Several years ago I had an article about three powerful tips for getting through a creative block. Although focused toward product managers, the tips were general purpose ways to increase your creative output.
- Morning pages
- Crappy first drafts
- “Use Your Obvious”
You can summarize the three tips pretty easily, despite their variety – “Just Write!”
At right around the same time I drafted this post with more tips that are especially applicable to product managers. But I just found out I never posted it! So here it is, a little late, but still pretty useful, I’d say. (Well, I still use these techniques anyway!)
Use multiple modalities
More than most other creative domains, product management is a multidisciplinary activity. All of our work has a technical aspect, a creative aspect, such as the UI, a marketing aspect, the sales aspect. And this gives you powerful tools to unblock your creativity. If you’re blocked with writing a requirement, you can design a UI, and so on. I call this approach to your creative problems “multimodal.”
If you get stuck on one mode, you can often get started on another mode and continue to make progress. And because all the modes are interdependent, making progress in one area often frees your mind up to make progress in other areas.
Suppose you are working on a new feature, but you’re not quite sure how to articulate the user story for the developers. Instead, you might attack it from a different perspective. You could start by describing how the user would experience the feature, how it would help his or her day-to-day life. Or you could start by writing down some technical constraints on the feature. What technology would be used, or how it would interact with other existing features to make sure no value is lost? Or, in a very traditional approach, you could start by writing the datasheet for the new feature. And of course you could start by sketching out a user interface.
(And remember to apply all the rules from the previous article, especially “crappy first drafts.” Your first drafts are often not going to be usable. But they’ll give you insights to use for your second and final drafts. )
Conceptualization tools
So far, I’ve described techniques that help you create the actual content of your requirement or marketing piece and all related components.
But, as my friend Scott Gilbert (with the awesome Twitter handle @AgileProducMgr) mentioned in a comment on LinkedIn, you can also use tools that help you conceptualize the problem. A novelist might use a story board, a timeline, and a cast of characters to conceptualize his or her novel. These all help develop the story, and prep for, but do not precisely achieve, getting words on paper.
We can use those techniques as well, in exact analogs to the novelist’s story board, timeline, and cast of characters. We can explore the timeline of the feature and how it fits into the process flow in the application. We can list the users of this new feature (or as they’re often called, the personas).
Mindmaps
Another tool that works very well for conceptualizing a new feature is a mind map. I use a free mind mapping tool called Freemind. Scott uses MindJet, a commercial product. We both got a lot of value from creating mind maps. They help us understand not only the problem we’re trying to solve, but also how the solution might come together. They are great for addressing the -ilities like usability and scalability.
I created a mind map template to help me with user experience and interaction design aspects of my features. My template outlines the key aspects of user experience as described by Alan Cooper in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
Next Up – PM-specific Tools, Not Just Techniques
In this article I focused on techniques that are well-suited to product management’s multiple modalities. A later post in the series will be about tools that are specifically designed for PMs and how they can help overcome creative blocks. (Unfortunately, as you’ll see, some of those tools so far only exist in conceptual form – that is, in my mind.)