Book review - The One Thing

Welcome everyone to this week's episode of the Product Bakery Podcast. I'm here today with my co-host Christian and Christian is like a very passionate book lover. I know you recently read The One Thing and I thought it would be actually worth to discuss it also in this episode to give people a little bit of a reminder. Absolutely. Yeah, as you mentioned, I think we both love reading books. Nobody can ever read as many books as you do. We actually need to make a side conversation or to make a conversation exactly about how you manage to read so many books. And we can also put them on our website. We should. But going back to the topic, I recently read the book The One Thing and it was a very good refresher when it comes to setting priorities. The One Thing was written by Gary Keller and also his co-author Jay Papazian and they're both gurus in the real estate world. And at some point they sat down and started writing about personal things. So how do you identify and find for yourself what's most important? And I just caught the book and I was really impressed about the input I got from it. So what you're saying is that The One Thing, if we talk about the book, we talk about insights into prioritizing things, not from a pure product perspective, not from someone who actually works within product, but from industry experts in the real estate business, correct? Yeah, but the whole topic is not focused around real estate. It's more a personal development thing. Talking about that, it's also a different approach how you usually prioritize. And at the beginning of the book, they explained how much time you waste with context switching or how often you have this false premises that you are more productive when you do many things at the same time. I just looked at myself and realized I'm falling into this trap quite sometimes. So I kept reading and I realized at some point that I needed to make a break and ask myself what's the most important thing I can currently do for myself. So you switch context while reading? Exactly. I switched context. So things you should not do. You're like, okay, let me take a break and while I'm reading, just do something different. Although it's not only important to read a lot, it's also important to think about it. While I was thinking, I was like, okay, what's right now most important when it comes to my business? And I just thought it's okay, maybe I should focus more on writing again because I wasn't writing a lot. And I have my own website, traffic is increasing month by month. And I thought, okay, it's a good sign to go back and help people to learn how to get into product management or write more about strategic topics. And so I came up with my own priorities, but the one thing I should do is write more. And it was what I have identified for myself. This book is also touching upon other things, right? There are many one things. And that's also something where I was a little bit confused with what they were talking about, because you have your private life, you have your relationship, you have your financials, you have your spiritual path or whatever it is. And there are many one things when it comes to each part of your life, which goes a little bit against having only one thing. But at the end of the day, I just thought it's so important to remind yourself, as a product person especially, what's the number one thing you have to do today? What's the number one thing your customers are struggling with that needs to be solved? And I was just thinking to pick that up and also hear your thoughts about that, because I believe we all fall into the trap of being overwhelmed with many priorities and maybe losing the main thing. Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually something that also in our company, we're discussing a lot. How do we decide? We never really framed it as like the one thing. But at the end, it comes down to, okay, what's the one KPI, the North Star KPI that we should look at? Like, all these sort of things. And I think it helps you in these prioritize, and it helps you put the focus straight. Especially if we think on how teams work, and we recently talked about different squads and so on. I think you constantly start or you constantly add new functionalities, new features, and so on. Which also means that kind of the things or the responsibilities in your area grow also by the time, right? Which means at one point, you should also invest in iterating on some of the older features. And then it gets like pretty overwhelming, right? Because you have a lot of like new initiatives that you have planned, you maybe have a lot of ideas on how you can test. Maybe you went the path of launching some MVP that isn't really a final product. So at one point, you should go back and fix that one to have it there living for the rest of the life. How do you pick what's now the one thing? Yeah, that's a very good question. And I think that's something where we are all challenged with to figure out what is the number one thing. And I believe saying now that you need to use a priority framework is the wrong answer. Because the first thing you need to have is a clear strategic direction. And that was also the follow up question, especially as a leader, how do I make sure that my team or that we as a company focus on the one thing? And whether you are a product manager or a VP of products, you always have to certain level of product leadership and ownership. Yeah, but let's maybe loop back onto obviously, the book is a lot about like personal development, right? I can definitely see that in product, we talk about what a strategic goal or generally like what objectives we want to reach. But how is that like in personal life? Do you have a life strategy or how do you tackle it? That's something that I personally don't have anywhere formulated. I think now we are drifting into a very philosophic discussion. And what's your life purpose, Alex? I don't know. Wake up in the morning, try to build some products. I mean, we dive into this philosophical question, we should rather take a look on what are your current short term goals? Maybe you want to lose some weight, or you would like to start investing your money. Or what I know from you, Alex, maybe you would like to start developing a morning routine. So that could be maybe your one thing by just starting working out a plan and following it for example. I want to wake up with the alarm. How can I change that? Maybe you need two alarms. Oh, I tried. My girlfriend got me like one with the wheels that drives away when it starts. I don't know. Besides the neighbors probably hating me, it didn't help me get closer to my goal. Going back to the main topic, I think it's a good reminder to ask yourself what is most important because one thing that I haven't mentioned yet, that was very well explained in the book is the word priority means one thing. However, having priorities doesn't make sense because there can be only one thing always and you can always do one thing at a time. We cannot do multitasking as much as we would love to. It's not possible. So instead of wasting your time with context switching, losing yourself in too much work and feeling overwhelmed, it's better to pick the number one thing you want to do. Because saying no also takes away a lot of pressure and stress from you. And whether it's personal or it's professional, you definitely sleep better once you have decided to focus on one thing and let the other things go. And one more thing that I love that I got out of the book is the moment you're going to drop the other things, there will be always chaos breaking out. And that's part of the game. You need to learn to deal with chaos. And that brings me back to product management because there are always these old projects that need to be touched. There are always customers crying, stakeholders crying, yaddy yaddy. But at the end of the day, there's only one thing you can do, whether as an individual or as a team or as a company. And do you have an advice for everyone who in their company now wants to say, okay, I'm focusing only on one thing. How would you communicate this like also to the rest of the organization? Because I think it's quite normal that people talk about priorities. People talk about different goals for a specific quarter. Like how would I tackle this? I believe the best thing is to first of all, start with yourself and figure out what can you do to be most productive. And that's nothing that you necessarily need to communicate. It's just getting the job done. And from a leadership perspective, I think it requires a couple of conversations and eventually fights to decide on one thing. So regular priority meetings on leadership level or C level should happen anyway on weekly or biweekly basis. And if not, it's a good time and advice to get started with that. Fair enough. And if there's more than one thing that you want to do, you can always add additional people who can do it. Like you're doing right now. I'm doing, but I'm more referring to some older experiences where I feel like we just happened to have 40 different teams because we had 40 different priorities, but none of the team had people, right? And nothing got done. All right, then I think there's only one last question that we need to ask ourselves. What's the one thing for our podcast? So it's first of all, launching this episode and linking the book in the description, as well as telling people that they can follow us on social media and re-share this episode in case they like it. That's two things, but we can say it's one thing for us and it's one thing for you. Yeah, that's true. Perfect. Christian, thanks a lot for sharing this. Have a beautiful rest of the day and talk to you guys soon.