What Being a Dad of 5 Taught Me About Product Management
My wife always says, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person. Busy people just get stuff done.
Having a large family has certainly kept us busy! And helped make me an amazing Product Manager. What sets me apart as a product leader, is I can hold all the variables and product missions clearly in mind while I work on crafting and directing a team towards the big picture, as we do our family.
Being a dad of five kids has contributed the most to this unique prioritization skill. But there are many product management lessons to be learned from fatherhood.
Prioritization
Prioritization is the root skill of managing lots of variables successfully. Prioritization is not usually a linear list from A to Z. The best way I can explain it is actually the way Nora Roberts explained it, as I saw on Twitter.
The tl;dr: Everything that needs to be prioritized can be thought of as either a plastic or glass ball. It’s not just that one thing is more important than another; it’s also how fragile it is, and how much it can be postponed.
Being a dad of 5 kids means that there are ALWAYS competing needs that need to be met. Deciding which ones to take care of first means understanding it’s not just a linear order of priority. It’s a constant juggle.
Example 1:
A 12-year old can stand to wait a few minutes for help with his math homework while a 2-year old is handed a cup of water. A cup of water isn’t super urgent, but a 2-year old doesn’t understand waiting when she’s thirsty. That ball can’t be dropped.
Example 2:
A 2-year old can stand to wait 2 minutes for a diaper change while a 10 year old’s bloody knee is cleaned and band-aided. The diaper is urgent, but it’s not going anywhere. The diaper ball can be dropped momentarily.
Balancing a team’s needs, timelines, workloads, feature requests, customer issues, resources and more requires a complex understanding of prioritization, and an intuitive grasp of urgency, especially as teams grow.
(Sometimes a diaper ball can’t be dropped! I once shut my Zoom video off while presenting on a call, and continued speaking while I changed a horrible diaper. I turned it back on a minute later and pretended like nothing happened. #wfhlife)
Diversity of Ideas
My 8, 11, and 13 year-olds don’t want to be told directly what to do, and as a parent, I want them to learn problem solving skills. So I’ll present them with a task and see how they would solve it. Kids haven’t been “tainted” with the “right way” to do things, and often come up with novel approaches. Which can also be grounded in unrealistic and incorrect assumptions, sure, but which are creative and make you think.
This taught me the value of utilizing a diversity of ideas to find new ways of doing things. As a leader, I try to elicit ideas and responses from my team, rather than directly telling them how to do something.
Problem Solving
Being a good problem solver is imperative to being a good product manager, and an essential part of being a parent. Whether it’s figuring out what’s wrong when a kid gets hurt, or simply figuring out what a 6-year old is trying to explain to me when he doesn’t have the right vocabulary to express himself.
But the other side of this is seeing your kids learn to problem-solve. Kids have an innate knack for reasoning from first principles. They ask “why” incessantly until they’re satisfied. And they don’t limit themselves to just “5 whys”! This has definitely caused me to probe deeper into issues to fully understand them.
Communication
Kids misunderstand and misinterpret things all the time because they lack context. My 6- and 11-year-olds are famous for hearing a single word and concocting a whole conversation they didn’t actually hear. They lack worldly wisdom and context, and need things to be thoroughly explained. Even my oldest, who’s 13, needs very clear instructions for things like cooking or cleaning. It’s easy to forget to tell someone to rinse the herbs so there are no bugs or sand, or that a pan should be hot before adding the food to it.
You can be really close to a problem or process and forget other non-product stakeholders aren’t as familiar. Be excruciatingly clear, make sure the problem, goal, plan and launch plan are not misunderstood. Explain things openly, not condescendingly, and direct them to where more information can be found. Invite questions, and check that you’re aligned.
Delegating
As a product manager, I need to ensure that each piece of product is designed and built properly. I have to create requirements that make sense to each stakeholder and individual contributor. I need to trust that it will be done properly — and oversee that it is.
As our family has grown, it’s really too much for my wife and I to do everything around the house. And as a parent, I want my kids to learn important life skills. I want them to know how to clean up after themselves, cook, and be responsible. I want them to feel ownership and overall pride in our family and home. It’s their house, too, and they should care that it’s in order.
So, when delegating tasks and chores, I try to give age-appropriate jobs, and I need to communicate clearly what and how it needs to be done, and my expectations of the result. But I also speak to the broader mission: why we need to have these chores, how a place feels when it’s clean, how you can find what you’re looking for when everything is organized. And we try to instill in them the pride that goes along with doing a job well done and contributing to the family.
So instead of saying, “Pick up all the toys off the floor,” which will result in 94% of the toys picked up, all shoes, socks, random objects and whatever still on the floor… 🙄 Instead, I will say, “Please pick up everything off the floor so I can properly sweet and mop without moving things around.”
Good delegating, as a leader, requires giving the mission, not just the task, and the expected outcome.
Stakeholder Needs
A product manager needs to identify all stakeholders in a project, and make sure needs are properly met. And to judge when stakeholder desires don’t need to be met.
With a family of 7, including my wife and I, there are LOTS of stakeholders in my house! Everybody has different needs. It’s important to understand what everybody needs, what everybody wants, and try to accommodate what you can for the success of the family.
A complex example is coordinating a family trip that will be fun, safe, and accessible for everybody. My toddler can’t do a difficult hike, and my 13 year old would be bored at many toddler-appropriate activities. Sometimes we find the right balance, and sometimes we need to split up and meet up again later, so everybody can have a good time. And sometimes we expect the olders to be flexible for the youngers. But it needs to be a balance, because as a parent, I want everybody to have a good time.
For dinners, my 6 year old hates vegetables, but he’ll tolerate a few. My wife likes her chicken cooked very well done, and I like things a juicier and tender. So, creating a dinner that has chicken just at the perfect threshold of doneness (or, I just pull off a couple pieces early and set them aside) and incorporates some of the vegetables my 6-year old likes gets everybody happy, healthy and fed.
Before making a dinner that I know will be pushing a child’s boundaries, I also make sure we’ve got cereal and milk.
Crisis Management
How do you deal with things going wrong? As a parent, we plan for plans to fail. (My wife always says, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail!”) We plan out fail-safes, backups, contingencies and extra insurance coverage. We also know that even the best backup plans can fail, and it requires quick thinking, calm, and flexibility.
When our own personal fears and anxieties are tested, we need to put them on the back burner and make sure our spouse and kids are safe — and don’t let our own feelings trigger their anxieties and fears.
Hours after being discharged from the emergency room, my wife — a fantastic nurse — saw that my son’s abscess in his nose was not improving. After calling an ENT specialist on his personal cell, he confirmed what needed to be done. But it was late at night and he lived hours away. She didn’t want to go back to the ER. She calmly talked my son into bravery, got a few items from her personal emergency kit, and I’ll spare you the gory details. She performed the procedure herself in our bathroom. The next day, my son got to choose the biggest Lego set of his life.
My wife is a superhero!
When I was driving, and we got lost at night on a dangerous mountain road with no guardrail protecting us from a sheer drop, and no GPS, I had to speak to everybody cheerfully so they wouldn’t worry, while keeping my eye and attention glued to the road and my peripherals. A jackal ran across the road in the eerie darkness. I told my wife later I was terrified, but my kids remember it as an adventure!
As a product manager, things sometimes go wrong. A release goes awry, a bug severely impacts users, a misunderstood requirement can lead to negative outcomes, bad data can lead you down the wrong path, or external events can trigger strange usage… It’s important to stay calm, keep the team calm, and make sure they know you can lead them through to a good solution and safe outcome.
Patience
One of my kids gets assigned sweeping duty more than the others. He also takes forever. He’s terrible at it, and he hates sweeping! But I know it’s good for him to learn to do it properly, and he will get quicker — and then he won’t even have to do it so much because I’ll assign it to a younger sibling. (And he’ll get to do things like take out the garbage!)
We’re on the right track — I need to be patient and accept he’ll get there.
Managing a product can at times put a product manager in the waiting game. Even when there’s urgency, sometimes a PM just needs to wait. Research is on it. Design is on it. Dev is on it. Just chill, and let the team work.
I once had a super urgent project I needed Data’s input on, before we could proceed, but they were slammed and had directives from the CMO to work on something else. I discussed with the CMO, but was told I had to wait. We were losing money, we all knew it, but it wasn’t as urgent as what was already in the pipeline.
I had to wait. I had to trust the system. It would all be fine.
Grit
Life can get tough. Straight up, as a parent, a spouse, I have encountered the most difficult, excruciating challenges in my life. Painful to the core of my being. Sometimes, you just got to keep plugging through.
In fact, dealing with the challenges of parenthood, the things that go wrong as a product manager are downright trivial. Sure, that time a million dollars of customer orders nearly got lost was an enormous “OH CRAP!” moment that almost gave me an aneurism. But really, against the backdrop of life, it’s something you can survive. It would get worked out. Nobody got hurt. Everything would be OK. You take a calculated risk, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Breathe. It’s OK. Move forward.
Good Partners
The most important thing about being a good parent and a successful product manager, is having good partners. Shoutout to all the single parents out there who are somehow managing to raise a family on their own! I don’t know how you do it. My wife and I are a great team, and there’s no way I can do this without her! And I know she says the same about me.
If you’re a product manager trying to be successful, but you can’t rely on your team, stakeholders, and leadership, you’re going to have a difficult time. You need team leads and executives who are trustworthy, communicate well, and who share your vision for the direction of the company in long and short term. You need partners whom you can rely on, who can take care of things on their end, and whom you trust to have your back — and who feel the same way about you.
Before accepting a job, get to know who you’ll be working with, what their goals are, and if you’d be able to work effectively with them.
