Friday Flashes

Strengthen your Product Decagon in only 10 minutes a week

I’ve gone to conferences, taken lots of notes, and been fired up to follow up on the books and resources that the speakers recommend. And probably almost as many times, those notes end up staying in my notebook, gathering dust, and ultimately being forgotten.

Coming off of my talk about the Product Decagon this week at INDUSTRY, I want to encourage everyone to build on the momentum of the conference. One simple way that you can do that is by spending time on reflection every week. I’ve been publishing a video series called Friday Flashes every week since January where I introduce a reflection prompt and share questions and examples to help guide your reflection.

If you haven’t checked out a Friday Flashes video yet, now is a great time because I just released this week’s video. It’s a fun one. The high level prompt is, “What’s a technology that didn’t exist 5 years ago that you can’t live without now?” and I break it down with additional questions and share my personal answer in the video.

If you’re not convinced yet, here are 3 more reasons to try it out.

Friday Flashes is your accountability partner for the Product Decagon

Even though the weekly prompts are broad enough to be relevant to people outside of product management, they’re (secretly) product focused. In fact, each prompt ties back to one of the ten disciplines in the Product Decagon. For example, this week’s prompt ties back to New Technologies and pushes you to think more deeply about what makes technology disruptive. In contrast, Week 8’s prompt, “What do you want users to remember about your product?” asks you to be more strategic in your Communication and clarify the key benefits that your product provides. Even if you haven’t had time to do your Product Decagon assessment yet, you can get started with Friday Flashes now.

Friday Flashes take 10 minutes a week

I know it’s tempting to skip the step of reflection when you’re busy. That’s why I make every video less than two minutes long. After you watch Friday Flashes, grab your pen and paper, set a timer for five minutes, and write down whatever comes to mind. When the timer goes off, you’ll still have an extra few minutes if you want to finish your thought, re-read it and highlight key takeaways, or just enjoy the extra time off. Friday Flashes are designed to be easy to incorporate in any weekly review or weekly wind down rituals that you already have, or a simple way to start building a habit of weekly reflection.

Friday Flashes will lead to flashes of insight

Even though the questions seem simple, you might be surprised by how much you can learn from reflecting on them. For example, here’s a look back to one of my most popular Friday Flashes so far. In Week 5, I asked: “For the last feature that you launched, what data did you look at before deciding if you should build the feature or not?” In response, one PM shared his realization that “One of the few things we can control is process.” Another PM thought back on decisions that she had made about starting a podcast and identified the gaps in her data. “I had interviewed 20+ people from my target audience group. I could have incorporated more hard data such as average listenership of a new podcast.” I will cover each decagon discipline five times in the year, so that you have the chance to develop insights across the decagon.

Get started today

Jump right into this week’s reflection, or get more information about the Friday Flashes series in the introductory video. You can subscribe to my channel to get notified about each week’s video. Most importantly, set aside 10 minutes a week to reflect on the prompt provided.

And if you’re the pen and paper type, I’ve put the weekly reflections together with weekly review and planning into a guided journal called The Productive Product Manager. The journal contains 116 color pages including: initial and closing assessment pages, plus a reference guide for the Product Decagon framework; vision board; goal setting; weekly pages; and notes pages. You can get your copy of The Productive Product Manager on Amazon. See a sneak peek of the inside of the journal in the introductory video.

Whether you choose to follow along with the videos, get the journal or do both, I hope you’ll join me in building a practice of weekly reflection. Every Friday, let’s find our flashes of insight together.