Deep Work - The "real" Product Management work

Product Excellence: Deep work for Product Managers

Photo by Saurav Thapa Shrestha on Unsplash

Cal Newport, in his book “Deep Work”, says “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep—spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.”

“Professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”

Why is deep work important for Product Managers?

Deep Work becomes especially important for Product Managers as the success of the products and their impact on customers’ lives are dependent on how thoughtful Product Managers are when building their products. Making time for high-value product work needs us to make time for deep work. In fact, any function or role needs a significant amount of deep work to excel in that role.

🤔 What does deep work for Product Managers really mean?

👉 Prioritizing work - Prioritizing your time for the most high-value work while managing other expectations is important. Without thoughtfully prioritizing your time, PMs can end up spending time on busy work without effective results. So taking time to think and prioritize is critical.

“If you don’t set your own agenda, somebody else will.” If I didn’t fill my schedule with things I felt were important, other people would fill my schedule with things they felt were important.” — Melinda Gates

👉 Product Vision and strategy: Understanding your company’s corporate strategy, shaping your product strategy, and defining product vision are all a result of deep work.

👉 Discovery: Continous discovery of problems, iterating on solutions, build and launching products are all activities that PMs do in close partnership with their cross-functional teammates. But PMs have to prioritize thinking through problems and constraints that might limit the product.

👉 Writing: Working on your written narrative needs deep focus time. Writing the narrative and all the FAQs forces PMs to think deeply about all aspects of a product.

My favorite technique for developing good thinking skills is the written narrative - a document that describes the vision of what you’re trying to achieve, why this will be valuable for your customers and for your business, and your strategy for achieving this vision. - Marty Cagan

👉 Developing product intuition: Good PMs are overloaded with qualitative customer insights, quantitative data, competitor and industry data, etc., PMs need quiet, undisturbed time to digest this data, connect the dots and develop their own intuition about customer problems, hypotheses about opportunities for the business, and input for prioritizing roadmaps

👉 Team development: For product leaders, it is important to also spend time on their people. Designing a plan on how to help team members improve and grow is critical and needs thinking time.

“the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.” - Cal Newport

How do I make time for Deep Work?

I had addressed this question in this post to help you make time for deep work

💬 What other real PM work falls into Deep Work for PM category? Please share in the comments below

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