The Art of Saying No by Mina Radhakrishnan at Mind the Product San Francisco

[Music] hi everybody I'm really excited to be here thank you so much Martin and mind the product for having me I think one of the things I really love about conferences like this is that they're by product managers for product managers and they're really about the discipline and the the joy that is product management so I'm here to talk about a topic that is near and dear to my heart I just want to very quickly give you a little bit in terms of background as Martin mentioned I was a doober most recently running I was the head of product there for about three and a half years so when I started there back in 2011 we were 20 people I think we just opened up New York about a few months before I started it and we were in the process of opening up Seattle and then towards the end of last year hundreds of cities 2,000 plus employees and today or yesterday I guess technically we returned five so happy birthday over obviously an amazing place to be and just a really great ride so today I want to talk a little bit about something that I really got to practice a lot at uber and you know I think that all of us get to practice every day in our jobs as product managers and it's the art of saying no so so as much as product is about you know shipping and building products and launching great things into the world invariably in order to launch some things we have to not launch other things and that's really a big part of what we do there are times when I felt like all I was doing was saying no and it can take an emotional toll on you because you really don't want to say no to people it's just hard it's not fun and so what I want to talk about is what our real world like tactics and strategies that we can use to move away from saying no period and having to be this really negative thing to getting to a place where we're actually having a conversation with people and we're maintaining those relationships and walking away from that even if not feeling great about it at least good about it and that's really what I want to talk about today so a little bit about why we say no how to find common ground with the people that saying no to and then also after that thinking about what are some ways that we can actually find a solution to the problem because it's product managers that's ultimately we're trying to do is solve problems that users and people have every day so here's the word know in many many different languages and it's a fun exercise actually if you if you just if you just take a day and count how many times you say no in that day you I think you'll be surprised how often it happens and obviously we say no a lot we say not for different things we say no I don't want fries with that or maybe we say yes to that we say things like no I I don't want to donate and I don't want to sign your petition or no I don't want to go on a date and so these these kinds of noes are are not fun but they're not that hard because they're in transactional knows in the sense that we're saying no we're either going to give something for that or pay something for that service and we're choosing not to or in that we don't really want to maintain that relationship so we're okay with walking away from that person and not really worrying too much about it later but if you contrast that to saying no in real life to things like your parents or to your significant others or to your children those noes are a lot harder to say because we really care about these people we have a relationship with them and we want to continue and maintain that relationship because we know that at some point in the future we're going to need something from them and so those are the kinds of knows in a professional environment that I really want to talk about today and it happens in a lot of different contexts I think it's particularly relevant for product managers because so much of what we do is to interface with many many other groups and as a result of it we're sort of in the middle and we know a little bit about all of the things that are happening whereas people that are in a specific group and work in a specific discipline or really tend to be more focused on the things that are unique to them and so the place that we're put into is like oh actually you know you want to do this thing but then there are all these other things happening here and so that in a unique position to really be able to offer the background behind why it is that we say no so why we say no there's one really big reason why all of us have to say no in the workplace on a pretty regular basis right and fundamentally it comes down to one word which is prioritization so if we had infinite resources and we had infinite time we could say no we say yes all the time we wouldn't have to say no it just wouldn't be necessary right but the reality is that we don't and there's this great proverb that I had which is if you chase two rabbits you we'll lose them both and depending on if you google this up like they're still it might be Russian it might be Polish it might be Native Americans some people say it's Confucius but wherever the actual source of it is that the the result of it is true it's about focus right and prioritization I think can sometimes feel like a really bad thing but it's not it's really necessary and it's really good and for me one of the most important things about prioritization is that you have to be able to articulate what it is that you're doing and why you're doing it and I always find that what I'm forced to explain myself whether it's in speaking it or whether it's writing it out I'm actually much better able to believe in what it is that I'm doing and why I'm doing it so one activity that I always like to do is walking out of a prioritization session it's actually just to take a little bit of time by myself and put up the prioritization list like the things that we decided to do and then the backlog which is the things that we didn't decide to do side-by-side and work my way through that backlog and say okay well hold on why is this on the backlog list as opposed to in the priority list and if I can sort of take my way and prove that on each of the things and I feel really confident and I know we've made the right choices and when somebody else comes along because invariably it's gonna happen it's like well why aren't you doing that thing I have an answer for it now backlogs of course I'm not talking about like hundred lists long backlog so you got a prioritized backlog to burley those top sort of five or ten things where you were debating it you were trying to figure out how it was that it actually worked and then it just didn't quite make it on there and what happens with this actually is that several things happen for me of the example that always comes to mind is that we were at uber at one point we were figuring out okay a bunch of different things and I saw I saw one thing actually was on a priority list not on our backlog list and it was about building a sequel building a sequel user interface so we didn't really have great dashboards we didn't have the best analytic solutions what we did do though is like teach every single person how to use sequel and give them a database access so that meant like tons and tons of people are writing these sequel queries they really feel powerful they have all of this ability to do it but they have to use this like old crappy interface in order to be able to get there so we built we decided okay well we're gonna build a sequel interface that people can use and I was looking at on the priority list thinking wait what why are we doing that there's ways to solve this problem people already have access to it and so what I ended up having to do is actually I just I couldn't prove it I couldn't argue and relate why this thing was on the priority list as opposed to stuff that we had on the backlog that was really important and so I actually like had to go and find our like head of analytics and sit down really go through it with him and ask why are we doing this what's going on here and as a result of that like I really had a strong understanding of like here's how many queries people are running a day here's the load on the database here's what's happening at all times of the hour and I think if I hadn't really gone through that exercise there's just no way that I would have been able to explain it and also as a p.m. on it I don't think I would have been in a good position to really defend it and be able to explain why it was that was important that we were doing that so that's why I think this is forcing yourself to really articulate value and and talk about why is it that we're doing this thing is incredibly important from the standpoint of being able to come to things with the with being able to answer the question of you know why can't I have this so there's lots of different ways to prioritize and I think that you know a really common thing that I see people doing and I'm guilty of it myself is you put a whole bunch of things on a list you stack rank the list based on how hard it is to do things and how many people you have and whether or not they can do it and then you draw a line and you say okay cool these are all the things that we're gonna do and then few hours later you're talking to somebody they come by and they say hey can you do this thing for me did you look at it you sort of think about how hard it is not too bad like okay cool I got a little bit of buffer time let me let me put it on their list then another person comes along a few hours later and they say the same thing and you're like okay well I still have a little bit of buffer time let me put it on and then the third person comes along and you realize you're on this slippery slope and the only response you can give to this third person out comes along and tells you that they need this thing and shows you why it's important to them and why it matters is to say too bad if you just come to me a few hours ago and that's definitely not the position you ever want to find yourself and it just makes you look bad and it makes you feel and it makes the other person feel bad there's nothing you can do but say no period and that is the last thing in the world that you really want to be able to do so we want to move away from prioritizing by effort alone and I think alone is an important word here because effort it does matter it's not that you can just think about like okay what what is it you have to consider effort in the scope of everything else and that's why I think when it comes to priorities what you really need are these four things goals success metrics time frames and potential solutions so time frames can be you know your your defining priorities at different levels of granularity it might be a super-high level it might be like lower than that like I think Google does an amazing job of this with okay ours right we were at Google we have like company level okay ours we have department-wide okay ours you could have your own okay ours you have product okay ours so everybody has a sense of what it is they're doing but they all have to follow this specific template of why am i trying to do this what is my goal my success metric how am I going to prove that I've actually achieved this goal how much time do I have in order to be able to do it and time frames can be arbitrary but in my experience I found that generally setting sort of like product level goals three months or a quarter is a really good way to think about it it's enough time to be able to do stuff you can set sort of like monthly check-ins and then but you're not thinking too far ahead you can generally plan for what you think is gonna happen over the next quarter and then two weeks is a great sort of time frame him for like sprint planning or things like that and then you can have potential solution so one major goal at Hoover on a pretty regular basis was supply growth it was like the goal was there are consumers they can't get rights they can't get cars why is it that they can't do that we need to be able to solve that problem so we wanted to get to the point where every single rider can get a driver whenever they want to that's our goal success metric we're gonna look at the actual like conversion request so if somebody tries to request a ride what percent of those requests actually completed and went to a full ride how many of them were cancelled how many of them couldn't people fulfilled what are the issues that happened there and we're gonna do this in three months and there's a whole bunch of ways we could do this one is that we could just stop accepting users of course because then we keep the demand the same and supply continues to grow probably not a great idea we could work on expanding our supply itself we can try and get more people in the pipeline we can grow the pipeline come up with better driver recruiting solutions get drivers through the onboarding funnel faster or we could also try this innovative new concept called surge pricing where prices demand fluctuate depending on the on supply and demand and so there's many different ways to solve a problem but ultimately where it comes down to is that you want to focus on why you're solving the problem why it matters and then how you're actually going to measure your ability to get there so once you have that in place you know what your priorities are you know what your goals are you know why you're doing it this is when you're having a conversation with that person who says hey can you do this thing for me you want to find common ground and so what that means it's really just finding agreement on the company goals now sometimes people ask me like oh does it matter who you're talking to like what if you're you know talking to people at different levels so like the returns associate at ModCloth that's in the fulfillment center versus the head of marketing and I actually think it doesn't matter because the point is that as a p.m. we need to have respect for every single person who were working with and it doesn't matter what that person's level in the company is it doesn't matter what they're doing on a day-to-day basis it doesn't even matter what our personal relationship with them is the point is that we're all together in that company we're employees and we are trying to find a way to make this company the best that it can be now the way in which we do it how we do it the specific things that we do on a day to day basis those might be different but fundamentally it doesn't matter who we are we're here to make the company better and so that means we need to have agreement on what the company's goals are and why those are the company's goals because you can imagine trying to have a conversation with somebody who thinks that the most important thing you should be doing is getting lost a lot of new users in the door as you have a conversation with a company CEO all you're talking about is how to get deeper engagement with your users and so that conversation doesn't really happen at the beginning there's no way that you're ever gonna be able to get to a point where you can have this conversation and not say no period but really come away with a solution from that so that I think is really the first step in having this conversation with somebody now this is something that I have to remind myself of all the time it's just that you just can't listen too much and not that I love to hear this out of my own voice by any means but you know you get passionate about a product area of something and you just start talking about it and you're excited and you just keep going there and you forgot to listen and sometimes people just need to be heard you know part of being a p.m. sometimes it's being a therapist and that's kind of what and that's okay and so I thought this cartoon is just really funny because it's like you know here's a relationship here's a marriage right and it's like it's clearly there's something off here and it's not quite working all right can you listen to you can you repeat everything you said since we've been married and so I just I can't I can't emphasize how important it is to just be quiet and to listen to take in what people are saying whoever that person is whenever you're having that conversation because it's never it's never a waste of time and I know like in my mind too I sort of been in that place where I'm like oh I've got like 500 emails to do I've got that strategic roadmap review with that person tomorrow I got to write up that requirements document I've got to review those designs and QA it and all this stuff comes into our head and we're not really listening so what I find actually is very helpful for me in having these conversations is I actually put my I put my laptop away and I actually take out my notebook and I start writing things down and as soon as I'm forced to sort of transcribe and write those things down I find that I'm listening much much better because there's just not like it's not like the Twitter and slack notifications are off on the side there's no like pings on emails like nothing's happening there's this great xkcd cartoon I don't know if you guys have ever seen it but it's basically trying to reimagine what the world would be like if we had to do it on typewriters and so you see this guy like typing and ma before you can get to the M he types in dub dub dub facebook.com/ and so like that you like sometimes when I have my computer on and so that's why it's so great to just put it away and kind of go from there so then what you want to be able to do after that is you want to listen but you also want to be able to give back to this person you wanted you want them to have a deeper and greater understanding of what's going on at the company and what people are doing and so I think 8 that can you guys hear me okay all right he's actually - just think about what the solution is and what it involves so it's okay to just sort of say like alright well if we were gonna do it how would we actually go about doing it and what this does is a couple of things one is that it actually makes sure that you really know what all the components are of all of the systems that are involved in that you actually understand as a p.m. like how to make something work so when the example I'm thinking of right now is this is like uber I goes back in 2012 or something so we only had like maybe 10 or 15 cities at this point and one of the things that somebody really wanted to do it's a general manager in one of our cities and a great idea he said well I really wanna be able to benchmark I want to know how am I good I am relative to other people so can you just give me a way to like be able to pull up my charts and also just add a benchmark feature just pick a city so that I can go through and kind of do what I need to do there so we sat down we thought about it's like okay well well what if the city is in different time zone then how should we show how should we show these graphs should we pick something that is like should we move everything to one timezone which time zone should we pick should we move it to a relative - I like a neutral time zone should we do it relative to like a zero point what is it that you actually want us to do so we went through that and then it was like okay well what if the numbers are really different what should we do with the axes should we grow the chart so that the access can grow like how is that gonna work should we save it what if you want to like change it to benchmark can you benchmark more than one thing and you you guys know how this conversation goes right so as soon as you start to do that and just and do it in a way that's it's not condescending it's not it should never be about that but it should be about understanding and it should be about getting people to think about all of the things that play into this stuff so let the next time when somebody says I think I've got this great feature you know they might actually have a better sense of like how all of the parts of the system play together and they can have that and then once you have that conversation about what the actual solution is you can tie it back to goals you can tie it back to like that that time or you found your company agreement and what you wanted to do there and see whether or not it actually is part of those goals and how it's going to go and then I think a great place in this template is to actually have resource allocation right like we have be prioritised cuz we don't have enough people and we don't have enough time so let's show you what everybody's working on and we tried to do our best I think at every company that I've worked at to be really communicated with our roadmap with to everybody in the company to the stakeholders but you know no matter how hard you try you're going to miss it and sometimes things will happen you'll update the roadmap but you won't update the roadmap that everybody else gets to see and they won't actually have access to all of those things and so as much as you can do to just keep communicating to people here's what we're working on here's why we're working on it this is what people are doing you know the better you're going to be and the better place you're going to be in to ultimately have these kinds of conversations and really fundamentally what you want to be able to do is find the intersection of your goals because we're all employees at the same company we want to make the company better so that means that there's got to be a way that we can figure out how my personal goal and your personal goal and our product school can all align with the company's goals and that's really where that's the first part of it without finding that common ground there's just nothing else that you can do the conversation doesn't go anywhere once you're on the same plane then there's something you can actually move on from and be able to do so alright we've established common ground we figured out what it is that we're trying to do we've talked about the solution we've talked about a hard it's gonna be what it involves and all of that and now we're in a place where we can actually find a way to make things happen so this is all about moving away from no period to a solving a problem right and there's a bunch of different things we can do there but the first and foremost I think is understanding the problem so just as we were talking earlier about listening to people and hearing and thinking about what they're doing sometimes we don't always know what they're trying to do right so I think most of us probably heard this like Henry Ford quote which is if I really asked people what they wanted they just tell me I wanted a faster horse and so they wouldn't if you ask them what the problem was sorry if you ask them what the problem was they'd say I want to get from point A to point B faster and I've definitely made this mistake where eyes like assumed that I knew what people were doing because people don't generally come to you with with problems they come to you with solutions right and so you want to move away from the solutions to actually getting to the problems and figuring out what those problems are so a good good example here is we'd built this or this product is uber it was called it was like a shared inbox basically to help operations and logistics managers better be able to communicate with drivers and we set this up in a way that was quite of like a ticketing system so once somebody were small like there was sort of a shared inbox and that all of the all of the messages would come in from drivers right early on beginning and then when somebody it was up for grabs so anybody looking at this could pick it up and start to respond to it but once you responded to it it came out if they up for grabs and sort of went into your own personal inbox that you didn't have access to anymore and we and we did this because we thought well you know once somebody's already replied to it we don't want to we don't want to keep sharing the work like somebody's already decided that they're gonna pick it up it's just a task so we'll let them take care of it we won't show it to anyone else and so we did this and we were like of course that makes sense that's how it goes and then we start getting these requests in which is like hey can I see what everyone's working on and we just couldn't figure out like show it show it I'll show it to us all the time we just couldn't figure out why it was that people were trying to do that and so we we had to talk to a bunch of different people and ultimately what we figured out is it was a process thing we're generally the the teams have found the most use for those were teams that had several different managers that were actually responding to and responsible for communicating with drivers so what would happen is that they would do it on a rotational basis so like one person would do it on Monday one person would do on a Tuesday one person would do it on Wednesday and what happened as a result is that like somebody would reply to it on Monday but they'd get distracted or go off and do something else and need to work on something more urgent and then they wouldn't pick it up and they'd have to come back to it only when it was their turn again so what that meant that is that the driver was just like what's going on here like I wrote in and nobody responded to it and so what they were trying to do essentially is find a way to like because they had this process system in place is being able to change the product to sort of reflect the process so we had to work through a couple of different things but fundamentally that's what we need to figure out it wasn't that they actually wanted to be able to like you know share the work that way it was just that they wanted to be able to respond to drivers faster and figure out a way to make it work within their process and how to do that and I mean we honestly if we like we talked to them we talked to all of these people like we had our stake holders we had our like weekly meetings and our hour updates and our betas and we why didn't we ever figure this out before and it just happens it happens sometimes and that's okay but the key thing is to go in with that kind of mindset I think to have a problem focused mindset as opposed to a solution focus mindset so the last sort of part of what we have here what I wanted to do is you spend a little bit of time talking about real strategies that we can use to actually figure out how to move away how to make this a really productive and good conversation right and I've broken this out into sort of two large ways there's features and so those quick conversations of like hey can you just add this one little thing in and then there's products which are like larger bigger things that you generally have to think about oh my it's a it's a it's a chain a real change to the roadmap and and typically what I found in my experience anyway is that you know features tend to come from people who are actually sort of more on the individual contributor level like actually doing these things day to day and these product questions tend to come mostly from like heads of departments or people who are managers that are actually responsible from like a larger standpoint so there's also a difference in the way in which you the way in which you communicate these type of things and how and what your options are for how you go through that so so the first one I have here is a add the feature in an upcoming version and this is sometimes people just want to know that it's coming and if they know like hey it's gonna come out on this date and it's gonna be available for that that guess you were a big part of the way because they know that you're working on something that's ultimately gonna solve their problem so one potential area for concern here of course though is that you know oh it's gonna come out in v2 and then you never get around to v2 right oh all of your scope for v2 changes and then it doesn't go there so I think it's a great way to be able to say that this feature is gonna come up in an upcoming version but just be honest stick to it you know and if things change make sure you communicate that back and that you can you can stand behind that promise because that's what you're doing is if you want to treat people with respect and you want them to know that you're really out there to try and solve their problem when you show them that you have something that's going to that's the solution you have to stand behind it and make sure that you can actually do that the other thing too is you could use a combination of existing tools right so one one thing that happened here is we used to have we first started out at uber we don't necessarily have a ton of drivers it wasn't super well known so we weren't we just come into a city and have like hundreds of drivers just turn on their phones all of a sudden we actually had to start out especially when we only had our black car model by going up and like cold-calling drivers like car companies and saying like hey can we pay you to be online during this time and then we had to actually pay them so we have to figure out two things one is like we edit eight think about our take so like here's how much the fare cost we take all of that but regardless of that we actually still have to pay drivers at a fixed hourly rate and so we have to manage that and control it but the thing is we knew always that we weren't gonna keep this model forever we had to do it because it was the only way to be able to manage that at the beginning to make sure that we have the supply we needed to be able to get that demand on the road but fundamentally it wasn't something that we wanted to continue supporting or building major products for because the whole goal was to get rid of it entirely right and so as a result of doing that what we we ended up doing is the hard part is like these guys would have to sit down the operations teams would have sit down and come up with tons and tons of spreadsheets and like literally spend an entire day trying to figure out how much drivers need to be paid when they were online how much they made and so we couldn't we couldn't build an entire like product just to solve this problem it didn't make sense given our resources but what we did do is we invested a little bit of time and thinking about all right well the thing here is that you don't necessarily know how to pull the data so let's write some sequel queries for you that will automatically pull the data and put it into a format that you can then just take and put directly into Excel so great now you've got that now it's just like a one click thing as opposed to having to run multiple sequel queries to be able to gather the data and then transform it and manipulate it and put it into what you're doing and writing a sequel query and sending it to run on a regular basis and sending an email that's really not that hard we can do that we can do that with our technology without spending a ton of time on it and still save you hours of work and then the next thing is basically here's where the the ops team came in because these guys are just like amazing Excel wizards so a couple of Yas guys then created like macros to be able to run on the excel sheet and transform it again into what it was that they needed so it wasn't even sort of technology work that we had to do on our side it was the team sort of coming together and so through that combination of tools they actually solved a huge part of the problem so now instead of spending an entire day trying to figure out how much to pay people you could in like several hours basically and so that was really like an important piece of it and then related to that I think is automated email reports so a lot of times like building good analytics is hard I don't know why you guys but I still haven't found a great analytic solution I mean like there's a lot of great companies out there that try to do good stuff and I really believe in them but I still haven't found something that solves the problem from top to bottom and so all as a result you know I think a lot of people still run sequel queries or whatever happens to be to be able to get it data and do stuff with it and so you have to remember like what I used to do is I have to set like calendar reminders I'm like okay 9:00 a.m. every day go run the sequel query and then pull it out and do that whereas if I just got an automated email report honestly like that's all just run the sequel query send it to me and that's really not that hard to do you know set up the cron job it's a very simple thing to do and that in itself just changes the ways that people respond to you because if you can do simple things like even if they're if the if people aren't necessarily super familiar with these simple things like you've just solved a big problem for them and you didn't have to work very hard to do it and it doesn't matter how much work you put in what matters is did you solve the problem and that's just the really important piece of it so let's features here's products right so these are these are bigger and these tend to be a managerial level that you have these conversations they're a little bit harder to solve so the first one is reduce scope right turn it into a feature maybe it doesn't have to be some giant product and if you do that well then you already have a bunch of solutions and strategies to be able to do that research and circle back I think this is a really important one too because sometimes you need to say I don't know I don't have enough information I don't really know where we can go with this and part if you've listened to them if you've understood the problem and you know where they're trying to go then being able to say like let me get back to you is an unbelievably important thing here and like people really respect it so I think it's it's really important to go out and do that and then the last thing is to escalate another word that I think people can sometimes think of as negative an escalation can be bad it can be bad if you just use it kind of without really thinking about it right if you're just like oh god I don't deal with this person let me go tell my manager that's probably not a good way to escalate but if you have a serious conversation with somebody and you really sit down and try to figure out how it is they were going through things you cannot find Bremen company goals you fundamentally believe that what you need to do is reengage users and this person fundamentally believes that what you need to do is acquiring the users well hey this is a time sometimes that you need to call people in and you know if you happen to be the most senior person at the company well then you get to like you know put your hand sinks down and say like well no that's what we're gonna do but if you're not then you have somebody else that you can bring in to help you with that and again the goal isn't it's not about proving people right or proving people wrong it's really about solving problems it's about finding a way to get to the goal and help people do the jobs that they're trying to do so that they can all help the company grow and kind of be a better place and you know it's not always building a product it's not always about getting your engineers together getting your designers together and having them do that sometimes it's really just about connecting people so it was one one example I'm thinking of is we would have all of these like interesting events that Community Managers around the world would do it over and we just get all these like requests flooding in and we'd be able to do some we wouldn't be able to do others and the problem was people just weren't talking to one another and so the simplest thing to start with really was hey we just set up like a weekly meeting where all the community managers in the world like got together and they spent time just quickly thinking about it we put together a spreadsheet where people could just input all of the different things that they wanted to run and when they wanted to run it and we could say whether or not we could do it or not we could monitor status around it no products no engineering nothing involved here it's just a way of organizing and getting people together so a big part of this is being creative finding new solutions and really thinking about what is the problem what is somebody trying to solve how can we help them do it and so you know you've probably forgotten everything I've said already that's okay I do too but I just wanted to say that there's I think there's really three things here if you forget everything else that I've said these are the three things that you know I think you can write on post-it notes and take away and still find useful the first and most important thing is articulating priorities we have to be able to prove to ourselves that what we're doing is what is important that we need to do it that we have to be able to defend it to our dying breath we have to be able to find common ground in goals to work with people to make sure that our we're on the same page that we're all here to make the company better that we're all here to solve what we're trying to do he hit our vision and make that happen and the last thing I think is to be creative and consider alternate solutions it's not always about building product it's not always about applying engineering or technology to solve a problem sometimes it's just about figuring out how to get people talking so that is all I have to say thank you so much and I hope that you know you'll have what you need to be able to move away from no period to really solving problems Thanks [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mind the Product

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Id: eYTz8Qce1qA

Length: 31min 34sec (1894 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018