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Zen Product Management. Frenetic execution is failed execution. Urgent emails, last-minute meetings, and high-priority requests indicates a lack of proper planning and prioritization. It burns us out, it burns our colleagues out, and increases the odds that mistakes will be made.

When everything is urgent, we don't have the time to uncover insights that drive businesses forward. There is always seems to be an email to write, meeting to attend, and a "crisis" to fix.

We have so much to do in the first place because our colleagues cannot find the information they need to do their jobs. And when they can't find information one of two things happens:

  1. We spend all our time communicating
  2. Mistakes get made

The solution to this problem lies in creating a system that helps colleagues pull trusted information. There is one critical principle to this system: it must minimize the communication needed to complete a task.

Brook's Law

Bad systems make PMs a single point of failure.

Good systems are clear, authoritative, and well-organized. They arrange documentation in hierarchies so access to one doc in lets everyone discover the rest. They eliminate single points of failure and empower us all to do our best work.

Execution Docs

  1. Share beliefs in a strategy doc
  2. Break strategy down into product requirements doc (PRD)
  3. Prioritize feature specs in a backlog
  4. Track development of prioritized features with a roadmap
  5. Record test results in a results tracker

Operating Principles

  1. Every product requirements doc (PRD) is a single source of truth for what a product team (1) plans to build, (2) has built, and (3) has shipped. They are living documents.
  2. If a decision is not in the specification, it’s not a decision.
  3. PRD always have a home. They graduate from the backlog to the roadmap to the results tracker.
  4. Avoid duplicating the same information across multiple docs. Keep timeline estimates in roadmaps and implementation details in specs.
  5. Delegate updating of execution docs to the functions closest to the details and therefore most able to maintain accuracy.