Finding Clarity of Thought for Yourself – Product at Heart 2023
How confident are you in your ability to think clearly? If you feel like you’re constantly pulled in a thousand different directions, welcome to the club! Product people in particular have so many competing priorities and projects, which is why Finding Clarity of Thought for Yourself was one of the themed sessions at Product at Heart, in addition to Providing Directional Clarity to the People Around You, Exploring Product Operations, and Knowledge Exchange for PMs.
This themed session featured three 20-minute talks and a quick roundup hosted by moderator Tobias Freudenreich. During the Finding Clarity of Thought for Yourself session, we heard from:
Megan Murphy, Cofounder and CEO of Ourspace
Dominique Jost, Head of Product at Doist
Shaun Russell, Product and Leadership Coach
In this post, we’ll do a deeper dive into each individual talk. If you’d like to explore the topics in even more detail, make sure you check out the videos from each session.
Megan’s talk: 🎥 Why Carving Space to Think Is an Evergreen Product Challenge, and How to Overcome It
Dominique’s talk: 🎥 Clarity at Heart—Easy as ABC
Shaun’s talk: 🎥 Overcoming Self-Doubt: Strategies to Reframe Attention & Unlock the Mind of a Product Manager
Megan Murphy: Why Carving Space to Think Is an Evergreen Product Challenge, and How to Overcome It
“Finding clarity of thought requires you make the space to just think—and that is hard to do,” said Megan. To kick off her presentation, Megan outlined three major reasons why carving space to think is such a challenge for product people:
Distractions in the form of meetings, notifications from the tools we use personally and professionally, and zombie topics (you know the type—those recurring issues that just won’t die and keep coming back to haunt you).
Lagging systems: Labor laws and general beliefs focus on the doing portion of our work. “We get messages like ‘get sh*t done’ rather than ‘think sh*t through’ and our desks are set up for optimal doing. But rarely for optimal thinking,” says Megan. We make money by thinking and doing, but there are no boundaries around when or where we do our best thinking.
The guilt we feel in pursuit of finding clarity because we have “nothing to show for it.” We worry if we don’t have something tangible at the end of the day, we might be perceived as lazy or uncommitted.
So now we’ve got our heads wrapped around why it can be so difficult to think clearly, but what do we actually do about it? Megan shared three steps:
Figure out what you need to Do Great
Give yourself permission to carve space
Communicate that clarity however best helps you express your convictions
Let’s drill down into each step.
1. Figure out what you need to Do Great
Not all tasks deserve the same level of attention or clarity of thought. Megan recommends going through a scoring activity with your manager to categorize your tasks. She uses the labels Drop, Delegate, Just Get Done, and Do Great. There should only be a handful of tasks worthy of the Do Great label. Once you’ve identified them, you know where you’ll want to devote your clear thinking time and energy. If you get stuck, consider the following:
Does this item have very high switching or opportunity costs?
Is this item likely to require a damage control plan?
Is this item likely to land in bad press?
Is this item likely to land in significant customer churn?
2. Give yourself permission to carve space
It’s rare to find a manager or company culture that encourages time for deep thinking, so you’ll need to give yourself permission to carve space—and stop feeling guilty about it. Megan suggests finding those places where you can do your best thinking, whether it’s out in nature or when you’re immersed in an activity like cooking. And as a last resort, you can “declare meeting bankruptcy,” where you clear your entire schedule for a day to allow yourself time to reset.
3. Communicate that clarity however best helps you express your convictions
Once you’ve found clarity of thought, it’s critical to let it out. If you’re feeling uninspired by traditional communication channels, don’t be afraid to seek out alternatives. Megan recommends exploring tools like voice notes, illustrations, or video to convey your message in a more memorable and effective manner. And don’t be afraid to ask your colleagues outside of product—this gets them invested and excited about the future of your product.
Dominique Jost: Clarity at Heart – Easy as ABC
To tackle the topic of clarity of thinking, Dominique did what many product people would do—he gathered quantitative data. By surveying over 250 people in his network, Dominique uncovered some insights into clear thinking.
First, Dominique asked participants to score their own ability to think clearly. He then asked which traits they believe define clear thinkers. Interestingly, the responses between the self-professed clear thinkers and self-professed non-clear thinkers didn’t vary too much. The top three answers in both groups were: focus, emotions, and analytical.
Next, Dominique asked what clear thinkers do differently from non-clear thinkers. Again, both groups chose the same three answers: externalizing your thoughts, organizing and planning, and mindfulness.
To tie all of these actions together, Dominique shared the simple ABC model for gaining clarity. When you find yourself struggling to think clearly, you can use this mental model to externalize, organize, and mindfully approach your challenge.
Once you’ve outlined the status quo and problem, the desired end state, and the challenges you’re facing, you’re creating a path toward directional clarity.
But clarity is not just about thinking—it’s also about feeling. And this is where the responses to Dominique’s survey revealed a big difference between self-professed clear thinkers and non-clear thinkers. The non-clear thinkers were nearly twice as likely to say they experienced feelings of overwhelm.
To get a better grasp on feelings of overwhelm, Dominique shared an emotions wheel, focusing specifically on the wedge that relates to fear.
Fear obscures things and hinders progress. If you don’t deal with it in a healthy way, you’ll be stuck. In other words, when we feel overwhelmed, it’s often because we’re afraid.
Dominique shared several tactics that can help you overcome fear (and therefore feel less overwhelmed). These included box breathing, guided meditation, and self-compassion. And, perhaps most importantly, accept that fear is part of your life. When you find yourself feeling fear, inspect it with curiosity and try to discern what that signal is trying to tell you. If you want to hear more about any of these tactics or the results from Dominique’s survey, you can watch his full talk here.
Shaun Russell: Overcoming Self-Doubt: Strategies to Reframe Attention & Unlock the Mind of a Product Manager
Shaun started his talk with an anecdote about penalty shots in a football match (or “soccer game” for the Americans among us). The interesting thing about penalty shots is that the biggest obstacle is not out on the field, but within the mind of the player. Whether they make the shot or not relies almost solely on their self-confidence… or their self-doubt.
Next, Shaun invited the audience to participate in a quick movement exercise that demonstrated the connection between where we focus our attention and our ability to do an activity. Not only did this get the audience up and moving for a moment, but it set the stage for his talk on how to use attention to overcome self-doubt.
Because product management is a job that involves high pressure, high complexity, and high uncertainty, self-doubt is quite common in this profession. “Self-doubt is a feature, not a bug,” said Shaun. Throughout the long span of human evolution, self-doubt protected us and guided us to make better decisions.
The problem we face today is that our context has changed completely. Shaun explained, “Self-doubt is overstimulated by our environment.” Our reactions to the pressure and uncertainty are often based on old patterns of behavior that don’t fit our current context.
As a result, we often experience a vicious cycle of self-doubt, where self-judgment drives unconstructive attention.
To break out of this cycle, we want to turn our unconstructive attention into constructive attention.
Shaun shared three modes of attention for product people:
Pay attention to outcomes as a starting point
Outputs when outcomes are overwhelming
Insights when a new perspective is needed
Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Pay attention to outcomes as a starting point
If you find yourself in a situation where you’re experiencing self-doubt, such as a stakeholder meeting where you’re feeling nervous, try to focus on the outcomes. Instead of thinking about how your voice sounds or what other people think of you, consider the ideal outcomes of the situation by asking questions like, “Are my stakeholders informed and up to date?” “Have we agreed on our next steps?” Having clarity on outcomes is helpful and holds your attention in a productive place.
2. Outputs when outcomes are overwhelming
In situations where focusing on outcomes still doesn’t help you refocus your attention constructively, Shaun suggests focusing on outputs instead. You can do this by writing down everything that’s on your mind: the situation you’re currently in and what you’re worried about. When you keep everything in your head, it can feel overwhelming.
But once you get your ideas out on paper, you’ll see that they’re finite, more simple, and probably don’t hold as much weight as you previously assumed.
3. Insights when new perspective is needed
Finally, you may find it helpful to seek an outside perspective. This could be in the form of speaking with a coach or turning to an established framework to help you ask the right questions. For example, the GROW Model is a framework that can help you work through a challenge.
In the absence of an existing framework, Shaun says you can rely on yourself. Get curious and ask yourself, if there was a framework, what would it be? If you had a colleague or coach to turn to, which questions would you ask them?
Curious to see what else we covered at Product at Talk? Check out our blog and video archive for even more inspiring content!