“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” — the Foundation of my PM Craft

In the movie?The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi promised to teach young Daniel Larusso karate if Daniel would first help him wax his cars, sand his floors, and paint his fence and house. Aching and exhausted from the manual labor, Daniel begins to suspect he was being exploited, until Mr. Miyagi finally revealed to Daniel in this memorable scene from the movie (YouTube video) how the prescribed chores had already equipped Daniel with some basic techniques to defend himself.

My History with “7 Habits”

The classic?The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey, was first published in 1989, the same year I started my tech career in Silicon Valley. As a new college grad, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a few good habits early in my professional life.

Inspired by the book, I grasped the reins of my career (according to Habit 1: Be Proactive), proceeded boldly to formulate my personal mission statement (Habit 2: Start with the End in Mind), and dutifully identified the “big rocks” in my life (Habit 3: Put First Things First).

As a junior engineer, I did not have many immediate opportunities to practice Habit 4: “Think Win-Win”, Habit 5: “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood”, and Habit 6: “Synergize”; but they seemed intuitive enough and well aligned with my personal values, so I tucked them away in my toolbox, certain they would come in handy in the not too distant future.

Luckily for me, learning the seven habits did not involve any backbreaking labor like waxing cars or sanding floors, but the fortifying effects were no less dramatic. As my work threw challenges and opportunities at me, I could often draw upon the seven habits for an effective response, and the more I practiced the habits the more they became reflexes, like Daniel’s karate blocks.

It’s hard to say which was the chicken and which was the egg, but practicing the habits got me into leadership roles and PM roles that invariably required these habits in spades, and the bigger the role the more I was stretched and had to further develop my proficiency (Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw), and so a virtuous cycle began.

Looking back through the years, I now realize what a seminal moment it was the day I picked up?7 Habits?at the bookstore. Little did I know the book?was going to equip me with some of the most valuable habits I would be leaning on in my future career in product management, as well as whet an appetite for continuous learning that would fuel my entire career.

A Quick Intro to “7 Habits”

The book was written for a general audience, and the lessons are meant to motivate the reader to live a purposeful, successful, and fulfilling life. I slyly touched on the seven habits earlier, but for easy reference here they are on a list:

• Habit 1: Be Proactive
• Habit 2: Begin With the End in Mind
• Habit 3: Put First Things First
• Habit 4: Think Win-Win
• Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
• Habit 6: Synergize
• Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw

One can apply?7 Habits?in one’s personal life, in one’s professional life, as well as in the intersection between the two to strike a healthier work life balance.

What I Hope to Share with You

Since?7 Habits?is such a classic, I assume most of my PM readers would have some familiarity with it. Therefore, I have no intention of providing a book summary here. If you haven’t read the book and are curious for a quick overview, the?franklincovey.com?website does a superb job. There are also lots of book reviews on YouTube.

Since this story is part of my “PM Friday” publication, I will focus on sharing how?7 Habits?helped me in my product management career.

Because the potential applications of?7 Habits?to product management is limitless, it would be impossible to give this topic a comprehensive treatment, so I wouldn’t even try. Instead, I will share a “highlight reel” of my best insights, lessons learned, and helpful adaptations from practicing?7 Habits?as a PM for three decades.

Let us begin….

Habit 1: Be Proactive.

Looking at the book from a PM’s perspective, it’s almost comical the first habit in the book is “be proactive”. If anything, we PMs are too proactive, so the last thing we need is for some guru author to tell us to be proactive, right?

Interestingly enough, I did find a priceless piece of advice related to being proactive that seems tailor-made for PMs.

Insight 1:?The most important lesson for PMs from the “Be Proactive” habit is to focus on the things that are in our control, and not to waste precious time and energy on things outside of our scope of influence.

This may sound a bit defeatist, but having managed dozens of PMs in my career, this is one of the most common mistakes I observed in junior PMs and even in some mid-career PMs. We PMs aspire to “change the world” and naturally have an activist streak in us, but to be effective we need to learn to think critically about where to focus our energy, as well as our teams’ energy.

My younger self was very much guilty of “spending calories fighting battles I can’t win”, as my mentor would point out to me time and again. Fortunately, with her repeated coaching I eventually learned to direct my energy to areas where I could deliver real impact.

Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind

In?7 Habits, the reader is encouraged to define a “personal mission statement”. One could argue the personal mission statement is the single most important call-to-action from the book.

Indeed, I got a lot of mileage out of my personal mission statement and would highly recommend the prescribed approach. However, once I became a PM I discovered there was a whole other untapped dimension to this habit.

From Me to We

As a PM I quickly realized, while it was beneficial to practice this habit myself, it was far more important to?operationalize this habit as a team leader and help my team “begin with the end in mind”.

This involves?repurposing the “personal mission statement” into a “team mission statement”.?Like the personal mission statement, we must exercise our imagination to create a compelling vision for success for our team.

This is harder than it sounds. Because the team mission involves a lot more people, a lot more care must be taken in its crafting. Too vague, and the team could lose sight of its mission. Too prescriptive, and the team would have little leeway to explore different ways to achieve the mission. However,?if done right, the team mission statement could mobilize all the creativity and ingenuity of the team while channeling everyone’s energy toward a common purpose.

Thus, as the leader of our product team our challenge is to create a compelling team mission statement that clearly defines the desired outcome, while empowering the team to exercise its full creativity and ingenuity to achieve that outcome.

Translating Mission into Action

Our job doesn’t end with the team mission statement. A core responsibility as a PM is to break down the mission into actionable pieces, most commonly represented by epics and user stories in Agile Development. Since every epic/user story is another touchpoint where the team will be reading and interpreting our intentions….

We must propagate this “begin with the end in mind” habit into the epics and user stories, so the team is clear on their desired outcomes and feels empowered to explore different options to deliver the best solutions.

Habit 3: Put First Things First.

This is probably the most well-known of the 7 habits, made famous by the “big rocks” demonstration (YouTube video) that delivers a powerful punch of enlightenment every time. This is indeed a critical habit for PMs, from how we prioritize our lives, to how we prioritize our work day, to how we prioritize our product backlog.

This concept is so powerful the “big rock” metaphor is even finding its way into formal product planning processes, to help ensure important initiatives are prioritized first and get the focus and staffing they require. I am a big fan of this approach, but I do have a word of caution.

If your organization has adopted a big-rock-small-pebbles approach to product planning, beware of the?unintended consequences on newer, less mature products.

Despite our best efforts, new products typically have lots of rough edges due to the lack of real-world user feedback. It is imperative that product teams be given a chance to uncover and fix these rough spots as quickly as possible. This creates a situation where we need to be able to address big buckets of little pebbles.

However, a product planning process that rigidly prioritizes big rocks over pebbles can work against a new and immature product whose commercial success depends on the team’s ability to uncover and fix a large bucket of small pebbles.

You can tell big rock mentality is failing your organization when you hear the sentiment:“We are really good at kicking off the next shiny project but really bad at addressing customer feedback and getting shipped products across the finish line to commercial success.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with the big rock metaphor — we just need to define our big rocks properly to include getting new products to commercial success.

Habit 4: Think Win-Win.

Whether it’s working with a customer, a partner, or another product team within our own company, PMs play a key role, and Win-Win thinking can really elevate our game. I’ll skip the well-known advice here, like “Don’t focus on grabbing a bigger piece of the pie — focus on creating a bigger pie”, and offer two insights related to this habit.

The first insight applies to working with a powerful “platform team” internally, and the second applies to working with a specific kind of external partner that is becoming increasingly common but especially tricky to work with: the “coopetitor”. (Yes, it’s really a word. See?Wiktionary.)

Win-Win-Win with “Platform Team” and Customers

In my previous story, “An Unforgettable Lesson on Teamwork from Lego Blocks”, I touched on the importance of working with other internal teams to drive product success. One especially important partner in many enterprise software companies is the almighty “platform team”, on whom we often find ourselves dependent for critical platform features.

In enterprise software companies that have a platform discipline, the platform team is often the heart-and-soul of the company and is held in high regard, so there is an inherent power imbalance to be overcome. Not only that, the platform team has a very tough charter to meet the needs of many diverse product teams, so it is very hard for any one product team to get their attention.

I discovered our platform team was getting tired of fielding requests from different product teams asking for features that were difficult to build, to enable products they didn’t fully understand, and for customers they didn’t know. It’s easy to see why they were not an eager partner.

In working with the platform PMs and UX researchers and designers, I quickly figured out the catalyst that would unlock our close partnership: our customers.

Our platform team loved being invited to join us on user research sessions with our customers. And once they witnessed the user pain points firsthand, they became motivated to help us address the pain points as quickly as possible.

They also felt personally accountable to some of the customers they met face-to-face. To reinforce these relationships, we would even arrange opportunities for customers to thank our platform team directly when they received a critically needed feature.

By bringing our customers into our partnership with platform team, we were able to create a healthy win-win-win partnership that motivated everyone involved.

Win-Win with “Coopetitors”

In the enterprise software space, technology partnerships and go-to-market partnerships are commonplace.

However, in today’s world of “multi-clouds”, hybrid solutions, and VIP customers demanding their vendors work together to help them achieve a seamless solution, we are often thrown into the uncomfortable situation of having to “cooperate with our competitors”, or “coopetitors”.

Even for those experienced with striking win-win partnerships, working with coopetitors can be especially challenging.

First a disclaimer: unlike my other insights in this story where I have tried-and-true best practices to offer, this insight is quite different in the sense that, although I can identify this as a trend that will affect many PMs, I am not in a position to offer tried-and-true advice. Having said that, I’ll try to offer some common sense survival tips based on my limited experience, which you will have to take with a grain of salt:

1. Prepare with internal stakeholders.?As with any external negotiations, it is important to make sure there is internal alignment on objectives and tactics. It is especially important with coopetitors because I have often witnessed surprisingly diverse views toward a coopetitor. One stakeholder might be willing to concede a lot because they feel the coopetitor can bring a lot of value to the partnership, while another stakeholder may see little value in the partnership and view the coopetitor primarily as a threat. One thing is clear — don’t engage with the coopetitor until you have had a chance to align with your stakeholders.
2. Executive sponsorship.?Due to the delicate nature of coopetitive negotiations, it is imperative to have executive sponsorship from both sides from the beginning.
3. “I’ll show you mine, if you’ll show me yours.”?Expect coopetitors to guard their information carefully, whether it is information about their product, their customer insights, or their true motives. Yet they will appear friendly and try to gather as much intel from you as they can. This is very tricky waters to navigate, so use caution and avoid oversharing.
4. Find common ground.?Given #3 above, you may find it difficult to make progress. Coopetitive meetings have been some of the least productive meetings I have ever attended. It is easy for meetings to get derailed due to distrust, chest-thumping, and sly comments. I have found some success by keeping everyone focused on seeking common ground. There is always some common ground to be found when you look hard enough, and identifying that initial slice of common ground can change the tone of the meetings.
5. Leverage segmentation.?No vendor is strong everywhere. To help find common ground, it often helps to segment the market into smaller segments where benefits of a partnership may be more apparent.

It would be great to see some tried-and-true advice from folks who have done this a lot more than I have. If you know of any useful resources, please be sure and share in the comments.

Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood.

Effective communication is arguably the most important skill for a PM. The fifth habit in the book reminds us that?empathetic listening?is crucial to effective communication.

My insight on this habit is simple: be sure to hire empathetic listeners into the PM role because this skill may not be learnable for everyone.

I have developed a deep faith based on real-world experience that most PM skills can be learned. Unfortunately, I have also learned the hard way that empathetic listening is a skill some people simply cannot learn. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not broadly saying empathetic listening cannot be learned. For people who are capable of empathetic listening, it is a skill that can be honed and mastered like most other skills. However, through the years I have managed a few PMs who, despite their most genuine efforts, simply could not listen effectively even when they could clearly see it was jeopardizing every aspect of their PM career. I had no choice but to let them go, but not before the team had to do a lot of damage control.

So what can we do to avoid hiring these PMs in the first place? I would like to share a couple of my best practices.

Looking Beyond the Polished Presentation

Most hiring teams already place top priority on assessing a PM candidate’s communication skills, so pretty much all PM interviews already include a segment where the candidate is asked to give a presentation on an assigned topic. This is a great starting point.

The key here is for the interview panel to recognize that a polished presentation does not necessarily mean the candidate is a great communicator. Regardless of how impressed I am by a candidate’s polished presentation, I always remind myself to evaluate their listening skills critically.

You can observe their listening skills during the presentation Q&A. Do they listen intently to the questions and comments? Are they asking clarifying questions in an engaging manner? Are they providing thoughtful answers to all of the questions? These are all excellent tell-tale signs of a great listener.

My Trusty Litmus Test

In addition, I always ask this trusty question, “What do you know about the job so far from talking to the previous interviewers? Please tell me what you learned from each interviewer.”

If they don’t have a great answer, I can tell they are either: 1) Not proactively seeking to learn the single most important thing they should be seeking to learn at a job interview — everything about the job itself, or 2) They tried but they were unsuccessful because they are not an effective listener. Either way, it is an immediate disqualification.

Habit 6: Synergize.

This word requires a quick definition because it means different things to different people, so let me quote FranklinCovey.com:

To put it simply, synergy means “two heads are better than one.” Synergize is the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork, open-mindedness, and the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems. But it doesn’t happen on its own. It’s a process, and through that process, people bring all their personal experience and expertise to the table.

Together, they can produce far better results than they could individually. Synergy lets us discover jointly things we are much less likely to discover by ourselves. It is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One plus one equals three, or six, or sixty — you name it.

I worked in one organization that believed so deeply in the partnership between PM, Engineering, and UX that we affectionately called it the “three-legged stool”. Missing any one leg, and the chair would surely tip over.

Even so, I often saw two styles of PMs within our organization — those who truly believe in synergy and are constantly on the lookout for synergistic opportunities, and those who are cynical, believe they know it all, and think others will only slow them down. I have seen successful PMs from both camps, but people love working with the first and dread working with the second.

To get a quick overview of these two archetypes, called “multipliers” and “diminishers” in the book?Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, by Liz Wiseman, see this simple chart:?Comparison between “Multipliers” and “Diminishers”.)

Another set of must read books on this topic are the two books from Marty Cagan,?Inspired?and?Empowered.?They are certain to help you squeeze the most brain juice out of your team.

Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw.

There are two main aspects to this habit. One aspect is about continuous learning, and the other is about daily self-renewal. I didn’t plan it this way, but it just so happened the first two stories I wrote for this “PM Friday” publication addressed exactly these two topics, respectively.

The first story was called?How Practicing Product Management as a Craft Enriched My 30-Year Career, and it was all about continuous learning and honing your craft.

My second story was called?An Essential 15-Minute Work Life Balance Check-up for Product Managers, and it promotes maintaining a healthy work life balance.

Needless to say, I believe deeply in this 7th and final habit for PMs.

Closing Thoughts

I am extremely grateful to have read?7 Habits?in the first year of my career and could practice the habits and adapt them throughout my career to make them my own. Through my “highlight reel” of personal insights, I hope I was able to illustrate how impactful this book can be in our PM line of work.

Having zoomed into?7 Habits?through the lens of a PM, let me zoom out and close with this quote:

“Lesson not just karate only. Lesson for whole life. Whole life have a balance. Everything be better.” — Mr. Miyagi,?The Karate Kid