time, I know that it is really tough to give upward feedback (tough to the extent that it is completely reasonable for you to not want to take the effort to do it). If you DO decide to put in the effort, and I’ve done enough to earn your trust, for you to give me feedback, I promise to honor that effort to listen and incorporate your feedback. Please give me feedback here: https://www.admonymous.co/alexdou
- Ambiguity kills. You will likely see (and get tired of) me referencing these two things liberally:
- Some other assorted tips and ideas:
- Build time into your schedule at work to learn
- If you are early in your PM career, we’ll start from a fairly standard rubric of core PM skills (one example, for a longer time than I care to admit, I didn’t think I needed to be good at Project Management because I aM a PrOdUcT MaNaGeR. Spoiler alert: you need to be good enough at Project Management to be a good Product Manager). But if you’re later in your career, we’ll be working together to figure out what kind of senior PM you want to be
- I adhere to the European Standard of PTO: try to take 5 business weeks off throughout the year. Also, taking PTO to do errands (e.g. moving houses, going to the DMV, etc) does not count
- The other side of this coin is that when you ARE here, show up
- I try to give timely and specific feedback
- Timely: one month after the fact is not timely. I will try to give feedback as close to the event as I can—if appropriate, in the moment. If we’re in a meeting with a bunch of people and it would be inappropriate, I will try to do it after the meeting
- Specific: I will explicitly say what I observed (which, notably, is different from what actually happened AND what your intention was). But I will try to go through the following points:
- This is what I observed
- This is the impact of what I observed, and why I think it is important to give feedback about it
- Here is my suggestion
- 15 minute rule
- Some traumas/areas of development of mine:
- In my early career, I got fired, then fired again, and then laid off. That was really rough, and so sometimes I still fear that it’s going to happen again when I least expect it