In the last installment of this series, I reiterated four key pillars a best-in-class product manager drives:

1. Policy – The governing corporate and regulatory rules a business system must align and adhere to
2. People – The skills and knowledge humans need to enable a business system
3. Process – The human activities required both with and without technology to enable a business system
4. Technology – The automation required to enable a business system

The article focused on manual, technology-assisted, and technology-exclusive process components and the role the best-in-class product manager plays in ensuring all components are incorporated into the business system. Next up is the technology pillar.

Of the four pillars, the technology pillar is likely the most familiar to a product manager. A best-in-class product manager can understand the why as articulated by a business owner, translate it into a business system what, and ensure the technological how developed by engineers aligns to the what and satisfies the why.

It’s also important that a product manager has an eagle-eyed view of things that can adversely impact technology development and can proactively mitigate or quickly respond when bad things happen. Having that eagle-eyed view is key to being considered a best-in-class product manager.

To better support the eagle-eyed premise, here are some nuggets to consider:

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As a young manager, I was involved in a significant crisis which had the attention of not only the partners in the firm but also its CEO. I, like many of my cohorts, was nervous about the crisis, its impact on our clients, and my employment status at the firm. There was a very senior partner who was tasked by the CEO to assume responsibility for navigating the firm through the crisis. It took us a year to work our way out of the crisis; and we all learned some valuable nuggets. I thought I was a good leader before the crisis. Now I realize how naïve I was in my assessing my leadership skills. That experience, while excruciatingly painful, was an inflection point in putting me on the path to becoming a better leader.

Some time back, I worked as a project management consultant with a client on some of their large projects. This client had a dedicated change management (CM) organization that recently purchased a methodology from a CM service provider.

All the PMs in the organization were required to go through training on the methodology. The training itself was good in that it helped underscore concepts and level-set on terminology. Included in the methodology was an out-of-the-box project plan that the CM organization wanted the PMs to adopt.

It was very difficult to get the PMs to adopt the methodology because the stock plan didn’t align well with how PMs were used to planning projects. The stock plan tried to include non-CM tasks to be more standalone-like, which made adoption more difficult. The methodology got a bad rap because of the incongruency of the stock plan with how PMs planned out projects. Unfortunate.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

So the older I get the more I think about the lessons I’ve learned in my career. Oh, to go back in time and talk to my younger self about the boneheaded things I did. Sadly, my younger self probably wouldn’t have listened to any imparted wisdom (which I define as knowledge coupled with experience). I was recklessly confident—I didn’t think I would get burned by touching the stove, no matter how many before me got burnt.

Ah, the naivete of youth.

What I’ve come to realize is that learning hard lessons doesn’t mean I have to experience them first-hand. It’s far less physically, emotionally and financially painful to learn from others. This has led me to an important conclusion--there are two paths to wisdom. The first is experiential wisdom, where I know the stove is hot because I touched it. The second is inherited wisdom, where I believe someone with credibility when they tell me the stove is hot. I could have saved myself a lot of time, stress, and money if I understood and practiced inherited wisdom.

In my zeal to help those still climbing the career mountain, following are my 12 wisdom nuggets to help others avoid experiential wisdom and replace it with inherited wisdom.

In my article What You Receive When You Give, I talked about the benefits of what you provide in volunteer service in addition to what you gain as a professional.
While it’s great to give of yourself and your resources, I’ve learned that being intentional about what you give to is vital. I’ve said yes to many giving opportunities—only to either regret it, or recognize that I’ve overcommitted myself.
In talking with other professionals, I’ve learned this is a very common situation, which inspired me to write an allegory titled Why Did I Say Yes? and create a methodology that helps evaluate whether to commit to an ask of resources.
Key to the methodology is evaluating seven boundaries to help you decide whether to support any ask of your resources.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As an individual contributor, Joe was praised by his management for his speed in delivering results. His management was so enamored with his ability to get things done quickly that he was promoted to a leader role over a team of ten. Joe’s speed in taking action carried over into his decision making. He saw making decisions fast as a sign of getting “real work done,” versus sitting around talking about things. “Great leaders don’t have all the facts,” he would say to his team, as justification for moving forward without a good understanding of a decision’s implications. Joe’s team learned to just say, “Yes, Sir,” and do their best to execute what Joe wanted done by the time expected. His impulsive decision making came to a head with a new hire named Greg.

On the 1980s HBO show Not Necessarily the News, comedian Rich Hall created Sniglets, which dictionary.com defines as “any word coined for something that has no specific name. Words like Jokesult (When someone insults you, you call them on it, and they say, "It was just a joke.”) and Chwads (discarded gum found beneath tables and countertops) were born to humorously explain commonplace things or actions. I’ve created 20 of my own project management and leadership sniglets; some made up words, others repurposed words or phrases. I hope they resonate with you and put a bit of humor in your day.

As a parallel to the book, I developed an excel spreadsheet to help you define good-enough goals and work towards those goals. The Nine Crucial Elements to Achieve Good-Enough Contentment Assessment includes an annual goal setting tab to help you identify what you'd like to achieve by the end of the year for each good-enough contentment element and put steps in place to do it. You can download the spreadsheet which you should use after reading the book.