Go Deep or Go Shallow?
When to finish well or spread out on a variety of topics
Do you go deep on a task to finish it perfectly or do you work a little bit on a variety of tasks? If you work with work cross-functional teams, then you need deep understanding of your technology, business and market. Right? Maybe.
Customer Feedback to Engineering Leaders
You have a meeting with your chief architect next week to review requirements from meeting with several key customers. Should you write a detailed document with requirements, background and potential solutions or should you sum up the key customer issues with backup details? If you talked to your chief architect when you scheduled the meeting, she might have asked for the summary issues with details she can review later. Before spending a lot of time on a big detailed document, ask a few questions:
What is the ideal way to present customer needs?
What questions does engineering have for customers?
What problem areas is engineering already investigating?
Your chief architect would appreciate an outline of relevant problems for engineering to solve. Iteration with a joint goal works faster than going deep into a potentially unusable solution.
Analyzing Customer Data Every Month
You just got the latest sales numbers for the month. Should you analyze the data for a few days before you talk to sales management about the trends from last month? Most likely sales management has been tracking the sales for the past month and comparing the sales to the forecast. Analyzing data for hours takes you away from driving the roadmap and prevents you from strengthening your relationship with sales management.
Choosing to talk to cross-functional leaders before deep and time-consuming number crunching gets more done through team work.
Technical Documentation for Customers
Engineering is wrapping up the final sprint for a new key feature. You’ve worked with several customers who are awaiting this new feature. Should you spend a few days writing an in-depth white paper discussing the design and feature details or should you prepare a few slides on the benefits and use cases?
Even if your customers are asking lots of questions about the new feature, your time is better spent on explaining why you are offering the new feature. By drafting slides together with engineering, you are providing inside information that can easily be absorbed by the customers.
Go Deep or Go Shallow?
While product managers need to spend time researching and thinking about their product, spending hours on a single task frequently causes more harm than good. Collaborating with others on several key projects leads to better results. Trying to be a lone hero by investing hours in a project, doesn’t lead to valuable results. Building relationships and working with the product team has immense benefits.
When you feel compelled to work overtime alone on a project, push yourself to switch to another project. This allows you to think about how to collaborate for a better result.
Go deep or shallow? Go deep enough to get results.