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Change your team's clock


You are your calendar.


As Tom Peters said a decade ago:

The calendar never lies. You can claim something is your priority, but if your calendar doesn’t reflect it, you’re lying to yourself.

I see it all the time. Product teams get confronted with all the problems. They are always on the receiving end of every howling shit-throwing monkey in the company. In this environment they tend to run from problem to problem and while they have ideas about how to "dig out from under" they never quite have enough time to figure it out. Their calendars have quite literally FLATTENED THEM. Most PMs are actually quite nice and amenable people and they HATE to decline meetings. Horrors.


And sadly, in the post covid world, your attention has become what your calendar says. Good or bad. It's very very easy to get on someone's calendar. Too easy. And it's very very hard for PM's to reclaim the one thing that they need more than anything - time with their team to figure out how to solve the thorny problems that are holding the product back.


If you are PM or even harder if you are a MANAGER of PMs, then your job is to create the conditions for action. You need to live and breathe action. You need to be a focus enthusiast. And if you want to focus the attention of your team, THEIR calendar is YOUR barrier.


Getting out from under means, in practice, that you need to "system interrupt" your team, in a good way. You need to make solving the harder problems a mandatory activity, not an optional activity. You need to put the team, not the stakeholders, at the forefront. Not to say you won't have time for stakeholders - but more to say that you need to prioritize the product, not the complainers, er, those with feedback.


The only way to do this, these days, in a remote world is to recapture your team time. Recapture your meetings. Recapture your team's calendars.


You will hear this sometimes in the form of "wE neEd EVery mEetIng to HaVe an Agenda" as if this were some kind of sitcom written by Steven Covey (RIP, and with the greatest respect). That is fine, as far as it goes, but it presupposes a priori that you know what the meeting is about. Which, you don't, because you usually haven't even had a chance to figure out what you should be talking about.


So then the momentum starts for "wE neeD to Do a StrAtegiC OffsIte" which is also fine but seems to me to put off the obvious problem that you need action, now, and if not now, very very soon like tomorrow. EVERYONE KNOWS as well that offsites tend to be remarkable in the moment, and forgotten once the team quits the hotel. All followup is gonzo.


What's the answer then? It's simpler than you might think. It's daily meetings. If you need to change the focus of your team, then you need to provide a forum for the team that is their number one priority of the day. The GO TO meeting. Make your team your number one, and make them make their team number one. Every. Single. Day.


If it feels like a lot of meetings, it is. It is a lot of meetings. But the way you make time for these meetings - the way you make time for your team, in other words - is by squeezing the crap meetings out of your calendar. Squeeze the things that don't matter to make time for the things that do.

It's not the time you spend in meetings, it's the character of the meetings in which you spend time

A lot of people get very upset with "wasting time" in meetings. The meetings you don't want to have are the ones that don't lead anywhere. The ones that don't lead to team focus and success of the product. Those are the ones you need to CANCEL. Those are the ones you need to DECLINE. Any meeting that is a STATUS meeting? Cancel that forever and replace it with a written update.


Try this. Set up a call for tomorrow morning to talk about the most important things you need to do as a team. And then follow it with a call THE VERY NEXT DAY. And the next. And the next.


Change the cadence of your team. Change your team's clock.



Some post scripts and reactions


A lot of companies are going back to the office and they claim that it is about "collaboration" and "innovation" and of course that is all dressed-up nonsense. I think the reason is more banal - its about improving focus, and the belief is that focus comes from interruption.


A lot of people find this objectionable, and with good reason. Simply being in an office doesn't make you more focused, and in many respects is worse than being at home. Open plan offices are a SCOURGE. It's very hard to find peace or focus. NO ONE WANTS TO GO BACK TO WORK FOR THAT. To be clear.


I think whether you work in the office, or at home, or wherever you work - a hotel, Portugal, or a hotel in Portugal - the same is true. Your team is important because your team makes your product happen. We probably needed this when we were all in the office, for different reasons.


Learn to say no. If it’s not clear why you need to be there don’t go. If there are lots of people who can’t say yes don’t go. If it’s a status meeting say no and update everyone over slack

per Ken P

I think your follow-up needs to be: what is required to make long team meetings productive. I find it is prep that you have to carve time out for. I also think people go to shit meetings because it makes them feel important and gives them face time with who they perceive are the right people. This is super-flawed thinking that drives many people. It is anti-productive.


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