Anuj Rathi: recommendation

Transcript context

…One of the most important skills for a product manager is influencing people on team, and I like the point that you're also trying to influence your user. That's interesting. Just more reason to get really good at influence, so. I actually have a newsletter about how to get better influence based on Frodo Baggins and Lord of the Rings. We'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Let's shift to a different topic. You have a really concrete way of actually implementing the working backwards process. We had one of the authors of the book Working Backwards on recently, and I'm excited to just hear what you've learned about how to actually put this into practice. It's easy to hear about, "Let's work backwards," but doing it is a different beast, and so I'd love to hear what you've learned there. So I think the people who invented working backwards is clearly Amazon. I think they started this entire process which are like, "Hey, why don't you write a press release, and with that press release, we'll work backwards from that one?" I thought that was a very cool idea, and I was trying to dig down into like, "Hey, why does it work?" My insight or at least the way that I thought about this one is it's not working backwards only from a customer value proposition. "Will our customers love it, and will they pay for it? Is it noteworthy, and is it something that we should even be working?" While that is one of the most important things that the Working Backwards framework teaches us, but essentially, what you're working backwards from is an entire machinery at a particular day that is working for... For the date of GTM, what do we need to do from here till that particular day so that the GTM is successful, but also, what will be the machinery we would have created so that this product is successful? Now, because you're already talking about GTM, you're already thinking about, "How will users love it? What is the money that we'll spend? What are the alternatives that we will... routes that we have explored that finally we have zeroed in on and all of those?" So they are all going to be a part of a PR review. If I take a slightly open stance on this one, what is a press release? A press release is you have a one-pager which talks about what are we building, what is a particular date, what is the exact value proposition, what will consumers say, what will the business manager say, how will they respond, how will they use it. But the one thing that comes out from this framework is that you can use it for a whole bunch of other things. You can use it for negotiation, for example, because you start with a date, and then you say, "This is the one-pager that I need to ship, and I want the consumers to see that." You can use it to now go to our VP Engineering and say, "By this date, can we build all of this?" Now, they do not have all the PRDs and everything, but they can give you a sense that this is too aggressive or this is not and so on. We can also use the quotes here to actually find alliances or find people who are going to actually derail this. So you actually use the customer quote to basically say, "I want my customers to say this. From marketing and from my pricing team, can we actually ship this so that consumers will say that?" Then, from the business owner's quote, you actually say, "This is what we are shipping, but what are your goals? Can you say that within three months, we would have achieved this much?" So using that to build one entire picture is one way that I found it really powerful because if you find disagreements here, then say, "I can't ship it," then you change the date, and then you change the goals because all of these things are changing together. found it really powerful because if you find disagreements here, then say, "I can't ship it," then you change the date, and then you change the goals because all of these things are changing together. So instead of one, you find the other set of all the things that need to come together for that press release to go live is the real value. The other part that I found interesting here is that I really truly believe in the power of three. So I actually ask my teams to write three press releases, alternative and divergent like, "What if we..." Suppose you're launching a membership program. So, instead of two tiers, let's do three tiers, or for example, let's take another one which is instead of building a membership, let's build up tiering pricing program with membership points. Instead of this segment, let's use another segment. Let's say within these three, and they all need to be fully thought-through, and that helps the leadership choose. So the two things that work here. When you are in the product discovery phase, you would have heard from a lot of folks. Finally, if you show them just one roadmap, it feels like, "Hey, this person didn't..." They listened to my interesting point which was valuable, but didn't include it. But when you're doing this three PR FAQs, I considered this, and this added up to a story that eventually is valuable, this alternative route. I considered your point of view, and I created a story, but unfortunately, it is not adding up so we rejected it. So, now, people can compare and contrast, and that's a very powerful leadership tool. That, actually, is a very powerful tool even for CXOs. When they say, "Let's build this," you'll say, "Here are three ways we can build this, and here's the reason why I'm not building what you said because you would like these two more."…

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