(#3) Peace 👎, Problems 🤝 — always!
Chaos and Product Management
“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Google is funny. You type in a word in the search bar and boom — there is a single-sentence definition available for it. It was all fun and games until we were using those definitions in our assignments to fill pages. It’s when you enter the real world where you question whether or not there exists any word that can be universally defined in a single sentence. For the very same reason, I love googling random words every now and then. Cheap thrills indeed!
Now that I have expressed my weird habit of googling — let’s come back to business, shall we? I have been wanting to write this piece for the last month, but couldn’t figure out how to begin to define “chaos”. Just when I knew what it meant, the very next day the product management life introduced me to another layer of the definition of the term. Not that I know it all clearly now, but at least now I have stopped seeking the “perfect definition”. One such day, while traveling back from work in my Uber, I googled the term chaos. “complete disorder and confusion.” — it said. Mind you — not “disorder and confusion” but rather “complete disorder and confusion”. Chuckled and I knew how I was going to start my piece. So random, right? Weird how randomness solved my writer’s block. And that’s exactly the point of this piece — useful chaos.
One night, after a bustling day at work, I was having a random chat with my lead and we were discussing how hectic things are in multifarious ways in the product in general. I turned to him and said — “If it’s so beyond hectic, why did you choose product?” — “Chaos is beautiful, right?”, he said, and I think that was the best answer I could’ve gotten to that question.
We grew up being taught (or rather conditioned?) to believe that chaos is bad — run away from it. And in order to run away from it, we developed a general tendency of taking the safer route ahead. A route that saves you from chaos and randomness. Speaking from personal experiences, it’s only very recently that I unlearned the “chaos is bad” hypothesis and that has really helped me in my personal as well as professional sphere of life. Indeed, product management has its own sweet way of teaching things you can apply at work and back at home as well.
I have always enjoyed planning stuff — be it a random trip with friends, or be it a date. Be it a family outing, or an office event/meeting. Some major cheap thrills in setting a point-by-point itinerary and checking them off the list as and when done. As a product manager, one thing that I am still coming to terms with is the fact that there doesn’t exist a day that you can plan and even if you plan, it’ll hardly go as per the plan. I think the reason is the sheer variety of hats you get to don as a PM, which ironically is also the coolest part of being a PM for me (I know — a little confusing loop of love and hate indeed). No day is predictable — you don’t know when a feature starts behaving weirdly, or you discover an entirely new user pain point to solve, or a high-priority ad-hoc request just drops in from nowhere. As a PM, You deal with randomness every day, and I think it won’t be a stretch for you to add this to the JD of a PM next time you publish a PM opening at your organization. :P
Among all the haphazardry (yes — I am a fan of this word of late, clearly), one thing that I think PMs should consciously focus on is not losing the bigger picture at hand. It’s very easy to get lost in these small-picture requests/issues and just get to fix them as and when they come. Hence, I believe consciously taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture for you and your users becomes important. I read this somewhere very recently and I really want to get this sentence pinned on my work table as a constant reminder — “Short-term hacks have a cost in the long run”. Something, I have also learned from my seniors is the habit of questioning any such requests with a series of “Why”s to understand the core of the problem at hand and then deciding whether or not the request actually needs to be implemented right away. Because honestly, if a PM won’t question, then no one will — which definitely is not the best place for any product in the market.
It so happens that users are not visible to us. They are sitting miles away from the offices we operate from using the product we are building for them — and hence becomes highly likely that amidst this everyday chaos, we forget the users. We forget the fundamentals behind building a product. And trust me when I say this, this is coming from seeing and being part of such misses every now and then. To help solve this, I am trying to build a conscious process of conversing with users. You might want to read my previous series on user conversations if you got an extra 6 odd mins? If you are a part of a fast-growing startup like I am, then you would definitely resonate with this — because eventually, you are the driver of these processes. If you don’t take care of this — no one else will. Simple. And I think it’s the best place for an early-stage PM (like me) to grow and shine — amidst all the randomness. I guess setting up processes to remain closer to your users amidst all the everyday work deserves another blog article in itself — coming soon(?). :P
Coming back — so is “chaos” really beautiful in product management? Honestly, I don’t know. One day I am loving the adrenaline rush the chaos is giving me and driving me through the process, while the other day — I’m trying really hard (read: struggling) to sail through the process. What I have realized that has helped me is — when you see the clouds of chaos surrounding your day, you take the extra effort to consciously take a deep breath — think of the bigger picture for you and the product — calculate — and then plan the next steps. Every time I have panicked because of the chaos and not done what I mentioned in the previous sentence, it has somehow resulted in something worse — be it product-wise, or be it my mental health-wise. Now if you read this paragraph without keeping product management as the key focus — you will see that the approach makes sense in literally any situation you are facing — personally or professionally. And I think that’s what makes product management beautiful. If you want, you can draw lines from learnings in the professional space into your personal life and they will still make all the sense!
Having said all of that — it’s always the best option to control the chaos whenever you see it building. “Okay Priyam, easier said than done — how should I control chaos now?” — may be the first step towards controlling it by accepting it and understanding the pattern with which it originates. Observe, understand, analyze the pain point — and move on with a bunch of learnings in your bucket to make sure you don’t fall into a similar situation again. I personally think that the critical role of any product manager is knowing the unknowns in the journey of product development and staying ahead of them. This honestly is an ideal state for any PM — if you ask me.
Whatever you read in the past 5 mins was merely how I see chaos in product management. There is a very interesting article by Susan Stavitzski, where she discusses different types of chaos typically seen in product management and this really helped to get to know chaos and be prepared for it. Would highly recommend you to read it if you are interested to understand the core of such chaos.
Signing off for now — while I go back into the chaotic beautiful world of product management with 33 backlog items, 12 high-priority ad-hoc requests, 7 PM-SDE memes, 9 internal & external syncs, and 5 pending PRDs to be completed.
Ciao!
PR
