Habit: Customize Communications
This article is an excerpt from my longer piece Habits: Five Product Best Practices Learned at Amazon.
Customize Communications
PMs don’t work alone, but they display ownership when they spearhead communication. PMs need to communicate their product status to a wide variety of stakeholders.
The Learning
Partners and colleagues are too busy to follow every move of every team. Other PMs might benefit from your product, however, they don’t have time to chase details. Or maybe they have ideas that might make it better. Meanwhile, leadership can better help position resources and/or attention if they can quickly keep up with a team’s work.
This is why weekly and monthly updates on your product are essential. Daily updates on high-profile efforts are highly advised.
Don’t just send out a list of projects. Always explain and quantify how projects drive outcomes, as well as successes, failures, and the learnings they produced.
The Systems in Support
At Amazon, Stakeholder communication is drilled in your head in your first week when you are told to make sure you start sending Weekly Callouts to all your stakeholders. The format of this email has been built over the years and so have been tried and tested. It is not just a list of what but the product why. It focuses on the outcomes you are driving and owning.
Rules of Thumb
Weekly Communication: Metrics and Milestone Updates Consider metrics updates and product callouts your minimum weekly communication requirements. On Monday, you should be looking at key metrics from the previous week so as to inform leadership and decide if a pivot or reprioritization is in order.
Product Callouts should feature key goals and metrics, notes on learnings, and successes or failures for the week. You should also make sure to include credits to the team, especially any engineers who pulled out all the stops. Yes, it is a lot of work, but it is a PM’s job.
Introclusion = Introductions + Conclusion. Get in the habit of telling readers what they are about to read and what they should conclude about the problem or solution. Or, to borrow from a McKinsey framework: Situation, Complication, Implication.
Unlearn Habits from School: Our excellent English teachers taught us to state our hypotheses at the top of our reports and the conclusions at the bottom. We strive to give the reader a chance to come to their own conclusion using the facts we share along the way. In the busy business world, however, executives want to quickly understand two things: “Why should I care?” and, “What are you recommending we do?”
Natural Anchoring Bias: The Introclusion, stating the introduction and conclusion together, lets you leverage natural anchoring bias. Your reader might still be looking to find fault in an idea, but they have already started anchoring on your conclusion and know where to focus their thoughts and feedback.
Suggested Reading
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
