Ship Happens, Week 4: Presentation tips for PMs, A/B testing with leading metrics, random posts about living life
Substack Live today! Presentation tips for product managers, A/B testing with leading metrics, random posts about living life.
Happy Friday everyone! Welcome back to Ship Happens, your weekly product manager newsletter.
I'm using this newsletter to share at least three things l've come across this week to help you build better product. Subscribe so you don't miss these when they come out:
On to this week's thoughts and updates!
1. Substack Live with today at 11am PT / 1pm CT
I’m gonna dip my toe into Substack Live today! Never done a live chat here before 😅 but I am excited to virtually meet
today. Tune in at 1pm central time / 11am pacific to learn more about the art of communicating as a product manager.Can’t wait! 🚀 Check your email or Substack app at about 1pm CT to catch the live and fire away with your questions!
2. Some Hard-Earned Presentation Tips for Product Managers
We are in the middle of Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) and lots of update communications coming back from break. I’ve had to do a lot of these presentations lately, fortunately I’ve had a LOT of experience with presentations and speaking in high-pressure situations.
As a result, I often get asked about my methodology for putting together a great presentation. I wouldn’t say that this is a comprehensive guide to it, but it should be at least a few tips that should help you point things in the right direction:
Take your time allotted for your presentation slot and cut it in half. Heard of Parkinson’s Law: “work expands to fill the available time”? The same goes for presentations. The people that don’t present well often plan for the full allotment of time and, even worse, don’t respect that time limit and go over. Then it pushes everyone behind you back, everyone else goes over or gets cuts and hates you for the rest of their days. Don’t be that person! If you get 10 minutes for your presentation time, plan to have 5 minutes. This will help you also for time syncs that come up like Q&A and if you get crunched by the person ahead of you. No worries, you planned ahead to go in half the time! A related tip…
Cut your slides in half too while you’re at it. If you have 10 slides, cut it to 5 slides or less. I promise you can get your point across with less text and consolidated visuals. It also minimizes your chances of getting stuck from slide transitions, added bonus! And if people need more information, you can handle it in Q&A or in offline documents. But in my experience, most people are overwhelmed by dense content. You’ll get your point across if you channel your inner Dieter Rahms: Less but better.
Find the most scalable way to get your talk track crisp. Everyone has their own way of doing this well. For many people, it’s scripting it. I actually don’t have a problem with scripting, if you can make it sound natural and you can keep continuity if something happens like your computer turns into an a-hole and deletes your script. But I’d argue that people would do better if they didn’t have a script because most people use it as a crutch. I’d suggest practicing presenting without one and see if it works better. Product Managers have a really good command of what they’re working on if they are good at what they do. So you might do better than you think! Here’s what I do preparing for presentations:
I get off my computer and write down in a notebook the key points I’m trying to communicate
For each key point, I write down sub-points and key data points I want to make sure I nail in the presentation
From there, I rehearse my talk track in my head or out loud to see how I can best stitch the narrative together.
Rinse, repeat for every presentation, wether it’s slides or off-the-cuff presentations. This is a method I can apply for every presentation.
For some supporting material to prove that I’m not bat-shit crazy, here’s a great article on this subject that has many similar points that I 100% approve of:
3. A/B Testing with Leading Metrics Instead of Revenue
Real talk: a couple of weeks ago I wrote this section of the newsletter about A/B testing and how most people are doing it wrong. I wanted to go deeper in a specific piece around that topic: testing with leading metrics.
This has been prescient lately for me, we are trying to run lots of tests faster to learn and iterate more quickly. If we were to use revenue in this pursuit as our primary metric, we would likely fail.
The reasons we would fail are:
What we’re testing and where we’re testing it
Statistical reasons like:
Overall revenue being a non-binary number
Overall conversion rate being a lower number generally
Sooooo we’ve been using leading metrics. The primary risk with leading metrics is that you might make positive headway on the leading metric, but that may or may not have an impact on your overall revenue metric. So what should you do?
The approach that I’ve seen work, which is the one we’re using right now, is picking the right leading metrics for your hypothesis, and validating that your leading metrics are or are not behaving as theorized by your hypothesis in the experiment.
For example, if your hypothesis is that your new filters design on your search page will lead to more users filtering and, ultimately, higher revenue, then:
The primary metric should be % of users filtering, provided that
It’s validated that % of users filtering is correlated with revenue
The guardrail metric should be revenue
In order to declare a winner, your primary metric BETTER BE moving up. If it’s not, then you should fail the test and ask why either the test is flawed or the hypothesis is wrong.
Where I think people get this wrong is when they set up #1 and #2, but then either #1a isn’t validated or they don’t pay enough respect to #3. And that’s where you start to get into trouble, shipping things that you’re not 100% solid on if they are positive or negative. If you stick to good test hygiene though, you’ve got a chance…
4. Random Posts & Books about Living Life
I’ve run across a few things this week that really got me thinking about how to reduce my stress and enjoy my life. Here’s one about living frugally:
Really got me thinking about how much joy I get out of reading, how spending money actually can give me way more stress, and I’d probably get a lot more out of enjoying the simple things I already have like reading, and writing here!
This article came in hot with the quote of the week:
The fantasy of ‘exit’ is now common: retiring at 28, trading your way to millions, fleeing normalcy for a life of luxury. This fantasy masks a deeper loss, an inability to envision a life that’s good without being extravagant, or simply one you don’t have to run away from. True wealth lies not in escape but in presence: being in shape and having enough time to climb a hill and enjoy the view, having friends and family who laugh at your jokes, doing work that directly creates real things, developing skills that mean something. These are riches that compound in ways no bank account can.
I can’t tell you how much this resonates with me. Who wants to live a life of wealth but lack of presence when you can live a life of balance where you can enjoy your kids and family every day?
And to bring us home, a classic that I finally got a chance to read: This is Water. I can’t tell you how much I resonated with the concept of learning how to train your brain to enjoy/tolerate the boring adult parts of life. Every day isn’t the Super Bowl, and that’s part of life too. Worth a read, and hope to connect with you all on Goodreads over a good book soon.
That's it for this week!
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