Shaun Clowes: recommendation

Transcript context

…What's the answer, Shaun? How do we solve this problem? I know you said it's your life's work. What do you find actually helps most in helping PMs level up and become say 10 X PMs? I think the most important thing and the chestnut that I repeat to everybody is that at the end of the day, the time you spend looking inside the building doesn't really benefit you very much at all. And Steve Blanken, people used to talk about you should be spending 80% of your time thinking about things going on outside the building. You might not be outside the building, but you should spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building. And I would say that very small number of PMs do that. They get dragged into internal politics, they get dragged into scrum management or scrum execution or product delivery, like elements of the delivery thing and you just can't win that way. You just can't win that way. You can never get an A because you're fundamentally not solving the job. The job is not about execution or anything, it's about finding reliable, differentiated value that you can uniquely deliver into the market. So I would say if there's one thing, two things I would say actually that I generally guide product managers to do, one is to always start from the point of view outside the building in every document in everything, always talk from the customer's perspective, from the market's perspective, from the competitor's perspective, and the people who listen to me on that I would say get better almost immediately because they're starting from a place that's easier to understand and then secondarily be data informed. They use all of that view of the world, but don't just make up a bunch of statements, support that statements with anecdotes and bits of data. It doesn't have to be a treatise, but convince everybody of what the world really looks like and what the opportunities ahead of the company looks like and good things happen to you. And all of a sudden you go from a world where nobody wants to help you get anything done to where everybody wants you to win. They want you to win and they may not give you everything you want, but they certainly will try because they're like, "Well, of all the bets we could make, this is a good one." I imagine many people listening to this are thinking, "Oh, I am that person. I talk to customers all the time. I'm always interacting, looking at research, putting data together." And what you're saying is you're probably not doing that enough. Is there anything that you could help someone recognize of, "No, you're actually not doing this enough and you think you are but you're not."…

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