How to improve product skills faster than everyone else

Eight personal lessons on how I learned to improve faster than before by understanding when true learning happens and how to optimise each day's potential.

As I am recovering from a knee injury (not fun!), I decided to write on a deeply enamoured topic – learning. This post is a reflection on learning strategies that (I believe) are more effective and efficient than how people typically learn. 

There is popularised and commonsensical advice about becoming better and smarter, such as just practising and doing the work. Getting to 10,000 hours of practice is a well-known principle of becoming a master, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell. 

Less commonly known is the initial research (by K. Anderson Ericsson and colleagues), which found that these 10,000 hours of practice should be deliberate and require maximal mental effort. In other words, mindlessly repeating the same activity is not enough. Each hour of practice should be performed at a peak mental effort, thinking about each step, adapting to changes and addressing the feedback. You probably know this as well. 

From a more practical perspective, the simplified version tells you that a PM with ten years of experience will be very similar in mastery to another PM with ten years of experience. A more sophisticated (and authentic to initial research) approach tells you that these PMs will significantly differ based on how much time each spent on deliberate learning and reflection (holding other variables constant). 

Which bears the question: how do we make each hour of learning 10x more efficient (and deliberate)? 

Get more feedback items and cycles than everyone else

Feedback loops, feedback cycles… Most content on improving through establishing feedback loops is superficial and rarely actionable. In my quest to improve, I had to understand and internalise what these feedback loops mean and how to use them. 

One day, I was reviewing the career paths and skill levels of different people I know. While the analysis was far from statistical, I picked up a pattern. It was related to how the product organisations were set up: processes that expected and included external input; the strength of collaborative work, including reviews and managerial coaching. The strongest PMs have gone through rigorous reviews, such as PRD critique cycles, and/or received significant attention from their managers. 

PMs in the bigger organisations had to build and rebuild their product strategies tens of times, write crisp PRDs, get their docs reviewed by multiple other product org members (not limited to other PMs), were often challenged on their solutions, endured rigorous reviews at all stages and had to prepare post-launch analyses. 

It finally clicked for me. If I could be challenged more on the artefacts I prepare, the logic I have for decisions, etc., then I’d go through more learning cycles than I would otherwise. The thought was obvious to me, yet with all its simplicity, I wasn’t doing it. 

To make each feedback loop provide more learnings, you can:

1. Get more people to review your work

2. Gather and accept more feedback items

3. Adapt based on feedback items (and their root cause)

Doing more work allows you to gather more data points for feedback, too. However, if you don’t get feedback on your work and can’t analyse the results of your work and the merits of your decisions (without post-hoc clarity), doing more work doesn’t accelerate your growth as much.  

Get challenged, hard and often

Not all product organisations have systems that challenge you to do a better job or set a bar at a level you can’t achieve with your first draft. In that case, you must establish these systems for yourself or the whole organisation. 

What systems, exactly? In general, any that allow you to gather task-oriented or behaviour-oriented feedback from a knowledgeable audience quickly. Examples include:

1. Product Requirements Documents (PRDs) that allow you to clearly outline your discovery and delivery insights and plans and then elicit targeted feedback on your thinking and logic from your team and other people (other PMs, leadership, and subject matter experts). Drive more feedback by posting these publicly. 

2. Post-launch analyses require reflection on your work and the results you’ve achieved. Additional questions/feedback from others help you see how else you could examine or interpret the data. Make sure to discuss the results with your team, focusing on “lessons learned.” 

3. Simple 1-pagers that outline your thinking about a particular initiative that you can share with other people

The reason I talk about a “system” and not about specific artefacts or actions is repeatability. Using post-launch analyses as an example, you must ensure all your launches go through the post-launch analysis stage. You can make an agreement with your team to deliver the analysis on all launched experiments and features in a specific timeframe – that would be a start in introducing a systematic approach to getting feedback. Ideally, there should be some kind of a forcing function, such as a bi-weekly meeting specifically to discuss all past launches.  

Many of these processes are established in bigger organisations, and you’ll be expected to follow them. Still, you can get additional task- or behaviour-oriented feedback in multiple ways. One of the easiest ways is to request feedback or review from more people than is usually required. Essentially, you want to get a lot of deep questions, comments, ideas and concerns when optimising for learning. 

An essential part of being challenged is realising when the feedback is good and when it is terrible. While feedback (or simply being challenged on a particular piece) can arise from political shenanigans in the org or can be produced by a clueless person, we mostly attribute too much of it to these causes. We quickly put that feedback into our mental ‘ignore’ folder when we do that. The less feedback you ignore, the more adaptation you have to do, and the more you learn. 

The best feedback targets assumptions, evidence and logic behind your decisions or behaviour.  

When you optimise for learning and improving, strict managers with very high standards and a desire to work with you on small details are better than laissez-faire managers. However, if the manager makes decisions for you instead of pushing you, that is not beneficial for learning. Make sure to work under strict managers, but build a relationship that allows you to make most decisions yourself.  

Build skills with targeted exercises

Product interviews in Big Tech companies are based on a case approach: build a specific product, find the root cause of a metric decrease, etc. This approach is a stripped-down and simplified version of a consulting interview. Exploring which experiences helped me develop and refine my approach, I realised that preparing for and solving management consulting cases was the most important learning experience. 

Product design cases, such as the ones you may encounter in an interview with Google or Meta, may ask you to build a specific product within some constraints. You are expected to identify underserved segments, their problems and needs, identify critical use cases, brainstorm solutions, set success criteria and develop a go-to-market plan. The experience mimics the actual product work you are supposed to carry out and touches on the most critical aspects of it. I feel that the principal value for Big Tech companies is not a structured way to assess candidates but a sure way to have product people who always consider specific items and follow a structured, repeatable and analytical approach. 

Solving these product cases, even if you are not looking to change jobs, is a perfect way to refine your skills and get feedback quickly. You spend 30-60 minutes on a completely novel problem, get challenged by an interviewer on your logic and move through the case in a structured way. During the exercise, you get targeted feedback on your thoughts, approach and decisions. Starting this is easy. You just need another product person to give you one of these cases after watching a few YouTube videos on how people solve them. 

A possible step up to a higher lever is solving management consulting cases. You will need to learn to build your own problem-solving structures to move towards successful case resolution.

There are other ways to practice outside your work. Discussing someone else’s product decisions is a viable way to dissect your thinking. Downloading apps and analysing their use cases, experiences, etc., is also a viable way to practice if you share your analysis with others. 

Athletes continuously practise specific movements in their training. Artists intensely master minor aspects of technique by repeatedly doing the same activity. Our work is no different. 

Seek novel problems that require more brainpower

Novel problems require you to start over and get deep into a new problem area where you have nothing to rely on. They make you work at the limit of your abilities and nudge you to develop a structure or a plan to address an issue. You can’t solve a big problem without identifying the critical levers and understanding its context. 

Novel problems and situations create uncomfortable external pressure. This pressure will create just enough acute stress for you to mobilise all your mental resources. Occasionally, you’ll fail, as we all do, yet the alternative is spending years on a low learning trajectory. Being acutely (not chronically) stressed by a challenge from time to time helps you grow. 

Working on novel problems and areas also means that there will be more potential feedback points. When everything is new and unknown, each decision is an opportunity to learn. 

On the other hand, there is a clear value in working for a long time in the same area. With time, you gain more profound expertise and understanding of the space, and you can run more advanced experiments and iterate on them. When you switch quickly, you can’t do that. 

The reconciliation of these two issues is tricky and subjective. One sub-optimal way to track whether you are getting enough novel challenges within your area is to write down things that you learned to do, failed at, can put on your CV, can build a conference talk around, etc. When you see that the number of bullet points doesn’t grow as fast as before, you are probably not growing as fast as you could. Given the right environment, you can grow in one org for many years.

You then need to cut your losses ruthlessly. If you work on an area that doesn’t require you to think hard or presents you with the same problems dressed differently, you need to move on when you optimise for learning. You don’t have to leave the organisation; you can seek other internal challenges. 

And, of course, running mindlessly through lots of novel problems without getting feedback (and acting on it) isn’t “optimising for learning”. 

Turn theory into practice (even as a leap of faith)

Books, courses, blog posts, workshops, conference talks – so many ways to learn how others do what you do and learn the best practices. Learning new approaches without implementing them in your work is valuable on its own as it impacts your mindset and builds your internal library of how you can solve specific problems. 

To grow faster, though, implement what you read in your work or side projects. Trying the approach you are unsure about requires you to deeply analyse what makes or breaks the success of this approach, identify limitations and adaptations for your case, and perform at your peak to ensure it goes smoothly. 

Repeating the same old ways rarely elicits significant learning but is more predictable. Trying a new and uncertain approach is inherently riskier, yet it allows you to see the same situation through a different lens. The more lenses/perspectives you can adopt, the more robust your problem-solving toolkit. 

Utilising an approach you’ve read about has to be mindful and deliberate. Start by outlining why you want to use it and what results you expect. Move on to building a plan for implementing or utilising the approach. Further down the road, reflect on how it went and its limitations. Think of how you would tweak the approach to achieve better results if it was successful or identify which parts didn’t work and ultimately made the approach ineffective. 

If you were to start using Opportunity Solution Trees after reading this blog post, you might run into problems that are more related to outside factors than the framework itself. For example, you may fail to convince your team to adopt the OST for various reasons. You must identify and overcome blockers to fully realise the value of any new approach you are trying. 

When starting your professional path, it’s better to follow an approach or a framework as suggested with only minor adaptations. 

If you are more experienced and have tried multiple similar approaches, consider how to adapt an approach to your specific situation. However, more skilled people are biased towards certain thinking and dogma, so you may inadvertently adopt a new approach in a way that is very similar to how you usually do things. This will limit the learning potential of trying a new approach as the difference from your regular approach will be minimal. 

When copying, think as hard as you otherwise would

Most decisions aren’t being made from the first principles. Most decisions happen when people think from an analogy. First principles thinking allows you to take control of how you make decisions by forcing you to think ground up, from some truths that you hold absolute and move into building your argument from them. First principles thinking can too lead to erroneous decisions either because of the initial foundation being wrong or because further argumentation is flawed. Still, first principles thinking forces you to go deep into analysis mode and build your argument without relying on fast pattern identification. And deep thinking improves your skills.  

Copying, though, is also a valid decision-making strategy. It is essentially a shortcut in which you believe that an existing approach can’t be horrendous; otherwise, it wouldn’t exist. Of course, the premise doesn’t hold 100% of the time, but it holds often enough. 

Copying doesn’t mean you don’t have to think. Especially if you are optimising for learning, you must assess why a particular approach has been used elsewhere, its key elements, etc. Copying allows you to execute fast and then assess the results of that execution. 

Artists start by imitating masters. Kids imitate their parents. Imitation is one of the most natural ways to learn, yet it must also be deliberate. 

Act on feedback with 100% resolution

“Feedback is a gift.” We often aren’t keen to receive such a gift, even though we wholeheartedly thank the person providing it. We even build plans to address it or think about how much better we’ll become after addressing it. Most often, though, planning to address the feedback becomes the end of the journey. With hundreds of small tasks each day, the feedback becomes less intense and less important with each passing day.

When optimising for learning, you must act on each piece of feedback you accept to a full resolution. Ideally, you should contact the person who provided feedback and ask them to assess you again. Only then could you consider the item to be ‘done’. The earlier you remove the barriers that prevent you from accepting and acting on feedback, the earlier you’ll start growing. 

In the example above, the feedback cycle lost 80% of its effectiveness along all the different steps.

How to analyse feedback items

You often hear that you should just accept feedback, not argue with it. That’s true, but that doesn’t mean you can’t discuss it. Clarifications help you understand feedback better. You should dissect the feedback you receive until you clearly see what it means. 

Feedback, especially the one about ‘points of improvement’, is based on expectations that haven’t been met. These expectations could be implicit (conforming to specific group norms is rarely mentioned as an expectation) or explicit. You must get additional information about the feedback:

1. What was the expectation?

2. What’s the importance of following that expectation? 

3. What’s the actual result?

4. What was the impact of you not meeting that expectation?

5. What examples and other types of evidence support the feedback?

6. How big is the gap between expectation and actual result? 

Understanding the answers to these questions will help you build an action plan that addresses the root cause of the feedback, not its superficial occurrences.

Three things to avoid when working with feedback

Many things could go wrong when working with feedback, but I’d be on the lookout for these three:

1. Trying to reframe the feedback in a way that changes it

2. Assigning the root cause of feedback to external parties

3. Combining multiple feedback items into one

Reframing or deflecting feedback allows you to “save face”. For example, you may agree that the result doesn’t meet expectations, but that’s because you did something else – more important and better. The chance to grow here is lost. Addressing feedback is not about justice and fairness; it’s about growth. 

Assigning the root cause of feedback to external parties is simply not helpful. You may be correct. It may be unfair to be provided feedback on something beyond your control. Still, instead of rejecting that feedback, you can think of ways to exhibit indirect control over the situation, find approaches to gently influence it or even realise that you should’ve escalated the problem to someone else. Regardless, the influence of external factors is not a valid ground to reject feedback. 

Combining multiple feedback items into one makes feedback and the resulting action plan fuzzy. Our desire to see patterns sometimes leads us to see complicated patterns where a simplistic model is just enough. 

Implement 100% of action items

You can build a list of all the action items that resulted from the feedback and track their progress/completion. Having it written down and tracked introduces internal accountability. 

Gathering feedback but not implementing it to a 100% resolution is an intellectual game in which you pretend to be a modest learner. It might be hard to accept the feedback and advice of other people, as it might damage one's self-image. Acting on these feedback items presents even a grander challenge, as these things are not born in oneself; they come from elsewhere, quite often from peers. We must choose between appeasing our ego or improving our learning speed. 

When working with mentors, strive to implement each suggestion or advice. If you truly trust your mentor (otherwise, why do you even spend time talking to them?) and their skills, you must accept the advice, fully implement their approach, and adjust based on the results. The emphasis is on the full implementation. 

Use mental rehearsal to reflect on your approach

Research shows that performing an action and imagining how you perform that action activates the same regions in the brain. We can’t conclude that you can simply imagine yourself doing things and improve at the same rate as you would when doing things. Still, mental rehearsal is quite often used by top athletes and promoted by top coaches. 

While mental rehearsal can be a coping strategy for anxiety, it can also be an intensively valuable strategy for attacking a problem from multiple angles. When I imagine myself asking an expert a question about their area of expertise, I quickly get an answer that satisfies me or gives me direction, even though I was utterly clueless about how to approach the problem just a minute ago.

 For example, when thinking about behavioural principles or how to apply them in a particular context, I can imagine myself asking about someone associated with the behavioural sciences. Something happens internally, and then I can reason more deeply than I could before. It’s as if I’m unlocking my knowledge or allowing myself to reason about that topic. 

We know much more than we think and use. Sometimes, a deep introspection through whatever approach (such as my exercise above) helps you unlock that knowledge. 

***

Here it is again:

1. More feedback cycles – faster growth

2. Actively seek being reviewed and held accountable even in minor details

3. Solve product cases with other PMs to get a swift feedback cycle

4. Seek novel problems in the areas you work in

5. Implement frameworks from theory, even if it requires a leap of faith

6. Even when copying, think as hard as you would when ideating a novel solution

7. Resolve all feedback items to 100% completion

8. Mental rehearsing allows you to analyse a problem deeply