John Cutler – 5 Essential Product Habits for Every Team
John Cutler is a product thinker and coach who has worked with hundreds of product teams around the globe. He sees himself as working in the “habit business”, meaning that he is trying to get product people to do things that will improve their ways of working. Observing the power of habits over words for several years has become the personal inspiration for his keynote talk at the Product at Heart conference.
His thesis: In product management, we have more than enough frameworks. But very little of this translates into our daily work. Product companies are defined by habits – and not by frameworks. So instead of discussing frameworks, we should rather focus on helpful habits.
Before diving into his talk, John asks the audience to take out their phones and check their work calendars. Why? Because it will tell you what your company values. He also encourages the audience to think about their companies’ zombie habits (that are done without any good reason) and product resolutions (resembling shiny new year’s resolutions, so basically things that we intended to do and then never follow up on). This is important to understand what good habits are and how to make them work.
What is a habit?
So what is a habit? According to John there is this theory that a habit is a learned, very automatic sequence of actions given a cue. For this talk, John defines habits more loosely as “just how we work”.
Habits are part of a broader puzzle, together with knowledge, skills, motivation, and environment – All of those things combined make a company successful. But habits are often less discussed in a company or team environment. While there is a lot of “habit porn” for individuals, there’s not so much for teams working together. Habits in this context are very important, because they help us to practice our skills and reduce the need for motivation. If you have a good habit in place, you don’t need to be super motivated to do a certain thing.
John also mentions a paradox when it comes to habits: While we want them to be simple and easy to do on one side, we also want a certain level of intentionality to go along with it. If unquestioned, formerly useful habits can become zombie habits. So there needs to be a balance between “easy and intentional”.
Habit 1: Connecting with customers
John’s take on customer research: “Connecting with customers is the ‘I go to the gym’ of product management.” Everybody says they’ll do it, but the reality looks different. So what does it actually look like to do impactful customer research? John outlines four important habits:
Intentional inquiry
Active listening
Thoughtful synthesis
Connect to decisions
He stresses the importance of not just collecting insights, but making sure they can be connected to something you need to decide. Connecting insights just for the sake of it can become a classic zombie habit. John also mentions how important it is to involve the whole team in the process, especially when synthesizing customer insights. He encourages product managers to have two one-hour long synthesis sessions with the whole team on a weekly basis.
Habit 2: Storytelling & Reducing Uncertainty
John says that product management is like a routine. Your main job is reducing uncertainty – for yourself, your team, and your company. So making sense of things and telling a coherent story is an important area to develop the right habits, according to John: “As product managers, you are storytellers”. Product managers have to make it a habit to refine the story based on the current reality. They have to become storytellers and coherence checkers and as with every habit, this has to be practiced. He has a couple of examples how we can practice those things:
30m morning writing blocks
Maintain risks and assumptions log (adjust confidence levels)
150 word - 750 word - 1500 word - 3000 word (and visuals)
Commit to practice 1m elevator pitch 10x during week
Rolling 12-month "honest" roadmap (with "?"s)
Since a coherent story can best be achieved when writing it down, writing is a skill that all product managers should master. John proposes to have regular writing blocks in the calendar to practice this. He also suggests rehearsing writing a long document and then boiling it back down to a tweet. This way the essence of the idea becomes clearer and the discussion with the team can lead to more alignment. Product managers should also commit to practicing elevator pitches to make sure their message is clear. This is not supposed to be a sales pitch, he’s talking about the real world pitch: “Here are our challenges at the moment, these are the risks, these are the assumptions we are trying to track.”
Another good way of reducing uncertainty is to write risk and assumption logs. These track the current risks and your assumptions – ideally even including a confidence level. So if we are seeing new risks, the confidence level goes down on the log. Another benefit is that risks, opportunities and assumptions are tracked over time, so you can always see what you did and believed in the last quarter. Related to this are 12 month (rolling) roadmaps. It doesn’t mean that everything needs to be clear on those roadmaps. There can be large question marks, but at least there is agreement about the fact that there are open questions.
Habit 3: Helping the team to learn
Often product managers are seeing their job as getting the most story points out of a team as possible. But John asks: If story points are equal to complexity, shouldn’t there be as few story points as possible? It’s not velocity that is most important. Instead it’s velocity of learning, and this is something that product managers can help their teams with.
If we imagine that building products is like crossing a river, it’s the product manager’s job to paint the stepping stones for the team. They should encourage their team to not get paralyzed on one stone – by leaving room for uncertainty, messiness and assumptions. They cannot tell their team which way to choose exactly, but they can help them by making it safe to take the next steps. And they can help the team to realize where they realistically stand and what the current situation looks like.
Of course, in order to help like that, the product manager needs to be available for the team and also create a safe space where the team feels like they can iterate and improve solutions later (without the strong focus of shipping new things all the time). So John suggest four habits for product managers to help their team cross the river:
"No-spin" weekly appraisal of progress (and time to retro)
Commit daily unstructured time to unblock team
Review constraints and operating assumptions
Make specific agreements to continue iterating (stepping stones)
Habit 4: Taking a look back
Coming back to looking at the work calendar – John points out that the majority of time we spend at work is about thinking ahead, looking into the future, making plans. We very rarely look back and reflect. But this habit is important in order to understand what happened, what we need to adapt and what we can learn from it. We as product managers need to rebalance those discussions so we can improve our decision quality.
John sees a particular advantage for product managers who are able to reflect on what happened and adapt to it, basically creating a feedback loop. In a toughening job market it can create a career advantage for product managers who can showcase that sort of behavior.
There are three particular things we can implement to build the habit of looking back:
Monthly decision reviews
Hijack existing meeting to share progress
Notifications, triggers, Slack, emails – make it EASY
While specific review meetings are good in theory, these can easily become a zombie habit. People are busy and tend to skip the meeting. So as product managers, we can try to bring them back to life. If this is not possible, another option is to hijack other existing meetings and spend the first 5 minutes to look back and reflect. “Nobody will fire you if you spend the first five minutes of a meeting reviewing the last thing that the team built”.
And make sure to make looking back easy. Even the act of opening dashboards to look at specific metrics seems too much for many. So if you can change the way of distributing this information from pull to push, it can help people to stay informed. John gives an example of a Slack channel which only shares one specific and important metric, which then in turn helps the teams to make better decisions.
Habit 5: Celebrating success
Product is hard. If you are not making room to celebrate progress, you never celebrate.
So much time is spent looking forward, so we don’t spend enough time reflecting and celebrating. When things get hard and you have never celebrated any of the successes, people are more easily discouraged, burned out and make wrong decisions. John says: “If we celebrate real progress, it makes up for all the setbacks”. Also – When you don’t savor the actual wins, you tend to bask in success theater. So here are the habits that John suggests to make sure successes are properly celebrated:
Ditch the "performative" celebrations (e.g., update emails)
Schedule monthly celebration
A personal "thank you, working with you on this was very inspiring”
Hijack meetings to celebrate whenever possible
Time-machine excercise – document your wins for the future!
The Reality: Things to consider
So while all those habits are worth trying out, there is also a reality check that needs to happen. In our current times, the cognitive load for people is high. They don't have much capacity to try new things. Also, people are motivated by different things. While you might think something is a great idea and should be tried out, somebody else might have another motivation. And lastly, there is always the role of luck. You never really know what will work until you try it, and you might have to try many different things.
How can we tackle these challenges? John’s first advice is to “subtract and hack”. Since it takes lots of effort to do something new, you first take something else out, for example by deleting an unnecessary meeting. Hacking means that you can add to an existing habit, e.g. by adding success celebration as an agenda point to an existing meeting.
The second advice is to go from “solo habits” to “group habits”, because a group of people motivates people. This is especially true since product managers can feel quite lonely in their role. So getting your peers and the team onboard is crucial to make habits work.
The third point is to acknowledge that changing habits and taking care of those things is “real work”. An example: Even if everybody says that successes should be celebrated, there is rarely something along those lines in the job description or when it comes to specifying the career ladder in a company. For product leaders and managers in this environment it’s important to realize that you constantly send messages on what is important. So if you want to see a certain behavior, you should think about how to incentivize it.
And if you are a product manager, John asks you to remember this: The success of your team is going to boil down to a small set of things that you do repeatedly. These habits will help you to succeed as a team.
A note by the author: It’s not often that you get the chance to write a keynote summary for one of your favorite product thinkers. And only when doing so, I realized the sheer amount of examples and suggestions that John packed in his talk. While I hope to have summarized the key points in this article correctly, make sure to watch the whole video – So you don’t miss any insights and jokes!