Reversing Entropy in Corporate Environments
Jun 27, 2023
Entropy abounds, particularly in companies as they scale. As the network nodes grow, complexities and number of conversations/relationship grows at O^n
PMs are unique in their ability to reverse entropy:
- Because of where they sit on the influence ladder vertically (comfortably at the midpoint between, say, Intern and CEO), they can actually create meaningful behavioral change
- Because of where they sit horizontally in the org (cutting across multiple teams and stakeholders), they can see patterns and make elegant changes to solve problems that rhyme across the org
Some examples
As an individual Bug Report increases in Days Open, an incredibly complex ecosystem of watchers, questions, and actions starts to accrete. Over days or weeks, that becomes really onerous to keep in RAM, kind of like a Chrome Tab that’s been open for 3+ days
- A second order issue arises here (much like in an ecosystem, there are knock-on effects), where heavy Bug Reports tend to get the least attention, because of how much spin-up energy it takes to come up to context with the ticket. “Okay, who was impacted here? What was the original bug? It looks like some Engineers huddled about it, but what was the result of that huddle? Oh, nobody took notes?”
- Good PMs will work to Reverse the Entropy by summarizing and routing all of the ongoing conversation
- Great PMs will close out the ticket with decisive action quickly (some options: getting the bug actually fixed; identifying the bug but saying “we won’t fix this”—and arming the CS or AM person with language saying why; splitting a “21-point” bug ticket into discrete pieces and routing to their respective teams; etc)
When a Big Decision needs to be made quickly, it either happens Day Of, or 2 Weeks Out (when everybody’s calendars allow). The best timeframe is probably somewhere in between, to give people time to come up to context, mull, pre-mortem, debate, etc. Probably like 2-4 days, depending on how much time is left until Friday PM If it’s Day Of, then it’s probably an emergency. We’ll exclude this case for this article
- A Bad PM puts a placeholder on the calendar with a vague title, and doesn’t come back to it until the day (or meeting) before the placeholder
- A Good PM will Reverse Entropy by putting together a Memo in advance of the 2 weeks away meeting and asking folks to read
- A Great PM will:
- write a Memo with 1) The Decision To Be Made; 2) Their Recommendation; and 3) Supporting Information/Data
- spin up a Slack Group with the relevant people—and no more
- use RACI + 2-Pizza Teams for guidance here
- directly “@” the people who need to either Explicitly Sign Off or answer Important Questions Without Which We Cannot Proceed
- lay out an explicit due date, and ask people to please say if that is not a workable turnaround time due to other constraints
- remain on the lookout for Slack Threads/Google Comments spiraling out of control (>4 replies or any reply >50 words) and “Eject to Zoom”. They will take notes during that Zoom and bring any relevant information back into the Memo
Creating Decision Logs for Product Features: On MM/DD/YYYY, we had a decision to be made about XYZ. The team who decided were . We decided Path A (out of Paths A-D, which are summarized below). Our main deciding factor(s) were … protip: to speed this up, you can speak it out and have AI transcribe it