Paint some rainbows, in your product(s) and in your life

Who doesn’t love rainbows and unicorns? Seriously — I don’t care how old you are, your gender, or your attitude… an explosion of color and a hint of magic are sure to catch your eye and make most of us smile. It’s why unicorns are so popular right now. It’s also how Disney continues to stay in business and make adults like me giggle at the thought of taking our kids to a park where we will immerse ourselves in imagination and later lose our minds from vacation stress.

Someone’s awesome car sticker I saw the other day.

Like an artist, as product managers we have the power to paint… to take a canvas (product), empty or full, and create (or refresh) a beautiful scene. One that meets — or hopefully — exceeds our audience’s expectations. One that (in the software development world) has the freedom to flex and shift in the wind, like a new-age, multi-dimensional work of art.

Hang on. That got a little trippy. Why are we painting a rainbow in the first place? Who decided that was best? Who proved that’s what our audience wants to see on the canvas?

For all we know, they just want to see the pot of gold at the end with the leprechaun dancing next to the unicorn.

(This is what I do on Friday nights now… ^)

Stay with me…

CX typically stands for Customer Experience. This is a key part of the product development & management process where customer needs are researched and then transformed into a journey that creates value. Business requirements are written, which inform development of those interfaces that are ultimately consumed by a customer. But what if we changed the meaning of that ‘X’ from ‘Experience’ to ‘Expectations’? Customer Expectations are really what we’re after. What are customers expecting from our experience? How can we identify and document those, so that we can exceed them? Without them, we’re creating noise in a vacuum.

X3 = eXceed the eXpected eXperience

Well, a rainbow can bring the best of many worlds to a customer, one color at a time. Typically you don’t take a paint brush and dip it in seven colors that are perfectly placed side-by-side so that you can arc across the sheet and have your rainbow completed in one fell swoop (that would be way too well-orchestrated and would require a masterful strategy and steady hand to execute). Instead, you usually layer one ROY-G-BIV color over the other on the canvas, careful to make them connect, and enjoy the creative process as you go, because you’re CREATING something that didn’t exist before. You’re PRODUCING something people want to see. And it looks attractive. And maybe — if you’re lucky — there are mini pots of gold achieved along the way.

Now, you can literally paint a rainbow — or you can embrace the analogy and apply the creation strategy we just laid out (one layer at a time) to a product. But how do you do this in the middle of a thunderstorm? Every day there are distractions tugging you in a thousand directions, lightning strikes left and right causing wildfires you have to extinguish.

Or what about when you’re being directed to paint a deep hue of red that builds out a robust experience for ONE specific type of customer but neglects everyone else.

What good is a rainbow of one color?

Appeal to the masses unless your business strategy specifically states otherwise (e.g., niche, boutique firms might need to focus on a particular consumer type to support their strategy).

Like many, I champion iterative process and broad, initial strokes that build user value across a wide swath of functions, creating value for a range of customers. Then comes a second wave of color when you add the next layer of maturity onto those features. At the end of each deliverable (maybe a feature?) is a ‘piece of gold’. At the end of each color layer is a ‘pot of gold’. At the end of the rainbow is a unicorn leaving traces of magic dust along the way. But you’ll never catch it because you’ll build rainbows forever, evaluating customer needs and constantly iterating on work previously released.

Wait — there are only seven colors in a rainbow. How can this process iterate forever?! You’re breaking the laws of physics!

Because… there are constantly new thunderstorms creeping onto the horizon. And the water droplets from those storms refract light from the sun, resulting in that spectrum of color we call a rainbow. There will always be new storms. There will always be new rainbows to paint.

I know what you might be thinking, “But Kim — what if I’m terrible at painting or I hate analogies?”

If that’s what you’re thinking, I have a question for you in return:

Then how can you become an artist?

Before we can improve our business processes and our deliverables, we must first improve ourselves: our ability to innovate, be inspired, speak freely, and execute work. Have you ever noticed when you are at an offsite or conference getting really inspired and jazzed up about a topic, you can’t wait to come back to the office and start implementation in your own daily regimen? Because you’re ready to make things more efficient. More productive. More creative. You’re ready to keep working with people collaboratively in the office just like you all were working so well together outside of the office?

But then you get back to the office and immediately are stuck in the drudge of daily life? Where the team that was just incredibly cohesive and communicative at the offsite is now silent? Sure, everyone needs quiet time to focus and crank out some work, but everyone also needs collaboration and open dialogue, plus — time to create — ideally, together. Building a strong team begins with building trust. In his book The Leadership Equation, Eric Douglas describes,

“The two fundamental elements of high-performing teams and organizations are Trust + Spark.”

Creating or solving something together is a great way to build trust.

But how do you spark innovation? How about taking a little WTO = Work Time Off. That’s right, you heard it here first. The idea isn’t new but the acronym might be! WTO as I define it is time to work… outside the confines of your normal space, routine, people, influences, etc. Go away from the office. Or at least go away from your normal work. The best digital companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.) are setting aside time for their employees to focus on innovation. Anywhere from 5–20% of the week might be dedicated to these activities. That’s up to a full DAY per week people spend innovating! At one of my old companies, our dev team regularly took one week for generating, exploring and developing new ideas that weren’t necessarily customer facing but added internal business value (optimizing processes, building internal software, etc.). Also, in the Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise (SAFe) methodology, the last sprint of a quarterly Program Increment (PI) is reserved for innovation.

The way I think about this is: Go on a hike, play golf, relax in a corner of a coffee shop with a book, go home and snuggle on the couch with an article, the only rule is: don’t do your normal job. Use this time to innovate on how to improve your team, your process, your outcomes, your product. How could you do something differently? Why would you do something differently? Talk to people outside your industry, or people who do a totally different kind of job than you. I bet you’ll learn something you can apply in your own area. Take a training, read a book, read an article, write an article. When you teach others is when you truly learn something yourself.

Core tenants of WTO = Learn. Grow. Share.

It takes active unbridling to tear yourself away from the norm and force new experiences and opportunities for learning. And you owe that to yourself.

Being the humans we are, we are innately bound by the patterns established by our brains. That’s why people tend to go to the same restaurants, follow the same daily routines, get the same kinds of haircuts and wear similar styles of clothes. We do what’s comfortable to us and we avoid different or uncomfortable things. The Fogg Behavior Model (here’s a great article about this principle applied to digital marketing, by the way) states that we have six core motivators that influence our willingness to change a behavior:

1. Time
2. Money
3. Effort (cognitive)
4. Effort (physical)
5. Social Deviance
6. Non-Routine

If any of the above are affected, it will influence our decision to pursue or not pursue a specific action or behavior. And the basic model says Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Trigger. For example, to change your behavior about sticking to a new year’s resolution fitness plan, your positive motivators must outweigh the negatives, you must have the ability to execute the plan, and of course there is a trigger making you consider this ludicrous proposition in the first place.

• The trigger is a new year — time to think about how you’re going to change your life for the better! Because most people don’t consider how they can improve their lives DAILY; they think about this ANNUALLY. And that is why by February the gym is back to normal (because it takes 21 days to build a habit and arguably longer to truly commit to a lifestyle change).
• The ability is really only limited by physical/health constraints. You can work out at home, using HIIT and bodyweight exercises, for free, watching YouTube. No equipment? No gym? No money? No excuses.
• The motivators are all impacted in this example. Money = neutral (become your own gym if you can’t afford a gym!). Time = negative affect (it requires commitment). Mental & physical effort = negative affect (it requires energy exertion; an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an equal and opposite outside force). Social deviance = positive affect (after all, you’re certainly not deviating from social norms with the rest of the world sparking an interest in gyms starting on 1/1 every year and trying to get fit). Non-routine = negative affect (it is outside your regular routine, at least at first).

So, wow… with all that stacked against you, no wonder people give up on their plans after a few weeks into the new year! There have to be some very serious positive motivators to outweigh the negatives for you to continue… including things like personal health risks if you don’t make this part of your life, friend/partner motivations (social adherence), etc.

Well guess what? Pioneers don’t let their constraints define them or limit them. Look at any pioneer throughout history: Columbus, Lewis & Clark, Tubman, Einstein, Hawking, Jobs, Gates, Musk. They literally progress(ed) the world by progressing themselves: asking (themselves) tough questions, and demanding truthful answers.

So let me ask you a tough question: are you highly optimized?

Let’s evaluate our day-to-day and think about how to make each moment purposeful. Every second of your life has the potential to be optimized. It comes down to your capability and desire to execute that. Don’t freak out, but you have about 2.8 billion seconds in your lifetime (if you’re lucky and live ~90 years). It’s time to get to that gym and stick with it…

Treat time as the greatest luxury. When you go home at night do you collapse on the couch and aimlessly flip through TV channels or Netflix shows? Or do you deliberately watch TV only when you need downtime from your weekly marathon (eat-sleep-work-repeat)? Do you surf social media intending to catch up with people for two minutes that somehow becomes 45 minutes? These platforms are designed to catch you and keep you. Demand more from your life. What did those 45 minutes give back to you? Did you improve or grow yourself at all? You have roughly 525,960 minutes per year (but who’s counting?) to spend as you please. Except you don’t. Because most of us spend about ⅓ of our day sleeping. And another ⅓ working. Add on commute times, other commitments, etc. and your amount of free time to truly spend as you please is extremely limited. So don’t waste it.

Decrease your screen time and increase your reflection time.

• What did you do today that you could have done better?
• What could you have articulated more clearly?
• How could you have treated someone differently?
• How did you spend your time that could have been more impactful — on yourself, on others, on the world?

Make small changes (improvements) tomorrow. Repeat daily. Now you’re a magician: an artist of life, a creator of iterative value. And you’re painting a rainbow of your own life. Once you can successfully apply these concepts in your personal life, you can apply them in the office and build your product rainbow in the same way.

Because now that you recognize the value of time, you can treat others (including your customers) with the same respect you have for yourself. You can use your WTO to spark innovation that leads to X3 (eXceed the eXpected eXperience). And because we are all customers, we know that one of the top things customers eXpect… is something in return for their time.

Just like you are reflective, contemplative, and continually improving yourself, you approach your product in the same way. Paint masterfully.

Be better than yesterday. #noregrets

product
 noun
prod· uct | \ˈprä-(ˌ)dəkt  \
Definition of product 
1: the number or expression resulting from the multiplication together of two or more numbers or expressions
2a(1): something produced especially : COMMODITY sense 1
(2): something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity
b: something resulting from or necessarily following from a set of conditions a product of his environment
3: the amount, quantity, or total produced

This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Kim in January 2019.

Kim Shyu is a Digital Product Leader with experience supporting B2B and B2C companies. Her expertise in Product Management is honed through a relentless pursuit to deeply understand her customers and build personalized digital experiences that exceed their expectations. See more on LinkedIn.