Hot Potato Theory for PMs: Do More In Less Time
The setup:
Picture this. You’re a busy PM, searching Slack, Google Drive, email chains, anywhere it might be. The VP of Eng just asked about it. Where did I keep the record of decisions we made? Eventually you find it. Last week a business leader asked you to add a new feature to your platform and you met to discuss. This is one of 20 things on your plate, and not your #1 or #2 priority. But you took notes, said you would follow up. And now you are.
A week isn’t too bad, right? You pass it along, and the right engineer reads through. No harm done. Still a stressful search but that’s the worst, right? Several months later, it ships, 4 weeks late for peak season but still in time to have an impact.
What if I told you:
- you could avoid that stress
- YOU could be the one following up with the engineers instead
- you could launch before peak
- you could do this without 80 hours a week of work?
How? Potato.
Hot. Potato.
Who is this guy anyway?
My name’s Peter Kazarian and I’m a Principal PM. I’ve worked in product roles at Yahoo, Nordstrom, agencies and elsewhere. I’ve helped open a connected e-commerce warehouse for a Fortune 500 company and been the first PM at a DTC startup. I’ve been lucky to survive layoffs, and stay pals with former colleagues, who will always vouch for my work.
There are tons of PMs writing out there about how to get noticed, or build a product strategy. Good writers too! But I wanted to sit down and walk through pure PM productivity. I’m not talking about squeezing every drop of juice out of the day, or all-nighters when you have to ship something.
What can be gained from the potato?
How do you stop a task from taking 3 times as long? How do you take the outcome of the meeting and carry it forward without needing extra effort, with the minimal amount? How do you get close to 100% accuracy, get people working in parallel, and free up your brain to think about your Fantasy league or what to cook for dinner instead of trying to retain project specifics?
The answer is what I like to think of as “Hot Potato Theory.” Let’s go back to that original example. You got the project done just fine. But there was a week where NOTHING happened. Nothing was being worked on, no one was iterating or acting on the decisions, and you weren’t waiting for anything to follow up on this. The notes were WAITING ON YOU to act on them. This is actually super common and happens to busy folks all the time.
Define the potato
1. You captured some kind of notes
2. They sat there
3. Eventually you looked at them, and the notes were a little less fresh but you moved forward
4. You got the next person in the chain to respond/action as needed
5. The project moves forward
Here’s the hot potato theory. “A meeting or decision exists to drive some follow up action. Every step after # 1 happens faster, and better, and gets easier, the sooner you push it to the right person.”
The hot potato is NOT about avoiding responsibility, it’s simply about ‘not WAITING’ to push the follow up to the right person. You can drive a lot of clarity by being the one who makes this happen.
How it looks in example form:
You meet with your devs to plan a new capability you’re adding. You’re taking decent notes during the call, and there are two outcomes you successfully reach. You create a list of bullet points with a note or two for each, to be converted into ticket stubs for later grooming. And you realize one subset of features needs a bit more discussion. There’s an agreed-upon task to get back together and involve a specific SME, let’s say an architect.
Done well:
- Ticket Stubs:
You grab these notes and while they’re fresh (same day), you build a new JIRA epic. You use the checklist, or bulk import feature to literally paste in the bullets and create a ticket or checklist item for each. They are just stubs for now but that’s fine. For the one or two bullets with notes you go back and add that to the body of the new ticket. You know that your grooming process will enrich with addt’l detail and intake these new tickets into the dev cycle. You post the epic to your team’s slack as an FYI, maybe you tag it appropriately so some confluence page or JIRA visualizer can start to track it.
Total time: 30m, or 2 chunks of 15m during other meetings - Follow up meeting:
You know you need to discuss the architecture behind this feature in more detail, with a specialist. You’ve got a list of attendees and spell out a simple agenda that’s just grabbed from your meeting notes. you hunt for time with that group and due to the crowded calendar of the eng mgr and the architect SME, it’s 1 week out. You send a brief heads up to the architect, you plunk the agenda and invitees into a calendar appointment, and you send the meeting, with an agenda, to people who expect it, with a good amount of notice.
Total time: 30m (maybe)
You just got: a high level of detail into writing, created tickets and appointments, and set up a path where you don’t need to think about this again, outside of those meetings.
You avoided: a week of dead time, trying to remember the specifics of the notes once cold, messy calendar conflicts with a busy architect, and don’t have any “things you have to remember to do.” Potato, baby!
Here are the REASONS why Hot Potato is the move for you.
It cuts project time, and lets you focus on fewer things at once.
- On top of cutting out “the time before follow-up,” you also surface other blockers sooner. If it’s hard to get that architect on the calendar, you’ve uncovered that now and started the timer, with a meeting appropriately far out. You’re not waiting, to then later find out she’s not free for weeks.
- You can also think about this in terms of your focus. You can now close this out sooner, or at least onboard it to regular processes like your sprint that will push it forward without addt’l ad hoc input. You’re not tracking the follow up for this, or the remaining project work, on a long list of other things. Fewer items at a time is better. You can math this, if you want.
- Think of each color line as the lift required to finish an item. The X axis is “Units of PM focus”, and the Y axis is time. The slope/tail of each effort drops off sooner and steeper, the total area under the lines gets smaller, you focus more, you close things off and ship sooner in a virtuous cycle.
Gets it out of your head and into the hands (multiple) of others
- “So why are we having this meeting?” Most of the time this is a straightforward question. You’re there to make a decision, or reach a consensus (Sometimes you’re there to receive updates. Sometimes you’re there to share/socialize a concept with others, etc etc). But when it’s a meeting around a decision — the decision is the WHOLE point.
- So ask yourself: does this decision mean anything if it’s just sitting in your notes or short-term memory? If you and Jane Engineer decided on 4 new tickets for you to create, what is the impact on Jane’s workload before you create those tickets? Before you get it turned into work product, it’s just a thing you verbally said you would do. Hot Potato-ing moves the decision into the real world! The sooner the better almost always.
- Not only is it the fast track, but you can also set up parallel paths here. Let’s say the devs building your product have a dependency on another team, some known eng work, and some business discovery to do before scoping addt’l tickets. The fastest path to launch is getting buy-in from the other team, scheduling that discovery and having your engineers start work, rather than waiting one for the other without cause. None of these are going to happen until you schedule or reach out for them. And once you do — all three could move forward at once!
Better retention of specifics & detail
- Notes “go cold” aka they mean less to you, the further away from them you get in time. There’s research about the specific drop off curve of short term memory and the ability to associate additional memories w shorthand. The important concept here is “sooner = better memory”. Personally, I like to get things out the same day, so that while specific caveat/detail X or Y is fresh, I can put it in notes or a JIRA as needed. In addition to all the ‘speed’ stuff — your work will turn out BETTER if it relies on the detail in your notes.
Creates an immediate record
- I am a big fan of turning the notes into little summaries for a post in Slack/Teams, about decisions made, not made, and the very specific takeaways. You can come back to them later, they’re rich with detail, they get you out of trouble sometimes. You don’t have to wonder about the outcome, or the 5 next things you have to do, if you wake up tomorrow and haven’t followed up yet.
Means you have to ‘think’ about less between steps.
- Have you ever seen the movie Memento? It was one of Christopher Nolan’s first films. The main character can’t form new memories past a certain amount of minutes. He’s trying to solve a crime (won’t spoil it) and he puts clues on his body as tattoos. He does this because he can’t hold these in his head and doesn’t trust his ability to keep a notebook with him. He keeps forgetting things, the tattoos remind him. Great movie, a little dark. See it if you haven’t.
- I try to do something similar to keep track of things because I don’t trust my memory as infallible. Kids, sleep deprivation, constant Slack pings, and fire drills…the product manager job. There’s no chance of having a quiet, organized day in most settings, so I cheat the system by firing off that next step immediately.
- If the next step is a meeting or meetings, can I schedule it now, with an agenda driven by context from this meeting? Then I can ‘turn off’ the part of my brain that remembers it.
- If the next step is someone else coding something for me or making documentation, can I fully flesh out the request/ask, and plug it into a regular business process like a sprint? Then I only have to think about it as part of the sprint, which I do anyway.
- If I need to write something, I’ll bring up a tab, type docs.new (thanks gsuite) and put a headline and outline in place. I’ll leave the tab open to come back to it. This one is more fallible than some others because I always have too many tabs open
There is NO reason to “try to remember” it all. In fact you will do FAR better if you freeze this moment of clarity in time, in a ticket, appointment, document or whatever.
Save the world and you look good doing it!
- Lastly — if you’re ‘johnny on the spot’ as an old boss used to say (or jane on the spot), if you’re following up quickly, accurately, in a way that drives things forward…you will do a better job AND create good optics for yourself. I’m skeptical of a lot of the glory-chasing elements of being a PM, but when you can do your core function well and do it in front of people, you should. It’s a true win-win.
Anyways, hope this has been helpful. It’s applicable to stuff beyond PM work, certainly. If you have your own version of the Hot Potato Hack, I would love to hear it in the comments!
Today’s Song: https://open.spotify.com/track/5iONbHwZXGzwOjLO7CILVc?si=fa7aa2c5ff814cc9
Today’s food photo:
