One of the best things you can do as a product manager is to get into the habit of drawing things out.
Early on in my career, it wasn’t uncommon for there to either be a metric ton of documentation around something or very little, if any, at all.
For the times when we had a lot, it was difficult to keep momentum even if said documentation was well-organized. It was frankly a LOT of documentation and plainly a lot to go through even if you started in the right place. In contrast, there were times when the documentation was a few bullet points, leaving you knowing what something does, but blind to how it works, why certain decisions were made, etc. Documentation is a good thing, but like all good things, too much or too little is bad (for reasons I could get into now, but would be better off a discussion for another day).
Now, I offer this advice especially to PMs, but really any one can benefit from it: draw everything (and I mean everything) out.
When you’re trying to understand a situation, draw it out.
When you’re conceptualizing how a workflow works, draw it out.
When you’re designing a user journey, draw it out.
When we visualize what something is, we take the depth of it and distill it into its most important aspects. A mind map helps you to organize your thoughts around a particular topic. A swim lane helps you understand who or what is involved when. A flow chart helps you to see how something gets from A to B.
So, what happens when things are drawn out?
You can find better ways to market and position things.
You can drastically cut down onboarding and training costs.
You can prototype ideas more efficiently and effectively.
You can plan new features with far less back and forth.
You can identify gaps and risks much, much sooner.
You can troubleshoot defects in a fraction of the time.
Life just becomes easier for you and the teams around you.
Bottom line: get in the habit of drawing things out. Like the saying goes, “a picture’s worth 1000 words.”
