Michael Goitein

Giles Turnbull, author of Agile Comms, has brilliantly framed the different aspects of effective communication, starting from one basic premise:

"Everyone is already too busy, most of the time."

The model immediately helped me grasp how the most effective product managers I coach communicate through:

• Lure

• Context

• Details

Turnbull likens them to the layers of a cake, and challenges us to simplify our message and present it thoughtfully and incrementally through these layers.

Lure

"The lure has two jobs: grab people’s attention, and get them interested in finding out more. The lure gives people a reason to overlook their overcrowded calendars, and divert their precious attention to you and your thing, instead of someone else, and someone else’s thing."

Giles Turnbull, Agile Comms, p. 17

How many people realize the need to “hook” their listener? Veteran startup leaders, Hollywood producers, and marketers alike know the importance of a crisp "Elevator Pitch," a disruptive call to action. But how many of us use this effectively, in our verbal, written, and presentation communications?

Context

Now that we’ve given our target person something to entice them to break from their busy schedule, it’s time to give them the next layer of information.

Unfortunately, inexperienced and effective communicators tend to jump right into the Details at this point.

"This [Context] layer is longer and slightly more detailed, but not to the point where it makes huge demands on people’s time.

After reading (or watching, or clicking through, or listening to) the content in the context layer, the reader should be able to answer a question in their head: “Do I know enough to stop here? Or do I want to know more?”

Giles Turnbull, Agile Comms, p. 17

Anyone will appreciate the courtesy of being given the right level of Context - Truly busy people will get what they need and go on their way. I believe most great presentations that truly persuade are more about Lure and Context than Details.

But if you've been effective laying out Context, and the audience and timing are right, people will ask you to go deeper into your next layer.

Details

Now comes the final layer of the cake – the Details.

Unfortunately, most people start here, verbally assaulting their audience with an avalanche of details, droning on with no courtesy or sensitivity to their audience's needs.

Seen in context of Turnbull's Three Layers mental model, it seems cringeworthy to launch into a barrage of details before we've effectively piqued our listener's interest with a well-crafted Lure, and laid the groundwork with the right amount of Context.

Lure and Context are the product manager's tools of persuasion

Note that it's the product manager's responsibility to own and be in full command of the Lure and Context aspects of their product.

These two layers form the crux of a product manager's ability to effectively evangelize for their team and their product across the organization. Consciously and intentionally curating the message at these the Lure and Context levels alone will do wonders for your ability to connect and persuade.

Two questions to increase your persuasion effectiveness:

• Where do you currently overindex? Lure, Context, or Details?

• How can you continuously improve your Lure and Context messaging across all channels? Verbally, in writing, and in presentation facilitation?

Becoming a more effective product manager starts with understanding where you are now, and where you need to use Lure and Context appropriately to engage and inform your audience.

Popularized and expanded in the latest edition of Radical Focus 2.0, Christina Wodtke's simple Four Square ("4sq") model finally gives teams a way to see everything that matters in one place. Based on coaching I've done with teams, I've found the right side of the Four Square to be the most powerful for two major reasons:

1. Top Right: Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) Confidence

OKRs represent a significant departure from previous goal-setting frameworks in that they pair a qualitative, aspirational statement (the Objective) with measurable indicators of success towards that goal (the Key Results). On a weekly basis, in a quick, non-scientific way, the team measures their confidence in achieving each Key Result, on a scale from 0-10:

• OKR Confidence (The higher-level moonshot "why" behind the work)

  • Objective: Become the iconic rebel of online whiskey purveyors

    • KR: Increase whiskey club membership retention from 40% to 80% - 5/10

    • KR: Increase organic referrals from 10 to 30 per month - 7/10

    • KR: Increase Average Revenue Per User from $30 to $60 - 4/10

The team uses this reflection to discuss how to get back on track if things start slipping, or how to keep them on track throughout the quarter. It's always amazing to watch teams make major pivots after rating KR confidence.

2. Bottom Right: Health Metrics

Health metrics represent the 1-3 things the team needs to pay attention to while reaching for their OKRs.

It's crucial there be few, and carefully-chosen. Team health, Client Satisfaction, Code health- There aren't too many metrics that fundamentaly matter to team and business health. Right after tracking KR confidence, the team similarly goes through the Health Metrics in a brief, informal and conversational way, rating each on a simple Red-Yellow-Green scale:

• Health Metrics (What to watch out for as we strive for our OKRs)

  • Customer Satisfaction - Green

  • Team Health - Yellow

  • Daily Active Users - Yellow

Monitoring Health while reaching for OKRs provides the crucial link.

How the two dimensions relate: Push and Protect

In the push to achieve great things, teams must protect what matters.

Achieving great goals at the expense of fundamental health metrics like team, code, or business viability is an illusion - success will be temporary, at best. And when a Health Metric turns Red, it's time for the entire team to stop work against the OKRs, and shift to addressing the metric at risk. Once that Health metric is green again, the team can go back to the OKRs.

Health Metrics can even become KRs until the team has them under control.

The Four Square, combined with the regular check-in cadence, provides teams a simple and powerful way to stay on track for long-term success.

Christina Wodtke is former Director of Design at Yahoo!, Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn, GM at Zynga, and a current Stanford University lecturer. She's shared many of her insights across teachings, talks, and three books: Pencil Me In, The Team That Managed Itself, and Radical Focus 2.0, the quintessential OKR guide.

Enter Christina's Four Square

Initially introduced in the first edition of Radical Focus, I immediately recognized the sheer brilliance of Christina's Four Square ("4sq") model.

Finally, teams could see everything that mattered in one place.

A Four Square example

The below example focuses on an online whisky retailer, going clockwise from the upper left-most quadrant:

• Priorities This Week (What needs to get done NOW)

  • P1 - Finalize creative

  • P1 - Understand client journey drop-offs

  • P1 - 5 interviews with valid engineer candidates

• OKR Confidence (The higher-level moonshot "why" behind the work)

  • Objective: Become the iconic rebel of online whiskey purveyors

    • KR: Increase whiskey club membership retention from 40% to 80%

    • KR: Increase organic referrals from 10 to 30 per month

    • KR: Increase Average Revenue Per User from $30 to $60

• Health Metrics (What we should protect as we strive for OKRs)

  • Customer Satisfaction - Green

  • Team Health - Yellow

  • Daily Active Users - Yellow

• Upcoming Big Projects (Highest-priority things to stay ahead of)

  • Mobile app revised biometric login

  • Onboard new bourbon wholesalers

  • In-app and SMS notifications upgrade

  • Test new subscription models

Going deeper into the Four Square

Over the next few essays, we'll delve more into each quadrant, and how to make best use of the Four Square to help your team, in Christina's words, achieve "Radical Focus."

One great approach is to use generative user interviews, a technique that asks users to "tell them about a time..." in an open-ended fashion. Applied skillfully, product managers can start to truly understand their customer's worldview, and gain an appreciation of their users' unique needs, pain points, & desires. Working backwards from these needs to actual product outcomes is the primary empathetic focus that de-risks better solutions.

Plan to understand user needs first so you can treat them to the Platinum Rule - as they wish to be heard, understood, and treated.

Jeff Gothelf defines Outcomes as:

Outcome is a measurable change in human behavior we see when we give the output to our [readers]. Outcome answers the question, “What are people doing differently now that we have delivered the output?”

Digital/Lean writers maximize their impact not by focusing on their Output, but targeting specific reader behavior-change Outcomes.

Always ask: What will readers be doing differently as a result of this (Tweet, Thread, Atomic Essay)? How will I know?

The foundations of Lean/Digital Writing are data-literacy, and Thinking Big, Starting Small, and Learning Fast - one writing example for this could be:

Tweet >> Twitter Thread >> Long-Form Article >> e-Book (etc.)

At each step, set goals and monitor reader behavior-change signals that signal when to go to the next level; i.e., if the Tweet engagement hits X, turn into a Thread; republish as an article; if that gets traction, continue through expanding and watching for signals.

Set & closely track Outcome goals for Lean/Digital Writing effectiveness.

To master the creative process, give yourself permission to create junk.
@jamesclear via @dickiebush

Write and ship!

Real artists ship
Steve Jobs

#2. Lean Writing - Start small, get data, iterate.

If you are going to ship, it's important to start small & constantly be aware of the signals readers are providing every step of the way.

Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole's Lean writing framework is the most immediately actionable way to ship work that people want to read. Start with a Tweet >> Twitter Thread >> Short-Form Article >> Long-Form Article >> Free Email Course >> Digital Product >> Online Course/ Community >> Business

Every step of the way, look at how readers are responding, what their questions are, and watch the engagement metrics.

#3. Community is the heart & soul of your writing.

Writing has traditionally been one of the most solitary pursuits.

But in the age of Digital and Lean writing, and through the mental models of Dickie Bush and Nicolas Cole, you come to understand that regardless of where you're starting, you can help someone else, they can provide valuable feedback to you, or even just cheer you on when you've lost your way.

The future of writing is Lean, Digital, and Data-Driven

No longer do I slave away on idle writing without focus or purpose. Through regular shipping, starting small, and community, I've made great friendships and learned more about writing, and unanticipatedly, and am actually enjoying the writing process. Thanks to the Ship 30 for 30 community!

Fortunately, renowned industry OKR expert Felipe Castro offers 3 reasons why value-based OKRs are crucial, with clues on how to make the shift.

Good OKRs restate success as improvement

Success can't be measured by simply "doing" things - it can only be measured by improving something. This is crucial because

• Reason #1 - We want a results-focused culture, and not one focused on tasks.

• Reason #2 - If you did all your tasks and nothing improved, that is not success.

• Reason #3 - Your action plan is just a series of hypotheses

We'll lay out the forces behind these reasons, and a way to address each:

#1: Moving from task- to results-focused culture

No organization can survive with an army of mindless automatons.

Management needs to shift from holding teams accountable for delivering "stuff" to always re-centering on the crucial "why" behind the work. Everyone on the team should be able to state exactly why they're engaged in the work, what success looks like, and how it's measured. The Product role, as the chief keeper of the "why" and "value" needs to lead with articulate, passionate leadership and evangelism across their teams and pushing back against management when they ask for "stuff," always making sure that there's a measurable definition of success aligned to the Key Results.

#2: Redefining what "Done" and "Success" look like

Many teams ship stakeholder-requested features to great fanfare and celebration.

Days, weeks and months later, no one goes back to measure whether that feature has actually delivered the anticipated results. It won't take too many discovery and delivery cycles sunk into work that doesn't deliver before an organization is out of business, and by then it's simply too late. Product can avoid this by keeping focus on the feature's mutually-agreed upon success criteria after launch. Both quantitative (data & surveys) and qualitative (live interviews) approaches can be employed to track progress against the real meaning of success.

#3: Accepting that everything is just a hypothesis & how to de-risk

Product continuing to work with these concepts opens the door to the necessary mindset shifts to exponentially increase OKR effectiveness.

Moving from task- to results-focus, and redefining what "Done" and "Success" open the door to management and teams alike embracing the humility to accept that everything they're working on is really a hypothesis. The way forward involves Thinking Big, Starting Small, and Learning Fast, continuously aligning progress against OKRs at a regular cadence and pivoting as necessary.

When used well, OKRs move teams from simply showing up and trying to look "busy," to holding people and teams accountable for actual results. The OKR "set" consists of the Objective, the inspirational mini-mission for the quarter, paired with 3-5 Key Results, hard measures that demonstrate progress in delivering against the Objective.

Using OKRs is only a small part of a broader shift required.

Beware one-way, top-down OKR goal-setting

But no team can be held accountable to deliver Key Result numbers outside of their control.

Managers setting OKRs for their teams without their input shouldn't be surprised when they either just get a list of tasks accomplished. or repeatedly miss targets set for them. Given the siloed nature of Enterprise technologies, and the mercenary, part-time allocations of people spread thinly across multiple projects to maximize "utilization," much work is kept waiting for either dependent teams or for a key person to become available.

The solution is to set Key Results using numbers the team can own and move independently.

Map the user journey and identify what the team actually can influence

The first step is to collaboratively map the customer's end-to-end journey, highlighting where the team's work appears.

Regardless of whether it's a marketing team, focused on bringing in the right target customers for their product, or a team building an onboarding experience, the customer path can be laid out and management and teams can together identify and set meaningful metric goals aligned to positively influencing decisive moments in the journey.

Managers collaborating with teams to set Outcome-focused Objectives and Key Results within their control offer an excellent platform for teams to get out of busy work and reset their focus on delivering tangible results for both customers and the organization.

https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1471653151371522053?s=20

1. Suspend the Project Thinking mindset

2. Prioritize your real goals

3. Understand your users' needs

4. Generate options

5. Simulate

It suddenly dawned on me that legacy Enterprises are stuck in Project Thinking, and leading with Product Thinking is the key to better OKRS.

Using product thinking to help you set better OKRs

Instead of being inwardly-focused on the Project Thinking values of When, Outputs, and Efficiency, setting better OKRs involves leading with Client-Centricity, Why, Outcomes, and Effectiveness.

Project thinking-based OKR example

Focus: When, Outputs, Efficiency & Internally-focused

Objective:

Get leadership buy-in on the new marketing platform

Key Results:

• Create 5 use cases in January

• Architecture designed and fully approved

• Test data migration and go live

Note that in the Objective, there's no mention of the benefit the new marketing platform might provide, just that leadership needs to buy into it (Pure Output).

Of the above five Key Results, three don't have a number, and those that do don't provide any indication of what benefit might happen from those "5 use cases" or "15 new screens."

Product thinking-based OKR example

Focus: Why, Outcomes, Effectiveness, & Client-focused

Objective:

Provide lower to middle-income clients with the best financial products for them at the right time in their journey, supporting their improved financial future.

Key Results:

• Increase client new account application starts from .03% to 0.5-2%

• Decrease declined applications from current 40% to 10-20%

• 50% of clients state "Yes" to the single-question survey "I feel I'm being provided the best products for my individual needs."

Thanks to Product Thinking, we now have a strong sense of for whom and Why.

The above Objective is far more inspirational than just getting a few managers to approve something - We're now focusing teams on bringing a better financial future to those who need it most, something they can really rally behind. Note the Key Results have numbers and ranges that clearly support the achievement of the Objective.

While the Product Thinking mindset will take time to adopt, it's the key to moving from legacy output focus to deliver meaningful results that matter.