#79: Being "The Expendables" in Product Management

And how CandyCrush touched the sky

Yo!

Last week, I had a probation review with my line manager, and I was surprised.

In the meeting, I told my boss I wanted to deepen my understanding of a few product lines inside the company. In other words, I have a concrete, certain plan to grow.

My line manager said:

"I cannot promise you which projects we're going to work on next, or next next. Our team is a strategic one, formed to quickly validate any hypothesis the board of management has before they invest in it further"

"So we cannot simply plan ahead what we will do. But we must be ready at all times.”

"Everything will be uncertain, except one thing: You are expected to learn fast, do things you might have never done, but still deliver the result with the highest standard"

This saying reminds me of the movie "The Expandables"¹ - it's about a group of elite mercenaries tasked with impossible missions (the main one: overthrow a Latin American dictator).

PM is like "The Expandables"². We are always on standby mode waiting to take on the next tough challenge without knowing anything in advance. We have to play the game as it goes. The name "Expandable"³ is self-explanatory: we are expected to expand ourselves to learn a whole new range of skills for the job.

It's like a rubber band. You can stretch in whichever direction the force is.

But, let's be realistic: what makes someone "expandable"?

I believe it boils down to 3 things:

1. Understand the problem fast. The less time we spend on problem understanding, the more time we have to prepare and react.

2. Satisfice. One must be willing to make decisions that they know are optimal at the time being but come with negative consequences. Sacrifice your perfectionism to satisfy the current problem.

3. Pay close attention to what's going on. This is arguably the most critical. In order to make decisions, you must have data points of the current situation.

The keyword that lurks behind all three points is uncertainty. If you think you have a high tolerance for uncertainty, being a PM might be for you.

P/s: I was over the moon to find out (after writing this letter) that Ken Norton (14 years building products at Google), shares the same notion about being expandable as a PM. Give his post a close look!

Weekly discovery: CSS Dinner

If you are (a PM and) learning CSS (a code language to make your site looks better than plain text), you must try out this website.

This website is designed to teach you how to use CSS selectors. It really opens my eyes when it shows countless ways to select elements.

But the thing that made this website soooo good is how it uses animation to instruct you to code - easy to follow and understand the concepts.

Though one obviously doesn't need to go this far to learn about CSS selectors, I'd encourage you to try this site at least once, to refresh your memory and experience a wind of creativity ;)

Around the Internet

1. Twitter has laid off 50% of its workforce. And Elon just taught us how not to fire people

simon balmain @SBkcrn

Looks like I’m unemployed y’all. Just got remotely logged out of my work laptop and removed from Slack. #OneTeam forever. Loved you all so much. So sad it had to end this way 💔

2. If you want to know how gloomy the tech industry has been for the past week, someone has made a layoff tracker!

3. Advertising by billboard is obsolete. Facebook? Too competitive. Drones are the new ad space! Last week, CandyCrush used hundreds of drones to advertise on the New York sky.

Lulu Cheng Meservey @lulumeservey

The sky over New York tonight! A feat by our team - it’s one thing to get some drones, but another to coordinate with the FAA and the many other local and national regulators and get all the permits and follow all the protocols and look out for wildlife and the environment and

4. Ever heard the term "Speak your mind"? Now, technology allows that. Though it's still in embryo, this is really promising.

Sarah Wandelt @sarah_wandelt

Super excited to share a preprint! At @Caltech, we build the first closed-loop brain-machine (#BMI) interface that is able to decode internal speech 💭. Check it out here: medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Think with me: What would you do if you find your lost phone?

Imagine this: You lost your phone. Luckily, you turned on Find My (iPhone)/ Find My Device (Android) and left 4G always on. You used the app(s) and successfully located your phone. You go to the location and see a suspicious man (assuming that there are people around, but you know that's him).

How do you get your phone back?

Note: I have been thinking about this a lot. I wrote quite a few about how useful Find My is in locating lost items, but when it comes to this I'm stuck. What's the best way to do it without:

• Harming yourself? (if the man is starving and not afraid to do whatever to escape)

• Humiliating the man in front of the crowd?

And also what if the man insists on telling you this is his phone and doesn't give you back, even if he is upfront lying? (cannot unlock, cannot do anything).

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Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter. If you find it useful, please help share it with your friends!

Have a relaxed Sunday and a productive week ahead!

Cheerio,
Tuan Mon

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Many One Percents newsletter is my weekly curation of Internet gems, mostly about technology, productivity and product management. If you want to support me, you can either subscribe to this newsletter, or donate via these channels: Momo | Paypal | Vietcombank | Patreon

1. The movie’s real name is “The Expendables” with an “e”, not “Expandables” with an “a”. My sincere apology for making this rookie mistake.

2. Again, “Expendables”

3. Okay, I mistook “expendable” (the movie name) for "expandable” - as written in the essay, because they sound the same. What I truly mean here is we PM should become expAndable like “The ExpEndables”, not become "expEndable” (meaning: of relatively little significance, and therefore able to be abandoned or destroyed) hahaha. But thanks to this happy accident, I have a chance to relate the movie to Product management lol.