What I learned about product management from buying an old house
There are many ways to sharpen your product management skills. Rolling up your sleeves and learning by doing is on the top of my list. You can also take a course like this or you can do what I did and buy an old house in desperate need of a renovation.
A few years ago, we got the keys to our new home. The realtor said, “It’s a charming, original house with lots of possibilities.” What he meant was: the list of things that need fixing is endless. When we bought it, we had the illusion that we would be able to move right in. Once we got the keys, we wised up. It ended up taking more than six months of renovation before we could finally move in.
This is what I learned from buying a 90 year old house — the most expensive course in product management I will ever take.
To make decisions fast, you need to know what you want
We were late for the showing and spent only 15 minutes in the house before we knew, we had found it. This was the one! We were able to make up our minds so fast because we had spent a lot of time thinking about what we wanted. We knew exactly what our priorities were. We specifically wanted a house in Copenhagen built in the period 1910–1940 with two floors, at least 140 m² (1500 ft²), with a basement, not on a corner, no sloping walls, and one that would fit our budget, of course. As it turned out, there were not a lot of these houses. In fact, we only found this one.
As a product manager, you make decisions all day long. You decide which feature to build next and which to postpone, what’s an acceptable solution and what’s not. You decide the scope to cut and the scope to creep. There are so many decisions to make that it’s impossible to research each and every one thoroughly. In many cases one decision is as good as the other, as long as you keep moving. Postponing a decision is often more harmful to productivity than making the wrong one. So you need to be comfortable making decisions fast, trusting that you’ll be right more often than you’re wrong. Investing a lot of time in knowing exactly what it is you want will enable you to make decisions on the fly.
It took me only 15 minutes to make one of the biggest financial decisions in my life, so it’s definitely possible to decide almost anything in less time provided you really understand what it is you’re after.
Communicate like a boss to your boss
During the renovation of the house, I found myself in new uncharted territory. I was the one in control of the budget, making demands and for once not being responsible for delivering. We had people working for us — not the other way around. And we were paying for their expertise and relying on their advice.
Throughout the renovation of the house, whenever we discovered a new problem (which was quite often), I found myself demanding to know the answers to the following questions.
- What is the right solution to the problem, meaning what is the best possible solution given infinite amounts of cash and time? What would that cost?
- If the best possible solution is out of reach, what is a reasonable alternative? What would that cost?
- Once a solution is found, how long will it take to do? Will it move our final deadline?
These are more or less the questions I’d usually get from my bosses. In all honesty, I always struggled to see the value of constantly having to answer questions like that. Why couldn’t they just trust me to make the best possible decisions and trust that we’d deliver the best solution in the fastest possible way? After working on the house, I understand the dynamics a lot better.
Do you know the good old scrum story about what it takes to make an omelet? The pig contributes with the bacon — its life. The chicken contributes with its eggs and walks away. If you’re a pig like me — so invested that it’s hard to see a project from the outside — you may struggle to communicate the right things at the right time to your surroundings and superiors — the chickens.
If you recognize the picture, here is one way to improve your communication. Spend your own, hard-earned money on a project where you need to pay other people to do the work. Preferably the work is something you know little about and thus you rely on their expertise. You will need them to find the best possible solution for the money you’re willing to invest. You will want answers to questions much like the ones above because you have a vision you’re steering towards, a deadline, stakeholders to manage (in our case the bank) and you’re frequently making decisions about what to invest in given the information available. I bet an experience like that will give you the empathy you need to communicate like a boss to your boss.
Wow moments do make you buy
One thing in particular made us confident that this house was the right one for us: the staircase. Now, all staircases will connect two floors and help you get from A to B. But not all staircases are wide, soaked in colored light from a stain glass window and with a winded railing of beautiful, polished brown wood. This one is. And because of that, we didn’t even blink when we offered the listed price without even attempting to negotiate.
Wow moments are frequently discussed in product development and in my experience also frequently cut from scope, maybe because they are not part of what is considered minimally viable. Maybe rightfully so, but they do make a difference that should not be underestimated. Every once in a while, you experience something that is unnecessarily nice, well done beyond measure and you appreciate that the creator put all that effort and thought into it. I don’t know about you, but this usually gets money out of my pocket.
Celebrate because you’re never done
We ended up moving in two months after we planned to. We had wanted everything to be done before moving in and of course that didn’t happen. It’s been two years now and we’re still not done. We probably never will be completely done and so one has to enjoy the progress and process.
In product development and management, there is a lot of talk about celebrating victories and even failures. In reality it turns out to be very hard to agree on a time where a celebration is appropriate. If you just released, someone will point out that we cannot celebrate before all the bugs are fixed. If you fixed the bugs, someone will point out that we cannot celebrate before we have gained traction or achieved our business goals. And once you gained traction or achieved the business goals you forgot what it was you wanted to celebrate.
When a house is built, many rites mark the progress along the way. For example topping out is held when the last beam is placed. In our case, our contractor brought champagne for one of the final meetings, where we were reviewing all the work and making a list of what had to be re-done. At first it seemed counter-intuitive to drink champagne and celebrate, when we were going over all the details we still weren’t happy with. But afterward I realized how nice it was of him to pick a moment to celebrate our achievements, despite all the missing details. And now that I know we’ll never be done with the house, I cherish the memory of sharing a nice bottle of champagne and getting tipsy before dinner in a brand new kitchen smelling of fresh paint and varnish. (I expect our contractor knew that his final invoice — which was a great deal bigger than we expected — would be easier to swallow after a bottle of champagne.)
So product managers, I urge you to celebrate early and often, because you will never be done. You will discover bugs after releasing and traction will be a struggle. But no one can take away the champagne you’ve already popped.
