Handling the Ambiguous
What are some strategies to deal with an ambiguous project? If you have been a product manager for awhile, you are probably juggling a few ambiguous projects along with your regular product management projects. For example,
How can we increase the profit in our product on the next release?
What do we need to enter an adjacent market?
What should the next generation of our product do?
How do customers want to scale our product?
How will our customers evolve to new ecosystems?
There are a few ways you can make incremental progress on these product questions while keeping today's product operations running smoothly.
Read Every Day
Read internal and external material about the market, technology, customers and competitors. Take lots of notes as you learn and be sure to collect links and screenshots. You'll need these notes to search and make connections. There are several ways to bring relevant material to your daily reading list:
Set up Google Alerts to provide relevant articles in a daily digest - using key words for multiple Google Alerts provide helpful articles on background and new developments
Find relevant newsletters to subscribe to - the slight increase in spam is well worth a good newsletter that provides insightful articles that help in research
Follow relevant people and hashtags in social media - LinkedIn and Twitter are both helpful in understanding ambiguous topic areas
Follow the Money
Figure out how money is flowing. Which organizations are budgeting to solve problems and where are these organizations looking for solutions? This can lead to a list of use cases and help in understanding the problems potential customers are trying to solve. Also, this helps gauge the business opportunity for your product if the ambiguous problem is solved. Following the money can help you eliminate unfeasible approaches to the ambiguous project.
By following the money, you can outline a few theories for possible solutions. Working theories provide a purpose to bring in others to help with the ambiguous project.
Ask Questions
With your working theories in hand and your notes from daily reading, you can start contacting knowledgeable people about your theories. At this stage, you will have a lot of questions about your own theories. It is daunting to reach out to experts about your theories and questions but this is the quickest way to learn more.
At this point reading more or searching for more documents is not going to help you. The nature of ambiguous projects is there are multiple right and wrong answers. You need help from experts to correct your theories.
Build a Story
When you set out to write a story about the ambiguous project, you realize there are more questions to answer. By this point, you need to think through your theories and what you have learned. Drawing pictures enables you to think about a possible solution and how the possible solution could be valuable to your customers.
It is time to write a story about your ambiguous project. A story has:
A setting - a description of the current situation
A conflict - a problem to be solved
A resolution - options to address the problem
The story is rough at first. You realize that you need to read more, follow the money, ask questions and refine your story. In each iteration of these steps the ambiguity recedes until your story becomes a vision.
Conclusion
Ambiguous projects are some of the most challenging and rewarding projects for product managers. Iterating through these steps, gives you a way to incrementally set a strategy to address the ambiguous project.