A (4:08)

Oh boy. That framing urgency always wins if you can look at things urgent versus important. If you drive around Silicon Valley and you, you go through some of these big legacy tech companies like Google or Apple, and you're driving at 10 o' clock at night, you see cars in a parking lot in here and it's scary, but the majority of the people in there are product people, product managers, product designers, they're engineers and they are working late at night. And many people have come to accept two things, like if I'm a product manager, I'm gonna work a hundred hours a week or 120 hours a week, or if I'm in tech, that's kind of what'? Or that busy is what the job is, or we are always urgent in some work, you're kind of calling out the problems with that. But what are some of the symptoms that indicate that this is unhealthy for a company or in terms of getting results on a team?

B (5:02)

I think a lot of it goes without saying. I mean, obviously once you realize that urgent and important framing, then of course you want to ensure that we're doing more of that important work and less of that urgent work. Much of this though, I think comes down to the overall operating model. Actually, I think it comes down to a couple of things, right? If you're looking at people who are being trapped in the urgent, not able to get to the important, there's usually one of two things going on. It's a full on operating model problem, you know, in which case this is really what leadership expects of people, or it's a coaching problem, you know, and the people don't know how to actually work the right way. So if it's an operating model problem, you know, what you're seeing there is an elevated sense of process and that's going to create lots of usually standing meetings and rituals and checkpoints and stuff like that. Or you know, again, if you're in an IT oriented business model where a lot of what you're doing is pleasing stakeholders, you're going to have lots of status, lots of prioritizations. You know, that's going to take up a lot of the time. If teams aren't truly empowered. You're going to see a lot of meetings generated to try and gather consensus, right? Because you know, the team's not empowered to make a decision on something. They have to make sure everybody agrees with them. So there's lots of meetings going on there. One other way that it can be a result of the operating model is that there's just not appropriate context that's being communicated into the teams and they are resorting to meetings in order to figure it out. You know, I guess that's another form of the consensus. So a lot of this can be really systemic. You know, it's not just a matter of stop working on the urgent and start working on the important. Every signal that these people are getting in terms of what it means to be successful in their company is leading them to use their time this particular way. So that's kind of the bigger problem and the one that maybe takes a much, much bigger lift to fix that problem.

A (6:52)

I mean, you're getting to the root of something there, which is it's kind of Like a cultural problem. And to be more pointed, you're calling out in an operating model, when companies don't work in an empowered team model, you just have more meetings and where you just picked on something here which I have to be pointed about, which is meetings. Regardless of any company I have spoken to anywhere in the world, regardless of what they are working on, regardless of the number of people involved, this one thing is always constantly true, as when I ask product people, where do they spend their time? The number one place is in meetings. And I often have to break the news to people all the time. Like, meetings is not product work. But meetings have become like the drug of choice for the modern product organization. They solve everything with meetings. It's almost like how many meetings do I have a day is a badge or a symbol of, you know, I am doing important work. And I think you're calling out the cultural aspects in here, which is driven by the operating model in the organization. And I've always said meetings are symptomatic of three things in a culture that I tend to see drive a high amount of meetings. One is lack of trust. You talked about companies with a low level of trust need more meetings. I don't know what you're working on. I'm not sure you're working on the right thing. I'm not sure my boss is happy. I need to check in, okay, get approval. This a trust dynamic. I am not empowered, so I have to check in. You also called out a little or no context. You know, when people don't know what's important? Well, everything seems important. When I don't know how I'm measured or what success is, then I do everything. And when you do everything, you're too busy to think about what is important and that cycle feeds itself. But also in your printing model, if you don't have any discovery, then you're going to have meetings. You know, what you're kind of describing is that many people are doing discovery while in delivery. You know, we are building something. Oh, are we? What about this? Oh, we need a meeting to talk about it. Like you are discovering those things as you do it. But I want to finish this point since we're on meetings as a driver in some ways. And maybe I want kind of two tips. Many people can't change this culture or this operating model where it's a meeting culture. There are constant meetings, Check ins status. And please don't get me wrong, I often have to say this to people. I'm not suggesting that every time two people get together, it's a bad thing. I often say there's a difference between meetings and work. If you're doing work, you kind of create work product. If you're an engineer and you go into a room and you come out with code, you were working, you know. But we kind of know the kinds of meetings we are talking about here. Those status updates, check ins, those things in here. Maybe kind of two things. One, how do you address that culture of meetings? Are they tips to run more effective meetings? Are they ways to tackle that culture or break out of that cycle that you can offer to teams?

B (9:39)

Obviously SPPG talks a lot about transformation and operating models and things like that. And of course there's the big work that has to happen somewhat top down in order to kind of move culture. But there's also like, what can you do just, you know, yourself, right, Kind of from the bottom up. If you're a first line manager or if you're a person in these meetings, you know, maybe there are some places to wrestle back a little bit of control for yourself. I'll start kind of another story here actually. I'll do, I'll do the gentle version then and I'll do the extreme version that I heard. But I've coached many, many product managers who were new and who were actually working in a more empowered environment than they realized and you know, kind of had found themselves sort of sucked into quite a few meetings and basically, you know, went through their calendar with them and said, all right, what's this one? Okay, are you sure you need to be there? I'm not sure you need to be there. So for this one, I think, you know, this pile, you should definitely go for this pile here. I think somebody else can be there in your place, you know, maybe a delivery manager, somebody like that. And by the way, I, as your manager, I'm going to go and talk to some people and make sure that there is somebody covering and it's okay if you pull away from these for a while. This third category over here, I'm just going to suggest you stop going and don't tell anybody. And if anybody complains to you, tell them to come to me and then we'll have a conversation. Might mean you have to go back into that. Obviously this is a little bit, you know, this is aggressive and you know what I'm saying here is not something that everybody can necessarily pull off. And obviously an individual contributor can't unilaterally make a decision like this. But in some cases this helps flesh out where the Weak spots are, you know, which meetings are truly necessary. It starts to slowly build some awareness about how costly these things actually are. The more brutal version of it. And by the way, I'm just going to put a big caveat and say don't do this unless you are really comfortable with your standing in a company. But good friend of mine who I just coincidentally had dinner with last night is a multi time entrepreneur. He sold three or four companies and one of the last ones he sold to a pretty well known company. One of his main product people was just buried right. He was very, very effective product person. But now that they had been acquired by this larger company, this person was just absolutely stuck. Like spent all day, every day in meetings. And my friend who you know was the CEO of this company that was acquired basically advised his person to stop going to every single meeting. Just don't go to any of them and we're going to see who complains and then we'll put you back in those. And that was just his strategy for kind of getting it unstuck. Again, pretty dramatic. But I think these types of, I think it just helps frame when you realize, you know, that in some cases you might have some tools here. It may create a little bit of pain initially. You can always put it back together.

A (12:28)

I mean those are fantastic techniques with it. Most meetings leave people feeling unengaged, frustrated with their time. And as much as you try to coach meetings out of people, people are addicted to meetings. I have not met a product manager or someone in product that can resist a meeting with the title of their product in the invite. You don't even need to say anything, just put what they are working on in the invite. They feel they have to be there. Just this longing need to be connected and like know what's going on and like they will make a decision without me. Chris, they might do something that affects wall. They might add something more urgent to my plate. I need to be in that meeting to block it, to protect my team, to say no on one end. When you're coaching people in this, you also meet people that kind of have this fear of missing out in a meeting. Is that a cultural thing or an individual thing? What do you think?

B (13:18)

I don't know. I mean that's a tricky case too because that's a sign of somebody who is hopefully deeply engaged. Either that or pathologically paranoid. But you know, I took it as mostly, you know, on the positive side, somebody who really does care and wants to make sure that things are being done the right way and wants to make sure that they understand how decisions are being made. Like, I wouldn't want to necessarily shut down that behavior, but if it is coming at the cost of being effective on the important side of things, then it's probably worth having a conversation and saying, hey, look, you know, I'm seeing you do all of these types of meetings. You're jumping at the second that you hear about one. This is a case to really use judgment and you know, again, find out those three categories that I said before I think are the right ones. I have to be there, somebody else can be there, or nobody needs to be there. And let's be somewhat judicious about this stuff. This leads to another technique that I've used. I think you and I have spoken about this one before and I'm kind of speaking from the point of view of a first line manager because really, I think this is where the majority of the coaching around time management really needs to be happening. You just have the people on the team complete a very simple pie chart on how they actually spent their last week. And you know, the whole point of this is not to have a detailed spreadsheet where you're accounting for every five minutes. It's something that you should be able to do looking at your calendar kind of off the top of your head. You might seed them with like, these are the categories you can choose from. I want to see a pie chart that has five or six slices in it. And you know, that already can be a really interesting way to have a conversation with somebody. The other important thing to say is don't give me the pie chart that you wish you had. Give me the pie chart that you actually had and then we can talk about, you know, the pie chart that we both collectively wish you had and see if there are some places where we can, you know, cut some things down and build some things up. I have a story that is somewhat related to what you were saying about people who are just kind of saying yes to all these meetings because they want to be a part of what their product is. This was a company that was a B2B company. We had an expensive direct salesforce and product management was reasonably involved in the sales process as a good sort of go to market aware product organization is going to be, you know, I insisted that each of the product managers would participate in at least one deal a quarter. So, you know, you're paired up with that, you know, sales rep. And I had one product manager who loved this, like, loved it to the point where I think he wished he was carrying a bag, right? I think he wished he was a sales guy. He got involved in more of these. He got involved very deeply in these things, and he got a little bit addicted to being the hero in these deals. You know, being called out at the all hands every week. You know, hey, you know, this. We closed this deal, and it was largely due to the heroic efforts of, you know, this particular product manager. When I was having this particular guy fill out the pie chart, I had a couple of buckets for him to choose from. One was the amount of time that you spent with customers inside of a deal context. And another slice was the amount of time that you spent with customers outside of a deal context. And as you can imagine, the inside slice was massive, and the outside of the deal context slice was zero. This was a. So this was a product manager who previously had thought, I'm spending all this time on discovery more than anybody else, when in fact, really what they were doing was, was actually servicing deals. And that was a great conversation for us to have. And I said, look, I still want you to participate in these deals, but going forward, this slice of the pie can't be bigger than 20%, like, ever. So. And by the way, this slice over here, that zero, we need to figure out some ways in order to, you know, to bring something more in.

A (17:01)

Oh, I love that. That's a great story. And it's. It's really understanding where your time is going and trying to carve out time for what is actually important versus what you're reacting to. I want to make sure I call out because I. I've always tackled meetings and coached it, and it's important to know it is something that has to be actively coached. But I've always coached it in every organization I have. And I've always said, look, as a leader's job, the three most important things you can do to kill a culture of meetings is to increase the level of trust in the company, to create more context through a vision and strategy and how success is measured and clarity about what's important, and to build a culture of good discovery where people can kind of get their answers before they do work. But on a team level, people say, well, what do we do if we can't change all of those things? And I say, look, I've always had these seven tips for tackling meetings. The first one, I always say, look, it always blows my mind that regardless of who is involved, how many participations, what the topics is, but why does every meeting take one Hour. You know why? It is literally the default setting on our calendar? It is just human laziness. We just default to it. There's a phenomenon called Parkinson's law which detects that the amount of time you take to complete something will expand or contract based on how much you assign to it. So I tell everybody, like, I want to see all your meetings, like just change on our meeting to a 20 minute meeting. And if after a couple of times you find out you need more time, keep adding until you calibrate to the right amount of time you need. But start with 20 minutes. Like, I don't want to see any hour meetings in the culture. The second I always say, well, what also makes us default to starting meetings at the top of the hour? You know, 1pm Meeting, 8am I'm like, I start my meetings at odd times. 8:47am you know, 1:55pm in cultures. And it's very disruptive to a culture because it kind of allows the meeting to also end at an odd time. Takes away the running from back to back meetings. People say, what do I do in the time in between the meetings? I'm like, I don't know, breathe, you know, go to the restroom. We go into meetings. People apologize for being late. One person meets the meeting, you have to reschedule. I love what Amazon does with meetings. People have talked about that, where they make people write kind of this written narrative or a six page written narrative. People come into a meeting, they read the narrative and then they discuss it. They I tell people, if you have to write six pages before you call a meeting, you will have less meetings. You know, it's like an excuse for actually doing deep thinking, deep analysis or deep work. Let's just have a meeting to talk about it. Like talking becomes cheap. Next. I always tell people you've got to cut the number of attendees down. The signs that Bain and company did, looking at decision making, over eight people in a meeting, every additional person reduced the effectiveness in making a decision by like 10%. And I tell people, you know, people think more brain power, the better the meeting. So if you, if you see a meeting with like more than like eight people, it's probably not going to get anything valuable going in that meeting. People, the Social Loaf team people kind of give up how much work they will do because there are many people in the meeting. And look, if the meetings are not fun, people actually don't find the value in them. Most important things actually happen in the first part of a meeting. There is such a drop off in the second half of most meetings because people kind of come in to kind of get a sense of what's the energy, what's the purpose, and then they all just lag. Yeah, efforts. You know, the last piece I always tell teams is, look, if a meeting doesn't have a purpose, doesn't have a clear agenda, doesn't have a sense of what it's going to ask you to commit in terms of your time, there's a magical button in your calendar. Many people have still not discovered it. It's called decline. You know, like you could hit that button, it's going to change a whole lot in your life. And most people, it's a kind of a cultural phenomenon. So I tell a lot of teams leaders have to coach and create space for not just coaching how to run an effective meeting, but coaching the impact on time management.

B (20:57)

I love some of the ones that you have up here. I mean, some of them I definitely do. The duration one I've been doing for so long now that I think I've forgotten that that's not, you know, obvious to everybody. Starting at an odd time is brilliant. And I can imagine, if nothing else, that's going to just shake up, you know, how much they actively mindfully think about a meeting. You know, just by doing that, I think that's fantastic. I'll give you a slightly different model for how I kind of bucket my tactics on these things. There are, I'm going to say four main types of meetings. I used to say three, but there's a fourth one that is kind of throwing a wrench in this whole thing and may unfortunately take us in the opposite direction. But for the first three, it's pretty easy. You're meeting because you're communicating some sort of complicated status. You're meeting because you need to make a decision, or you're meeting because you need to solve a problem. And each one of these things has its own dynamics. And I think actually first of all, understanding that broader process of kind of what is the main purpose of it, you know, among those three, we'll get to the fourth one in a second. But you know, in the those three, what is the main purpose? That can already frame things up pretty well because I think there's just a lot of conflation of these. And then you start to realize there are tactics within each of those buckets. So first of all, with communicating status, the best thing you can do is just ask yourself, is there a better way to do this? Am I calling this 45 minute meeting hour meeting because I'm too lazy to kind of just write this up in a way that's going to be a lot better for everybody else. Most status can be communicated in an offline way much, much more effectively. So if you really have a communication of status, that's a real good target for really trying to figure out if you need to have that at all. The written narrative thing that you spoke about, I think that's really, really well suited for those meetings where a decision needs to be made. And, you know, not only does the act of writing the narrative make you be a lot more particular about what meetings you're actually going to call, but using that narrative can make the meeting itself much, much more efficient. So everybody's got the same baseline. You know, the way Amazon does it, the first 15 minutes of the meeting are quiet while everybody just reads it and gets up to that same point. Most of the objections are handled inside. So any real discussion is around the meat and oftentimes it can make the decision making process really, really effective. So that one's great there. Solving problems, this is where you got to get a bunch of smart people together to start working through stuff. This is being used as an alternative to product discovery. So be careful on those, you know, be careful that this just is not another example of you, you know, not having done your homework or not, you know, having done discovery. So it doesn't mean that we're not going to have communicate status meetings. It doesn't mean that we're not going to have solve problem meetings. But those are ones where you want to be particularly clear on why you need to get a group of people together. The fourth one is definitely different and it moves in the opposite direction. And it is really, it's a byproduct of what has happened because everybody is working remotely so much. And it is, it's the relationship building. It's the place where spontaneity can happen. All of this stuff is sort of the opposite of the drivers that we have for normal meetings. You know, these other three categories of meetings. We're trying to save people's time. We're trying to make it as efficient as possible. There is no space in there for actually building trust. There is no space in there for stumbling upon something that wasn't necessarily on the agenda but turns out to be really, really critical. And that class of meeting, like, I'm increasingly believing that managers need to actually make sure that those things are happening. You might find creative ways to do it, but I mean, maybe we don't Call it a meeting because it is fundamentally a different sort of beast. But you know, for somebody remote, you're still going to be sitting at your computer, you're still going to be looking at zoom based pictures of people. And I'm still trying to rationalize that with the rest of this.

A (24:51)

The argument I make to teams is I kind of call those walk in sessions or collaborative sessions and I say you want to reduce meetings and I like your framing or your buckets in here pretty much. You want to reduce those status update things. You want to reduce and increase actual sessions where you come out with work, product or decisions or actually solutions to problems. But you do call out in this remote environment the need to build trust, to build relationships. It's probably a great discussion we should have on kind of how to work remotely and how you coach teams working remotely. I think that's a very important conversation. I'd love to have you back on it. I do want to call out here because we've kind of picked out millions and it's a good one because I have found it to be the number one place time goes. And it's beyond just the product environment probably in every company. I mean, there's an addiction to meetings. You know. What's number two on the list, Chris?

B (25:46)

Email. Oh, yeah, right.

A (25:48)

Yeah. Email is like number two for companies and number three on the list is actually chat. You know, whether you're using Slack or teams and you know the real dynamic. If you look at all of these things, meetings and emails and chat, and you look at the amount of times people spend on these aspects, you start to ask yourself how much work is actually proactive versus reactive? How much are we deciding what we do than is things happening to us? To your earlier point, how much are we working on important versus urgent? You know, the way I describe it to product teams, do you feel more like a firefighter or do you feel like a physician diagnosing problems? And if you look at these reactive behaviors, they really take away from work. So I was kind of getting to the question of how much time is good time for work versus good time for all of these things. What are your thoughts there?

B (26:40)

Yeah, yeah. And I like the proactive reactive. I mean, that's probably more fodder for a pie chart again, you know, just to actually have somebody reflect on a week and a little harder to keep track of, but just to bring some awareness to it, I think is a big part of it. Yeah. So you know, how much time is good time? I mean, and in fact, let's just be precise about it. I mean, when we're talking about product management and that whole urgent, important thing, really the important stuff is discovery. It is often though not as urgent as the delivery stuff. Right. The delivery stuff is the stuff that right now we've got to be feeding this expensive engineering beast. Maybe we're tracking towards some public event, you know, whatever it happens to be, there's a lot of urgent stuff going on there. Discovery ideally is a few weeks or maybe even further ahead of what we're actually building. So it's the epitome of the important but not urgent. You know, I think in that covey thing that I did, that was quadrant two, you know, it was all about how do you get quadrant two much more in the foreground. And I think the first thing to realize is whether or not Discovery, you know, your role in a product team. Is discovery your day job or is discovery your side hustle? If you are a product manager or a designer, discovery is your day job. If you're an engineer, discovery's your side hustle. That probably minimizes it. I actually heard one of my customers talked about it, Discovery, is it your major or your minor? Right, so, so maybe we'll do that one. Right. But if you're a product manager or a, or a designer, discovery's your major, delivery is your minor. And that means that ideally the majority of your time should be spent on discovery activities. You know, I think we for a long time have said it's about four hours a day. And you know, that's, that's half the day, right? That's going to leave some time for delivery and some time for kind of some natural flow of meetings. Now one of the things though that I often hear, and I think this is when I talk to many of my customers, especially people who are kind of new to hearing about discovery and how that all works, they tend to misunderstand and see discovery delivery as this sort of zero sum game. So they'll say, okay, look, my job right now is this big. It's all this delivery, project management and whatever. And you're telling me now I have to do four hours of discovery a day on top of all of that? And that just fundamentally misunderstands what discovery, when done well, is doing for you. It should be reducing all of the other stuff by probably far more than those four hours. You know, at the simplest level, you're going to be working on fewer things or you're going to be iterating in a canvas that is much, much quicker. To iterate on. So that's one thing and that's a bit of a mind shift for many people. The other thing to also keep in mind is that when you say four hours and you say discovery, that doesn't mean like you're user testing four hours a day, every day. Discovery is about the interactions that product managers have with their tech lead. It's the conversations they're having with business stakeholders. It is actually figuring out how you're going to describe this to the delivery folks, you know, whether it's story writing or other sorts of documents. So all of that is part of discovery. Certainly some of it is going to be directly in front of customers, but we're not saying half of every day is in front of customers.

A (29:50)

Yeah, it kind of comes full cycle to when I even see some of the best product managers and I say, when do you get time to do your discovery? And you know, they're like, I'm working 12 hour days, I'm working 16 hour days. They say, look, I get my four hours after work. Yeah, from like 6 to 10 o' clock at night.

B (30:07)

I hear that too. And I'm actually suspicious of how effective that can be because so much of discovery is collaborative. So yes, that means that you have to be convincing everybody else to be working after dinner and working with you on that.

A (30:18)

So you're spot on. Your. I think it goes back to what is really important and urgent. And I love your phrase discovery is not the phase, it's the day job. It's. It's kind of what we do. Don't say how much time are engineers spend in coding. That's what product people do every day and it has to be a lifestyle. This has been fantastic and insightful and I love kind of here some of the practical techniques and tips. Get a pie chart to understand where your time is going. Assess what's urgent versus important, what's proactive versus reactive, how much time is actually spent on real product work. There is a hard truth here and it's often hard for me to tell people this, but when I do that exercise, often with teams, you know, I tell product people you're more like a project manager because when I look at your time, a majority of your time is going into delivering something than deciding what to do. It might sound like a harsh reality, but it's really back to the operating model points you brought up is in those environments, those product people are mostly project managers and it's reflected in where their time goes. Chris, this has been super insightful. I'LL leave you with this because I just recently had someone ask me, a new product manager ask me for a tool or or technique for products. And I said, hey, you know, I'm going to tell you my favorite time management technique. It's the most important tool. And he was eager. He kind of brought out a note, but I said, no, no, no, where's your cell phone? He's like, yeah. I say, you know, on your cell phone there's a button, it looks like an airplane. Push that button. You know, magical things will start to happen in your world if you don't have one of those. Maybe around the edges there's an on and off button, push and hold it. Things will start to change. There is really some cornerstone of good product work that the discipline of time management is abso because we need time to think. If you're in meetings all day, when are you thinking about what's in those meetings? You need time to solve problems. You need time to work actively to understand customers and understand the insights into your decision making. That's really the power of great product work. Chris, I cannot thank you enough for being on this episode of Product Therapy. What a great conversation on time management. Thank you again for being here.

B (32:21)

Thanks Christian. Really fun.

A (32:23)

Want to learn more? Until next time, Please check out svpg.com, sign up for our newsletter that Mary Kagan puts out. Join us for one of our workshops near you and get access to all of the articles and content we put out. And thank you to everyone for joining us. Until next time, have a good day. A Quick Disclaimer While this podcast is named Product Therapy, it is not hosted by licensed therapists or mental health professionals and it is in no way a substitute for professional mental health services. We recognize the importance of mental well being and encourage anyone facing personal difficulties to seek support from qualified professionals. See www.findahelpline.com.