The canvas strategy

What's your take on the canvas strategy by Ryan Holiday?

The idea is simple. Find canvases for other people to paint on.

Be an anteambulo. A roman term for the one who clears the path in front of their patron. Making way, communicating messages, eliminating distractions and waste and generally making the patron’s life easier.

If you clear the path for the people above you, you will eventually create a path for yourself.

The person who clears the path ultimately controls its direction, just as the canvas dictates the painting.

It's not about kissing ass and making your boss -look- good. It's about providing the support so that others can be good. It's about finding the direction someone already intends to head and help them focus on their strengths.

Bill Belichick, the now six-time Super Bowl-winning head coach, made his way up the ranks of the NFL by loving and mastering the one part of the job that coaches disliked at the time: analyzing film.

He strove to become the best at precisely what others thought they were too good for and therefore didn't want to do. He was like a sponge, taking it all in, listening to everything.

His insights gave the other more senior coaches things they could give their players. It gave them an edge they would take credit for exploiting in the game.

He became a rising star without threatening or alienating anyone. He mastered the canvas strategy.

In the canvas strategy you are the least important person in the room - until you change that with results. Greatness comes from humble beginnings. It comes from grunt work.

You focus all your energy on finding, presenting, and facilitating opportunities that help other people inside the company succeed.

Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. What reputation and relationships would that help you develop?

You help yourself by helping others.

You trade your short term gratification for a longer term payoff.

Strong product people

It's hard to get better if you don't know what better looks like

The product leader

A product leader leads the product managers building ships (products). They hire the best shipbuilders, create a proper environment for building ships, and they provide their people with the support and tools they need to do great work. The ships your teams build can only be as good as the shipyard that produces them.

The product manager's job

It's the product manager's job to come up with a product solution that is valuable to the user, usable by the user, buildable by your engineering team, and still viable from a business perspective. It's all about finding a balance between these four dimensions.

Again, what's the job you said!?

  • Go out there and listen to your users and customers to understand their problems and how you can possible solve them.
  • Conduct several experiments and prototypes to test your assumptions and various solutions before building them (to minimize the risk of building the wrong thing in a beautiful way).
  • Maximize value but minimize the effort to build the actual solution and make sure the winning solutions can be built by the team in a reasonable amount of time.
  • Deliver the product and optimize (or even innovate on) it based on feedback.

By this definition, a product manager is not a person who only collect requirements, write concepts, and maintain a backlog without making any decisions.

Do you know what better looks like?

If you don't know what makes a good product manager, how do you make sure your product managers know what they are expected to do? How do you hire the right person? How do you show them their necessary areas of personal growth?

Help your product managers understand what you think makes a good product manager. Help them identify their gaps to see what they should get better at, and help them understand what better really looks like.

Product vision, product strategy, goals and principles

For some organizations, product vision, strategy, goals and principles are very scary things - so much so that they avoid creating some or all of them. People think that it's a complicated and difficult process.

In fact, it's all about decision making. These things provide the guardrails for making decisions and prioritizations faster, and better. You need that, because there will always be more work than there is capacity to do it.

How can I grow and learn as a product manager?

  • I can learn by consuming books, podcasts, blogs, conference talks.
  • I can apply what I have consumed and learned to my daily work.
  • I can reflect and get feedback on what I have applied.
  • I can contribute back to the community and my colleagues by showing up at events to share my experiences, teach others, write articles, onboard new product managers, and become a mentor.

"Strong Product People" by Petra Wille

How do you recognize a bullsh*t strategy?

One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.

Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.

Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?

A strategy is the unique value a business provides to the market.

A unique value is the benefit your customers get from your product, which they can't get anywhere else, and which a hell of a lot of people want or need.

The intellectual content of a strategy - the thinking behind it - is only half the battle. The other half is converting that thinking into a strategy that is actually usable.

So what can you do?

You can put your strategy through the subjectivity test where you remove all subjective language, anything like 'good', 'great', 'world-class', 'best' and 'smart', and see if there are any substance left.

You could also play the opposite game where you ask yourself if the opposite of your strategy also make logical sense. If the answer is yes, then you probably have a good strategy on your hands because it represents a true strategic choice.

PowerPoint or Word?

Most strategies float around in "The Deck". A nice long PowerPoint presentation with a few pillars, onions, missions, visions, and the like. A PowerPoint lets you get away with all the things that wouldn't fly in a conversation or email.

Instead, just write it the way you'd tell it. 

A single page of A4 with a few paragraphs of argument and explanation, culminating in the punchline ("therefore we are going to do X"). Your job is simply to explain it so that anyone who reads it, gets it.

There should be no difference between your written explanation and your spoken one.

Even a super-crisp strategy is still, ultimately, going to be fairly abstract, so it's important you really land the idea (and get the ball rolling) by listing some key actions arising from it.
  • What must you do to deliver on this?
  • What needs to change?
  • What do you need to stop doing?
  • What needs to be added?

If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.

"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith

Yes, yes, yes!

I'm a Yes-person! Yes to everything and everybody.

I don't think I am alone. We say yes too often.

Saying 'No' to people when they ask you? Hell no. I don't want to disappoint people or hurt any feelings. I want to be polite. And what if I miss out on something if I turn it down?

But I also know that my reluctance to say "no" leaves me overcommitted and overwhelmed.

Zoe Chance decided to let 'no' be her default response for an entire month, which she dubbed 'NOvember'. As the month progressed, she started to feel less stressed and more in control of her own decisions, her time, and her life.

She started giving her MBA students a 24-Hour 'No' Challenge. To practice saying no! 

It's about being kind to yourself. People won't hate you. You may find it empowering.

Sometimes you must respond with more than a "No" or "No, thank you".
Your boss assigns you yet another task when you are already swamped?

"I'd be happy to do it, but I am already behind a couple of other projects. Should we reprioritize what I've got on my plate?"

Michael Bungay Stanier says the secret to saying 'No' is to shift the focus and learn how to say 'Yes' more slowly. What gets us into trouble is how quickly we commit. Saying yes more slowly means asking more questions.
  • Why are you asking me?
  • Whom else have you asked?
  • When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
  • According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?
  • If I couldn't do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me to do?
  • What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?

I read somewhere that the best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule, like “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night" or "I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone".

People respect rules and they accept that the rule allows you no choice.

Or simply use Derek Sivers "Hell yeah or no" rule?

If you feel anything less than "Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!" about something, just say no.

When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say "HELL YEAH".

How do you say no?

What are the skills that get us hired or promoted?

We all have our practical skills which can be acquired through education, training programs, learning by doing. Skills we are not born knowing. Something we must teach. "Hard skills" as we often say.

In the book 'The Song of Significance', Seth Godin says we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to skills like 

  • Decision-making, 
  • Eager participation, 
  • Dancing with fear, 
  • Speaking with authority, 
  • Working in teams, 
  • Seeing the truth, 
  • Speaking the truth, 
  • Inspiring others, 
  • Doing more than we are asked, 
  • Caring, and 
  • Being willing to change things.

He says that we tend to underinvest in training on these skills, fearful that these things are innate and can't be taught. 

We downplay them, calling them "soft skills", making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

These are interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. Human skills. Skills that amplify your hard vocational skills.

Adam Grant refers to "character skills" in his hook 'Hidden Potential', which are never too late to build.

  • Take initiative to ask questions, 
  • Seek information, 
  • Get along and collaborate with peers, 
  • Pay attention, 
  • Take on challenging problems, 
  • Do more than the assigned work, and 
  • Persist in face of obstacles.

These skills can actually all be learned. Even though they are more difficult to measure, that doesn't mean we can't improve them, can't practice them, or can't change the way we do our work.

Seth Godin asks us to imagine a team member with all the traditional hard skills: productive, skilled, experienced. That's a fine baseline.

Now add to it. Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring, and motivated. 

Generous, empathetic, and consistent. A deep listener, with patience.

What happens to your team when someone like that joins?