What I meant to do differently after MTPcon

The day after MTPcon I wrote down a list of things I want to do or do differently after hearing all these inspirational presentations. However, it’s been three weeks and I have done exactly none of them.

Here is my list:

1 Regroup with the members of my team individually to understand whether the way we work gives them sufficient psychological safety and try to understand if there is anything we should do differently as a team.

2 Think about the story of my product. Donna Lichaw’s presentation was really interesting but I struggle to see what the story of my product is. Need to book in some time to think it through.

3 Read — from the many book recommendations, start with Thunder Below and work my way down the list shared by Simon Cross.

4 Create an internal equanimity check: when there is a crisis, people at work tend to dramatise —often to highlight the importance of said crisis. But even if I try not to get caught up in that, I feel I need a better technique to calmly reflect on the situation.

5 Make sure to formalise convergent and divergent thinking during team meetings.

6 Never cover up my mistakes and make sure to explicitly own up to them.

7 Schedule a call with a customer.

8 Review our international distribution and engagement rates and see if we could improve the product by tailoring it for specific audiences.

9 Celebrate success with my remote team.

Here are the excuses I came up with for not doing anything about them:

• I‘m too busy
• The team is remote and it will never work

Clearly I had plenty of good intentions but my original resolutions were too vague and there were too many. So what I’m going to do now is to focus on the top three things I think are most important and make sure I implement them and also make them more concrete so I can actually do them:

• Buy Thunder Below online and add it to my reading shelf
• Book a call with each of my team to just get a feel of how they see our team work, whether they need anything and whether we could improve our collaboration processes.
• Write my PM manifesto. This is something I heard on the Happier podcast. Gretchen and Liz recommend to write a manifesto to distill the principles you want to live by — this can be for your job, for your relationship, for your family or just for yourself.

So let’s get cracking.