 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining. My name is Glenn Wilson and today we're going to be talking about how to think for the long term when everything is on fire. Which for many of you who have product managing experience, pretty much know it's all the time. So first, a little bit about me. Like I said, my name is Glenn Wilson. I have been a product manager at Google for 13 years. I'm currently a group product manager within Google Cloud. Before Google, I went to school MIT Sloan and where I got my MBA in 2008. Prior to that I did a bunch of engineering work in a couple different startups that kind of went nowhere. And then before that I got my BS in computer science at the University of Michigan. So I have some engineering background at Google for 13 years. I like to pretend like I know a little bit about product management given I've been doing it for a little while. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit today about managing for the long term. So first before I get started into too much detail product management is an art. Many people do it in different ways. It's not been perfected into a science otherwise someone will have like turned us into a script by now. But what I found in my career and my organizations, they may not apply to you or yours. Every product manager's job is different. Some of you may be watching this and say, oh, I do things a different way or this would never work at company X and that's totally fine. I'd be more concerned if my advice worked everywhere and anywhere. But you will just have to adjust this to the way that works best for you. And some of you may already find things that work for you and that's great. You don't have to take all the advice but these are things that I've found to be true. So I'd like to share with those of you who who are looking for more insight. So first, as pms there's a million things we need to do, writing customer doing customer interviews doing market research free object bugs designing UX is planning market communications, presenting to executives and doing tech support. The goals and responsibilities expand even further if you don't have a dedicated project manager, or you don't have a dedicated UX lead. You end up doing their jobs as well because that's what we as PMs do we do all the jobs that need doing. And there will always be more to do that a PM can ever get done, you will never get all of this done. It will take up as much space in your life as you give it. And you will end up working 24 seven 365. If you do. If you're on top of that, all the things that typically come in as as product management experiences, everything on the surface looks critically important to do now. That bug looks like it affect top customers. Engineering is screaming for a PRD on this food feature every day and they tell you they're blocked. The executive doesn't know how to use the feature and they're asking for something else they want, want you to explain how to use their phone. And you're just expected as a product manager to handle all these issues, and everything becomes an interrupt on top of it interrupt on top of it interrupt. And suddenly, suddenly everything you're doing with your entire day is just handling all these red things here, and not really doing the other stuff that you should be doing, or you feel like you should be doing. The reported 52% of the PM's time ends up being firefighting. There have been times where I felt like it was 100% and all I was doing was firefighting. And that's actually pretty normal. So your, your days and your weeks and your months go from a clear and solid plan that you had set up beginning the quarter or beginning of the week, and then just becomes this mess, it's unpredictable disastrous everything's a fire, and every day just seems to just bleed into some other problem. Your backlogs get pushed down team doesn't have a lot of confidence in what they're doing and there's conflicting priorities. It becomes kind of chaos. And you can kind of steer through the chaos for a little while and they're going to be times in any company where things are going to be a little chaotic and that's normal, but doing this consistently over years, we'll just burn you out, it'll burn anyone out. And so there, I've got to be better ways to handle this. And usually when I get into situations like this, I tend to get, you know, very, very fun questions from people on the team, like, what's our five year vision, where are we going, you know, up level this three levels. And these all seem to fall on product manager right when we're dealing with another million other issues and other fires. Can't they see that everything's broken and everything's on fire why are they asking me for these things. This isn't going to have any effect on now. Take a moment. We'll take a breath. This is normal. This happens to all of us. You know, product management is just this kind of role. And it's our job to kind of steer through that chaos, but you can take a breath. We're going to start by setting out a couple of points. I'm going to talk about the tips and tricks that I use for myself to get out of these scenarios and how to stay thinking several moves ahead when you have all of these daily fires and everything's falling apart. Some of these things may work for you. Some of these may not. I encourage you to try them and see and adapt to what works for you. So, overall, four bullets. First, we're going to recognize what emergencies and critical issues do to you specifically what they do to your brain. Secondly, we'll talk about objectively assessing the cost and benefit of what you have to do. We're going to talk about ruthlessly prioritizing constantly and what ruthless prioritization means. Secondly, we'll talk about how to set a science in bandwidth for your longer high level thinking stuff that may not be very well structured and how to keep that so that it's not the thing that gets tossed overboard when things get busy. So, moving on, let's break down the problem. First, you've got too much to do. We have too much to do. We're given too many responsibilities. There's no way we can get it all done. And there's more that keeps on coming in every single day. So, what's the trick to this? It may all seem on the surface that it's 100% critical that everything's got to get done. But, in fact, it's not all critical and very, very little evidence. So first let's talk about our brains. Our human brains have natural instinctive prioritization built in. If there's a tiger nearby the hypothalamus triggers in our brains, and we get into fire flight mode. If your body trying to preserve itself, hey, I'm going to fight this tiger, I'm going to run away as fast as I can. And when you're doing that, you're not thinking with the rest of your brain. You're not thinking with your frontal lobe, which is where you do high level planning and high level thinking. Your body is just, hey, I got to deal with this emergency now and I'm going to run away. So long-term thinking, planning, deep considerations, all get superseded when you get into this mode. And there are things that trigger us into this mode, right? Think of a spectrum of criticality. To the left on here, you have, you know, kind of the lighter color, work that is not super important, can wait, get done by someone else, you know, kind of stuff you kind of put it on the back burner. And to the right, yeah, everything, you know, that are super critical, you know, you have a tiger in front of you. The same is true of work coming in. So our brains naturally bias fearful, scary, high emotion work to the right. Think of this as angry customers yelling at us, angry executives demanding things, you know, other teams yelling at you, and having a fear of something's going to affect my career. That just, your brain naturally pushes all that stuff to the right. And our brains naturally bias fuzzier stuff and back burner stuff over to the left. We don't really know what it is. And we don't know that it's, you know, going to come eat us. Our brains kind of like, I don't know this thing, I'll worry about it later. I really just have to survive right. So how do we get out of this mental trap of thinking everything is critical and then deep prioritizing the stuff that's going to benefit us benefit us longer term. First, we have to get on a flight or flight mode when you make any decisions. Usually what I do is get out of that that hard situation where I take a walk. I'm not on the line with the customer. I'm not in the hard presentation or review, and I just get myself back to, hey, you know, objectively, I'm not in the fight or flight mode, my blood pressure is low again, all that. So one other thing I do is I take things in perspective and world of global pandemic. How important is this specific problem. Is it really life or death is the thing that we're building just going to get replaced in a month or a few years. Should I take it so seriously. So our brain also has other tendencies, we tend to over inflate the downside when the downside outcome is unclear, meaning, you know, what's the worst that could happen if you don't ship the future that the CEO is demanding. Well, our brains naturally catastrophize and we naturally think, Oh, I'm going to get fired. I'm going to be blacklisted from industry forever and my career is over. And our just brains just naturally do that. But if you just take a moment, take a walk, take a breath and you think about it. Is this thing that the CEO is just going to forget about in a day. Our brains tend to kind of catastrophize these things when the outcome isn't totally clear. Interestingly, there's all sorts of other mental biases here. And you can see there's, there's a link here for if you want to check them out with hundreds. A couple that are very relevant when you're trying to plan your day and trying to, you know, or organize a roadmap is we tend to bias one is we tend to bias towards what's happening now. That's called recency bias. Whether prioritize or emphasize what's happened very recently, or what's happening right now over something that happened a while ago or maybe something that might happen in the future. You know, for example, have you ever experienced a major issue coming in late in a quarter, and it get bumped up to the top of the priority queue for the next quarter. Well, that may be recency bias playing in. Our brains also overweight and overvalue work that has already been done that can be undone work or recovered. And some of you may may have heard this as the sunk cost trap. No matter what decision you make right now, you can't get back to previous investment, it's already it's already been put in. You have to make a choice based on the state of the world right now. I know that there's been many times in my career where I've heard, you know, we've been working on this for X years and customer wise been waiting on this forever. We just needed to get out the door, you know, we've already spent enough time on it will just get it done. And that, you know, when you think about it that's, that's some cost trap, like we've invested as much as we've invested. We have to look objectively at how much work is left to do and what the, what the benefit of that work is. So, like I mentioned, there's hundreds of these cognitive social and other types of mental biases, you can check them out online. There are many great books about it, and they really open your eyes to how our brains work. So check those out. So, I'm going to take us through a little bit of a made up exercise. So first, before you go into this exercise make sure you calm state of mind ruthlessly prioritizing is harder to do when you're, you know, in fight or flight mode, or you have something emotionally heavy weighing on your mind. But once you've gotten to that point that you're calm, and that you're good ruthlessly prioritizing means deep prioritizing things you know in your gut or right, unless you have strong objective proof otherwise. You're being brutal against the kind of sense of yeah we need to do this. And pushing back towards having an objective outcome of what's going to happen is a requirement. So things you naturally will think are important. Everything looks important. You just have to be very objective about what the outcome is going to be. And then the other product managers that I worked with Sheikah Kapoor and I came up with a method that worked relatively well for us. So what we did was listed out all the demands on our time, basically the relative projects that we're doing, you know, things that are going to suck up our time. And we listed out basically what the what the expected outcome would be. And then mapped out what would what would we do or what would happen if we didn't do it. There's a bunch of other things you could add of like, you know, dependencies and, you know, is Eng blocked on this or whatever other columns you want here. But it's really just to get everything down on paper so that you can start really going through and being brutal about which things you're going to spend your time on which which aren't. So we would go down and we would prioritize based prioritize our time based on the various aspects of those columns. So, there are a lot of frameworks out there for thinking of how to prioritize work, you probably are already using some already. You have to find one that works for you there's the great ones out there. But there's a couple ways that I think about it. When I'm thinking through the brutal prioritization versus what is the, what is the cost, the cost versus the reward. So, you look at the expected outcome. Is this thing, you know, going to give us more revenue, is it going to make one customer happy doesn't unblock us for six months. Those kinds of things like you really just need to think through what do we get if we do this thing. And I also think about what happens if we don't do it today, what happens if we don't do it tomorrow what happens we don't do it for a month or a year. Is it still going to be around and just be ready for us to pick up later if we want. Does it go away, you know if we don't even respond to this is it eventually just going to vanish and then we'll never even need to do the work. So pick it up, you know if it's important and usually have the bandwidth, maybe something your manager can do some something your tech lead can do something someone else can pick up temporarily while you, while you have your time elsewhere. Can you snooze a project. There have been many times where you know that a project's important it's just, you just can't get to it, but then you ask the person who's waiting on you just say like hey I'm underwater. Just give me a couple days, you know can we hit this news button on this and I promise I will get back to you. And then finally, you know is there a dependency on another team that means you can't really do anything on it until that team does something. What that really triggers in my mind is if there's something I'm waiting for another team and I can't progress. I can just flip that on my mind to be like, I can't worry about this right now it's blocked. So I'm going to spend my time on something else. And a very interesting exercise that I take for myself is, I take myself out of my own position, and I imagine I'm someone else, and I'm advising someone that's in this role on what to do. And I say, if this wasn't my job, what would I prioritize or what advice would I give the person's actually doing the job. Sometimes taking yourself out of it takes you know the kind of mental attachment or our own mental bias towards certain projects and says okay if you're going to tell somebody else what to do, what would you tell him to do, and then what work. And so this may be awkward and it's, you know it's a learning process. Some of your instincts will say hey some things are higher some things are lower. But you just got to keep in the back of your mind, hey let's have an objective measure what we're trying to do. It's going to be easy to measure objectively, you'll have, you know measurement metric. Hey we're going to drive this metric up. If we drive it up will know it's up right like we create a revenue, we sold a sold a deal. You know we change latency from 100 milliseconds 50 milliseconds. And that's great you can set out objective outcomes on those things. So your objectives are going to be harder to measure. And they're not going to be very obvious, and they may be somewhat subjective. And obviously we'd like to have things be objective we'd like to not have subjective outcomes if we can. But it at least forces you to think through what you get for a project what realistically you get for it. That may be another project is thinking through hey one of the new lines on my spreadsheet, or in my tracker here is measure Project X or build the measurement for Project X. So, other people do this in multiple, multitude of ways, like they don't necessarily use spreadsheets some use can band boards or sticky notes or whatever your white boards whatever works for you. But spreadsheets work well for me and work well for my teams. So, next. There should be some long, long term things you should be doing that aren't going to appear on the list. It's, it's hard to take a line in here that says long term thinking expected outcome. I don't know I think about stuff. If I don't do it right now. I don't know nothing happens workload who knows right like that's that's the hardest thing to kind of put in this list. And there's always going to be interrupts that come in that you don't anticipate. They're going to be bugs that come in executive reviews things that just that button you have to handle. And what I usually do, and I've recommended my teams is I only allocate part of my time. And so I cut cut at about 70% of what I think I can realistically get done, and leaving the other 30% open as extra slack time, you know this is time that I could use for for interrupts, but it's mostly time that I can use for higher level thinking. So, it's important to not allocate 100% of what you think you can do, because you're not giving yourself any wiggle room if stuff goes wrong, and you're not giving yourself any opportunity to spend some time thinking. So take that line, put that red line about 70% or you'll find whatever ratio works for you. And there will be stuff that's above the line and below the line. Now one, one little interesting tidbit that you might see on this. This slide is that we have two opportunities that are mirror of each other. We have, you know, fixing a bug that says 3% revenue a day, and we have another that adds 3% more revenue. This is an interesting mental bias because we have a mental bias called loss aversion, whereas you know our brains perceive a loss of a certain magnitude as being worse than a gain of the exact same magnitude. So, you can imagine that these are just inverse things with each other and that's just one of our mental brain glitches that we have. You might have noticed that. So next, now comes the critical part. Once you put together that list of things you're going to do and list of things you're not going to do. It's critical to kind of hold the line for yourself and advocate for yourself. So what I've found is really helpful is first publishing this list of what's above the line and below the line and make it publicly visible would be indicated to your stakeholders which means your TL. Your engineering teams, your manager, your other PMs that you're working with. And what's really important here is not just the stuff that's above the line, but stuff that's below the line. That becomes really important because you're communicating outward what you're not going to have time and bandwidth to work on. And you'll be surprised how much those stakeholders will find ways to drop other projects or ask you to deprioritize other things to move some things above the line. And then it stops becoming, hey, I'm going to infinitely expand this balloon with all of these things that I need to do, and becomes more of a negotiation. Well, you know, hey, if I don't do this project for you to do that project for you. And then you find out exactly what people really need when they get into that mode and they see what's going to happen and not. Another trick here is to not move the line. It's really tempting to say, hey, I'm going to add one more project and just kind of push the line down. And then you start cutting into the excess time that you need to do high level thinking. So don't move the line. You can push stuff down below the line to make room for any interrupts or whatever. But don't move the line down because that's where you start creeping into that extra time. So what this ends up looking like is many times when new interrupts are new really important things come in. So you have a conversation with your manager conversation with your stakeholders, where you say yeah I can do this thing, but we got to bump it, we got to bump this other thing below the line. I can't write this PRD anymore. We're going to have to handle this executive escalation. And so that that then causes the people that are putting demands on your time to really think about what's important. And so your manager may come to you and say, yeah, we have this really, you know, important executive review that we've got to do, can you jump on it and take care of this thing. And you could say, well hey, that's fine. I can't do this PRD. And either it's, it's going to go one or two ways your manager is going to say oh okay. Never mind, you know, I'll take care of this escalation, or they're going to say yep that PRD is not important right now let's take care of this big fire. Interestingly, the line didn't move. So you may be looking at the spreadsheet and saying, oh my gosh, it's going to take up so much of my time just maintaining this thing. It's going to be, you know, a line of work just in and of itself just to keep it going. And especially because ruthless prioritization is a monthly weekly daily process. That seems like a lot of work to restack things and shuffle things around spreadsheet. So rather than do that, there's some people that do that and that's great if you've got the time the bandwidth to do that awesome. What I do in many of these, these situations is I handle things through weekly snippets and quarter legals. So for weekly snippets snippets for those who don't know is, at the beginning of the week you kind of write up the stuff that you'd like to get done if you're going to focus on kind of like your, I don't want us to call it a to do list but it's kind of like, here's what I'm doing this week. And at the end of the week, you write up hey which of these things did we get done which didn't get done and why. And you do that on like a regular basis and weekly basis. And so what I do with those snippets is then I publish those out to the people that I work with managers, my pms, my counterparts stakeholders, and they see what you're working on. And it gives a visibility into what things are taking up your time and not. It's also a very good exercise for yourself to see where your bandwidth is actually going and seeing how much is being eaten up by by the tasks that come up and you get to see which ones roll over constantly to the next week, because chances are you'll probably think you're going to get more done than you will. And that becomes a good part of your planning process you start to understand yourself better and what you're good at getting done and what you are getting done. The good tip is you don't necessarily need to track down all the way down to a minor sub task, like you don't need to be like, put coffee on, you know, wrap this present close this bug, you don't have to track at that level you just be like, hey we're working on a project foo, I intend to get food to point this point, you know, by the end of the week. You don't have to be exhausted with everything you're doing, like, you don't need to track like, okay, this is when I went to lunch. This is when I get a snack. Those kinds of things you really don't need to track down to that level. I imagine it's probably some people that do and it's successful for them, but that sounds like also a lot of work. One more final trick here, throwing everything below the line just out of your mind. There's going to be a lot of things that are you're not going to have time for you're not going to get to just throw it out of your mind just don't spend brain cycles on it until it becomes an interrupt. And as I mentioned before, communicating all this to your stakeholders and your manager, really important, the more that they're seeing your snippets the more that you're seeing what's above and below the line for you. That sets expectations and that sets clear boundaries for what you're going to do and not do. If you let them add infinite things, it's just going to go on forever, you're just going to over inflate with work and you're never going to be able to think long term. So that's what it's like I said I send out snippets some people send out little newsletters and little little bits of text, and these can be on Slack channels they can be on email they can be you know however, however makes sense for you and your company. And then finally, the important part of this is holding the line so you can take advantage of the unallocated time. Keep it sacred. You can allocate yourself to 100% of what you think you can do. There will be things that pop up. I'm going to talk a little bit now about how to, you know how to manage that unallocated time. The first thing I can say is, it becomes a trap. Unallocated time. It's very tempting to devolve into clearing out your email, going to this team meeting that happens to be on a calendar, trying to knock something out from below the line. And then everything from incoming chat messages texts, Slack messages, all that stuff. These things just drain your big thinking time to provide very little return they're just administrative. But they're tempting, and some of them play off of your brain's chemistry and behavior, such as getting a dopamine hit you for checking up for updates from your email or your texts. So, there's many great tactics for handling focusing your time that are presented elsewhere. People do things like only answer their emails and certain blocks of time or they turn off their phone. You're going to find what works for you there's tons of great resources out there on how to do these things so I'm not going to talk about those, but check them out. So what you'd also be surprised at what you would do and what's useful with this unallocated time. It may feel a little bit like you're goofing around, you're not doing your job. Since it's easy compared to the other tasks that are more measurable and produce output, but it's okay to spend the time reading articles about new ways to do things cool innovations people are talking about TED talks. It's okay to then do thought experiments and be like, you know what would we build here if we had infinite resources. Should we just do that thing. What if we blew everything up and rewrote everything from scratch. It's, you know, it's okay to take that time with others and just get up in front of a whiteboard with your tech lead and just whiteboarding some ideas out brainstorming come up with some cool concepts. And some of it doesn't even have to be work related, you can just be like hey let's brainstorm all the way different ways we could build kites, you know, stuff like that. And sometimes, you know, that's good to do and that's healthy to just jog your creative juices. Also don't necessarily put a lot of pressure on yourself to produce produce something every single time. A vision for the future isn't invented in a single day, and it's not invented by completing one more task from your backlog. There's many great ideas out in general and how to be creative and how to think creatively, they're out in the wild, you should check them out there's great great books on this. So, some people will find that it's, it's useful for them to schedule this big thinking time and put it on their calendar. Some people just unplug some people do it ad hoc. The key is that you take it. The key is that you spend that time doing these kind of interesting things to kind of just jog your brain, and you know use those frontal lobes. So, what you might notice by now is that that same process that we use to ruthlessly prioritize and focus your own personal time and allocate space for big thinking can also be used towards creating roadmap. So, this also includes how you communicated upwards and outwards, how you set expectations with other stakeholders of what's above and below the line, and especially leaving slack for unexpected interrupts and maybe some experimental time. Some, some extra time the team can take to do just while the crazy ideas to see if they work. Many of the biases and instincts and behaviors of our brains that I talked about before applied to roadmaping as much as they do our personal time, we bias towards bias towards work that, you know, we know it's very recent, or that's scary to us and things like that. We also if we allocate 100% of the team's time to projects that we won't have a space for interrupts and every new development becomes a fire. We're constantly fixing bugs and getting behind in the roadmap and never doing future looking things. It sounds pretty familiar. It sounds similar to what your personal time looks like when things get busy. So, we can use many of the same techniques that we just, you know, we just talked about and some of the advice I just gave on how to ruthlessly prioritize what's on your roadmap. What is the expected outcome of this project, objectively, if we can measure it. If you don't do this project will just go away. Will we will it be in the same state a month from now or a year from now, can we just kind of put it on ice until that. We're constantly biasing towards specific projects based on fear, anger. You know, very scary outcomes. Are we miss weighing the positive benefits versus the negative benefits, all those things that we talked about all those mental biases that you can read about. They end up creeping into our roadmap as well. So building a full roadmap and calculating expected outcomes are beyond the scope of what I'm talking about right now and there's really great resources out there online on how to do these things. So I encourage you to check those out as well. So finally, we've kind of come from everything being kind of a dumpster fire to having a clear set of things you will work on special time that's just for higher level thinking and time and very clear communications of what you're not doing. So I'm not going to talk about how to, you know, set a vision or create a five year roadmap. That's for another talk. But at least you have some structure like what's worked for me and my teams. So, if there's only a couple things that you take away from here. There's, there's a few bits of advice. Not everything is critical. Very few things are absolutely truly critical. We, we with our human brains tend to over prioritize emotional worrisome recent previously committed things in our brains make us do this. So I'm going to, you know, ruthlessly prioritize do it constantly. There's ways to not do it in a very cumbersome, you know, project management tracky way if you want to you can just do snippets. The important part is that you know what your bandwidth is you have a limited capacity for what you can get done. You won't know where that limited capacity ends. So allocate less than what you can realistically get done and make sure that that you have that extra slack to pick up, ideally for future thinking. And be ruthless in holding the line of what you take on and over communicate to people, what you're going to do and what you're going to not do. That's very important. That sets expectations that that makes sure that they know what you're doing. And it also prevents you from starting to balloon up all the things that you're that you're willing to take on. So don't don't use your broader thinking time for for administrative tasks. It's always easy to like say I'm going to clear up my email or just like oh hey there's this quick one page or I need to write I'll just do that instead. Really take the time and how you take the time is kind of up to you and there's there's many really great resources out there and how to do it. No right or wrong way to think big just spend the time being creative. Ultimately, I hope that some of these points were helpful to you. Many of you have probably already found a method that works for you and that isn't here and that's great. This isn't meant to be comprehensive and everyone kind of rules their own way, but hopefully these are these are useful to you. So first, thank you for listening thank you for giving me the time and provide feedback. If something's made sense or didn't make sense, feel free to disagree feel free to tell me hey that doesn't make sense I'm going to do it a different way. Or if you just want to nerd out about product management and prioritization that's cool to say hello, we'll chat. Contact me on LinkedIn, Twitter or through product school. So thank you very much. Thanks for taking the time.