Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Work
TIER 4 2021-08-10
> ## Q: I’m new to product management and I worry sometimes that I’m frustrating or annoying my team without knowing it. I want to avoid that, while still delivering impact. What should I be watchful for? Product managers appear to be the most disliked function in tech. Case in point: PMs are often seen as unempathetic, narrow-minded and, worst of all, unnecessary. This makes me sad. But it also tells me that many people simply haven’t worked with a great PM. In my experience, great PMs make everything better: They unblock blockers, stamp out uncertainty, keep everything organized, get your team more resources, protect you from constant flux, align everyone behind an inspiring mission; the list goes on. Once you’ve worked with a great PM, you’ll never want to go back. But PMs often shoot themselves in the foot (and thus make all PMs look bad) by being, as you suggested, annoying. Especially new PMs who need to learn how to deliver results, without any real authority, under pressure. To help you avoid becoming an annoying PM, below I’ll cover the five most annoying PMs habits, and how to avoid them: 1. **Obsessing over frameworks, processes and the “right way” to do product** 2. **Prioritizing impulsively** 3. **Expecting everything to be quick** 4. **Avoiding decisions** 5. **Being too prescriptive** Let’s dive in. # Five habits of highly annoying PMs  ### 1. Obsessing over frameworks, processes and the “right way” to do product By far the best way to annoy your teammates is to obsess over the “right way” of building product, especially by treating a specific framework or process that you read about on Twitter (or certain newsletters 👀) as gospel. [I asked people on Twitter](https://twitter.com/lennysan/status/1420773875705544715) what annoys them most about PMs, and this habit came up more than any other: Best practices from smart people are great and all, but remember—not everything you read about will work within your specific business, market and team. You may be too early-stage for a highly opinionated way of building. Your company may already work in a way that makes it impossible to work differently. You may not have a team that *wants* to change. You can tell you’re annoying people in this way when no one around you is making an effort to learn more about, or helping you implement, the framework/process/system. Or it feels like they’re just going through the motions. Or worse yet, people make passive-aggressive jokes about your favorite framework or process. My advice to you is to absolutely try stuff out, and continue learning from the experience of smart people sharing their wisdom, but remember that it’s more important to have a team that is bought-in and excited about your ways of working than having the perfect process. ### 2. Prioritizing **impulsively** The next best way to annoy your team is to prioritize work without people understanding why it’s being prioritized. Particularly when (it feels like) you’re making decisions off anecdotal data. A few examples from that same Twitter thread: Your teammates care a lot about what’s being prioritized, because their careers are in large part riding on the success of the team. If they don’t believe that what they’re working on will have a significant impact, their work (and morale) will suffer. You can tell this is an issue when teammates frequently ask you why something is being prioritized, or push back on the task’s priority. It’s normal for this to happen, say, 10% to 20% of the time, but if you’re getting pushback more than 50% of the time, you’re probably annoying (and losing the trust of) your team. > #### “With people, slow is fast and fast is slow.” —Stephen Covey To avoid this, my advice is to (1) always have a strong “why this is a problem” argument in your [PRDs/1-Pagers](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1541V32QgSwyCFWxtiMIThn-6n-2s7fVWztEWVa970uo/edit) and (2) speak with the engineer, designer, etc. in person when kicking off a non-trivial project to explain the rationale behind the importance and address their concerns in real time. ### 3. Expecting everything to be quick The next best way to annoy the heck out of your team is to suggest that everything you want them to do is going to be real *quick*. Everyone you work with—engineers, designers, data scientists—also wishes every project could be super-quick. And maybe it could be. But everyone’s burned by promising something will be super-quick and then having to work late nights to deliver it. Instead of suggesting something will be quick, ask, “What would need to be true for this to be doable in the next x days?” It’s totally OK to suggest something will be quick occasionally, but if you’re finding that the majority of your asks should take “just” a few hours, you’re probably annoying the sh\*t out of your team. ### 4. **Avoiding decisions** A fourth excellent way to annoy your team is to avoid making a decision, especially until you reach a consensus. Many PMs desperately want to get to a consensus because they worry about upsetting people or being wrong. In practice, this approach just won’t work long-term, and if you ask people, they’ll often tell you that they’d rather you just make a call and move on. > #### “Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow.” —Jeff Bezos Try this next time you’re stuck on a decision: Ask your team if they’d rather keep hashing it out or for you to just make a call. I bet you they’d rather just move on. Another tactic you can use is to say, “It seems like we’re not going to get to a consensus here. It happens! I vote we go with x, move forward, see how it goes and change course if necessary. Everyone OK enough with that?” For more on decision-making, check out my post on [autonomy vs. direction](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/dff9723f-a141-43ec-913a-03b8b16697fe).  ### 5. Being overly prescriptive A final way to surely annoy your team is to be overly prescriptive about what to build. Basically, leave zero room for creative thought. There’s a fine line between articulating the important details of a project spec and spending three pages explaining one button. This annoying habit can apply to both the beginning of a project, telling designers and engineers exactly how a feature needs to work, and also at the end when you spec out each feature for days. You can tell this is annoying your team if your specs are longer than any other PMs’ you work with, if your designers and engineers don’t really use your documents, or if you hear from your manager that your team is feeling micromanaged. My advice is simple: Prioritize conversation over documentation. It’s easy to default to more documentation and detail every time one of your teammates misunderstands something. Instead, use that experience to narrow in on what types of nuances need to be clarified in writing vs. discussing. Don’t assume more writing and documentation will solve these problems. ### In closing As a PM, you are 100% guaranteed to annoy people. You’re in the line of all communication, you’re dealing with people all day, and you have to make complicated decisions under stress daily. Being self-aware enough to know this puts you ahead of many PMs. I hope that the pointers above put you even further ahead, and make you a less annoying PM—for the good of your team and for all product-management-kind. *Have a fulfilling and productive week*🙏 ## 📚 Further study 1. [14 habits of highly effective product managers](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/14-habits-of-highly-effective-product) 2. [A three-step framework for solving problems](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-three-step-framework-for-solving) 3. 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