Recently, I got a chance to read an amazing book called “Indistractable” by the author of “Hooked” fame, Nir Eyal. If you are doing Product Management then you must have already read “Hooked”, and if you have not already then, I highly recommend you do so at the earliest. But his book “Indistractable” is an anti-thesis or rather an anti-dote to whatever he has written in his book “Hooked”. It will help you get your life back from all the distractions that you have around and focus on what really matters.
While reading this book it strikes me that, isn’t this an everyday challenge for all Product Managers and everyone in the trade of Product Management that how can we always be able to focus on what really matters.
In this blog I will take you through the Indistractable Model defined by Nir Eyal in his book and will try to map it to the paradigms of Product Management and show how we can use it for building an Indistractable Product Management thought process.
Indistractable Model
Going “by the book” and I seriously mean it. To implement the Indistractable Model in your personal life and in the process become Indistractable, means to be able to focus on what is really meaningful to you and, to do so you will have to take care of four buckets of things that have a direct impact on your focus:
- Internal Triggers: The internal triggers are the fundamental phycological issues or crisis one is facing in his/her personal or professional life which pushes or motivates a person to be distracted to something which is not supposed to be their priority. These internal triggers could be making you run towards the lap of distraction(s) and it could be anything from a toxic workplace, toxic colleague to the bad relationship one might share with his/her life partner.
- External Triggers: These are the external factors, everything outside you that acts as a catalyst to distract your focus from what you want to do or achieve in your personal or professional life. It could be those notifications on your mobile phone, to anything which steals away your productive personal or work allocated time.
- Distraction: The Internal and External Triggers which can push you away from the focal point of your focus. But even if you have taken care of both these triggers there will be external factors, people, etc in the mix who will end up distracting your focus. It could be the constant chatter in the office, or an annoying colleague of yours who always has something to discuss with you or it could be even your loved ones at home . You need to control all of it by different means.
- Traction: Ability to make time for the activities both personal and professional that really are in alignment with our core values and thus with our priorities as well.
Implementing the Indistractable Model for Product Management
Even before I begin to apply the Indistractable Model to Product Management, it would be good to understand how this is going to help us in our day-to-day Product Management tasks. To put this simply, the Indistractable Model aims to keep our focus on something that really matters to us, avoiding all the distractions effectively. This would in turn help the Product Managers to prioritize better by cutting right through all that noise of distractions.
Now it is time to apply this model to Product Management. To do this we will have to define the paradigms of this model from the perspective of the product and Product Management.
Internal Triggers:
The internal triggers from the product perspective are the issues that can lead you to other distractions and you may end up focusing on fixing either a symptom or a non-issue, unless and until you do not fix the core issues. These core issues could be anything right from the product stability to bad user experience. In a real-life scenario, the users might be facing challenges onboarding your product, navigating it, or using it end to end. But if as Product Manager instead of solving the issue of bad user experience, you invest in jazzing up the user interface, you are not solving the core issue. Hence even after having a mind-blowing user interface upgrade, the challenges your customers are facing would still exist and you will have a bunch of unhappy customers who might eventually get frustrated enough to move to your competition. So, as a Product Manager, the key here is to identify the internal trigger and focus on solving the core issue instead of letting this internal trigger digress your focus towards a problem that does not need to be solved and hence does not need your attention, investment nor your team’s efforts.
External Triggers:
In the case of Products, the External Triggers can be expected in terms of direct requirements flowing from the customers either directly or through other communication channels in your organization. So, the question here is, why is this a distraction, if as a Product Manager all we want or work towards is more and more interested customers and requirements come from the interested customers. It is so because there is a difference in working on a customer’s use case and their user scenario in comparison to directly getting a requirement. Because, when it’s a usecase or a user scenario you understand the problem, try to see the alignment of it the core value of your product, and then work on a solution which best serves all your target customers, while a direct requirement from a customer looks very tempting as it can directly serve value to that particular customer and more often than not is pointing towards a solution itself. Thus, there is no validation of any usecase with the cohort of customers that you intend to serve and risk of the solution serving a very niche usecase for maybe that particular or a fraction of customers thus making it a very costly implementation with a low return on your investment and above all, to get this requirement implemented you as a Product Manager would have de-prioritized something which was planned you were focusing on.
Distractions:
As product managers, even if you have taken care of the internal and external triggers which can lead to derailing your and product focus, there will still a cloud of distractions around you that can get you out of focus momentarily or for a sustained period. These distractions can be anything ranging from blindly falling for the competition’s strategy, to getting distracted by the buzz words. You have to deal with these distractions have one at a time. So, it is very important that we first identify the distractions and then put a stop to those by analyzing their alignment with the core problem that we intend to solve for our target customers. More than not, it will not be in alignment and thus it will help steer clear of these distractions.
Tractions:
Focusing on the activities that really matter to the evolution and growth of the product are the ones that can keep you away from all that noise of distraction. Any activity is undertaken by the Product team if it focusses on solving the target customer’s problem or proactive enhancements to improve the customer’s experience with the product, then these are the tracks of traction, we as Product Manager need to keep our product train on. So that we do not end up digressing from the intended product roadmap in the influence of internal, external triggers or distractions.
The below diagram shows the Indistractable Model for Product Management.
This was an attempt to implement the Indistractable Model for getting control over your focus for the Product Management domain so that this in turn can help the Product Managers prioritize better and end up maintaining a healthy roadmap for the product. This provides a framework for thinking in a direction to prioritize right for yourself, but is heavily based on your judgment and thus purely qualitative and quantitative in nature.
Cheers!
Excellent article
Thanks!