Atomic Habits for Product Managers
James Clear's Atomic Habits provides a compelling rationale for why frequently practicing small and easy to do atomic habits consistently compounds in benefit to ultimately generate incredible results It then goes on to provide a comprehensive guide for reliably forming such atomic habits, regardless of the level of self-discipline or willpower you may naturally have
Original Article: Atomic Habits for Product Managers
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James Clear's Atomic Habits provides a compelling rationale for why frequently practicing small and easy to do atomic habits consistently compounds in benefit to ultimately generate incredible results. It then goes on to provide a comprehensive guide for reliably forming such atomic habits, regardless of the level of self-discipline or willpower you may naturally have. While many of his ideas naturally appeal to those seeking to develop lifestyle habits like exercising, losing weight, or quitting smoking, I found his ideas to be equally relevant for product managers looking to accelerate their career.
There is a whole host of skills that product managers seek to develop that can only truly be built through deliberate practice. This includes everything from honing your analytical rigor, to building your product intuition, to becoming more strategic. You can't just attend a class or read a few blog posts and expect to become great at any of these. At the same time, simply doing your product role the same way you've always been doing it is also unlikely to help you develop the specific skills you're after.
Instead, the formula for mastering these types of skills requires first developing atomic habits to encourage daily or weekly practice and then performing the habit with deliberate practice. For example, building your analytical rigor requires setting aside time every day to critically review dashboards and form hypotheses from the trends that you see, running weekly ad-hoc queries to deep dive into specific user behavior, putting together metrics recaps a week after every feature launch, as well as spending time each month determining how to improve or augment the dashboards you currently have. Yet the daily demands of a product management role are already so taxing that if you aren't already performing these activities, you'll find it difficult to incorporate them into your weekly routine. That's why to successfully build any of these skills you'll need to first develop the right atomic habits to support them. I wanted to share three of my favorite strategies for doing just that from the book.
Start with a habits scorecard
The right way to start any new habit is to first put together a habits scorecard of your existing habits. The idea is to detail every activity you do in a given day and then to score each as positive, neutral, or negative. For product managers, the best way to do this is to spend one week tracking every activity you do on your calendar. This means beyond your existing meetings, add events for every single thing you spend time on: checking email, grabbing coffee, writing specs, updating JIRA tickets, reviewing designs, lunch, etc.
Once you've put this together for an entire week you can score each activity and develop a clear picture of where your time is being spent. This creates the necessary awareness to help you figure out where there may be time you are spending on negative habits that you can re-purpose to the new habits you are seeking to build. Maybe you feel like you are spending too much time in unproductive meetings and you can look at ways to either ma...