Our first speaker from within our community for the May event is Felicity Bodger on discussing her playbook on “How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.” This talk is for product managers who want to level up to become killer pms, creating a personal professional playbook will enable you to transform your team of mercenaries into missionaries while also fending off the monster chewing on your leg, unlike your run of the mill corporate values that only have the half-life of a power point presentation.

How To Become A Killer Product Manager (in 3 easy steps)
– Felicity Bodger.

Step 1: “Stealing like an artist”

Be inspired by what others have done. These principles are based on an article by Naomi Knight, Head of Product at Meta. Colloquially called “Naomism“, she recommends that a person captures best practices, frameworks and processes about how to be a killer PM.

Naomi’s key principles:

1. Understand, identify, execute –
   • principles behind discovery and delivery on a page – which leads to extreme clarity
2. Canonical everything: (which means to explain things in it’s simplest form)
   • Document everything Write down the governance and information architecture structure.
   • PM as a conductor is a metaphor for the role of a PM
3. Simplifiers – explain complex items simply
   • People and Processes: have single threaded owner
   • Building a bridge – doing yourself out a job

One of the keynote speakers at the Atlassian conference last month shared his principles which are at the other end of the spectrum from Naomi and are not so much about shaping the work as surviving it. We deal with complex work environments with uncertainty in our professional lives which isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Unfortunately, the thing about working in product is there’s always some monster chewing up your leg.

To quote Molly Graham directly,

“You’re fighting to survive and for people to give a shit about your company or product. There’s no way that the stress of building something from scratch doesn’t affect your emotions. You’re cycling through anxiety, fear, euphoria, boredom and then back to fear again as the situation changes. And that’s completely normal”.

If you deal with the emotion whilst scaling, it will help you to thrive.

Lenny Ricky has another metaphor for the role of the of the product manager, calling the PM the beating heart of the product team. The secret sauce of being a product manager is enabling others to do their best work, which ultimately creates the best product outcomes. To create the dream, you must build the team. And to build anything, you have to have the right tools. And for such a job, you don’t just need a bigger toolbox, you need to build a product aligned brain!

Step 2: How to Create a Digital Toolkit to Save and Synthesize Your Ideas

Building a toolkit to save and synthesize your ideas is essential for every product manager. Inspired by Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, this step focuses on curating your digital life and organizing information effectively. Here’s how you can get started.

Choose Your Tools

You don’t need fancy software to begin. Start with tools like Raindrop.io for bookmarking and Notion for organising ideas. Even basic browser bookmarks with an editable structure will do. The key is consistency.

• Step 1 Recap: Review all articles and resources you’ve collected in the research phase (e.g., a folder named “Inspiration”).
• Affinity Mapping: Read through your saved content to identify themes, much like affinity mapping in workshops.

Organise with the MECCA Framework

I’ve created a simple acronym—MECCA—to help structure your digital toolkit.

M: Making Your Work Better is the Work

• Focus on conscious leadership and operating “above the line.”
• Build a dream team: Steve Jobs famously encouraged balancing developers’ creative and technical strengths.
• Check out The Ask Your Developer Book for insights on fostering innovation within your team.

E: Extreme Ownership—Mastering Product Management

• Embrace accountability and long-term skill-building.
• Apply the concept of “drinking your own champagne” to develop and refine your expertise.

C: Curate It

• Use Naomi’s principle: Document, manage, make sense of, and reshare information effectively.
• Stay organised to avoid knowledge silos within your team.

C: Creating Systems

• Learn from James Clear (author of Atomic Habits): “Goals are for people who want to win once; systems are for people who want to win repeatedly.”
• Develop repeatable processes to ensure consistent results.

A: Automate All Things

• Identify areas where AI and automation can improve efficiency.
• Remember, mastery often requires human effort and iteration.
• Create playbooks to distill complex knowledge. The process of creating a frameworks forces reflection. And the process of following a framework forces evaluation and iteration.

Implement Gradually

Don’t try to build everything at once. Start small and expand your toolkit as your needs grow. Writing playbooks for yourself and your team helps streamline work processes and encourages fast execution.

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Step 3: Preach What You Practice

Once your digital toolkit is in place, become an evangelist for your methods. Marty Cagan’s book, Inspired, emphasises that without evangelism, your product won’t gain traction or will wither within a large organisation.

• Your playbook is a roadmap: It builds the team and sells the dream.
• Use it as a guide to stay focused on priorities.

Apply Conway’s Law

Conway’s Law states that the communication structure of an organization is mirrored in the design of its systems. Product experiences are shaped by the culture of the teams creating them.

Challenge yourself: Where does the experience of your product start? Prioritise work by asking, “Who can I set up for success today?” While you might not change your company’s structure, you can enhance how your team collaborates daily.

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TL;DR

1. Step One: Steal Like an Artist – Research and collect ideas.
2. Step Two: Build a Second Brain – Use structured digital tools to save and synthesize information.
3. Step Three: Preach What You Practice – Share your framework to inspire and guide others.

By leveraging collective wisdom and structured tools, you’ll build a robust digital toolkit to drive innovation and excellence in product management.

Use collective wisdom to go forth and win as you now have the playbook for creating a new future as killer PMs!

For other presenters in this session, please follow these links or head back to the main summary to catch up on the Q&A:

• Felicity Bodger – How to become a Killer Product Manager in 3 Easy Steps.
• Nick Kardamitsis – Beyond the numbers: Harnessing data for smarter product decisions.
• Marc Vandamme – Creating alignment with your teams and leaders.
• May 2024 Warp Up