Product @Seesaw, @Yelp | Alumni @YCoreNetwork | @UCBerkeley @Cal_Engineer | SF Bay Area local | Likes steep things 🍵🧗♀️
San Francisco, CA
Joined June 2011
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Brittany Cheng retweeted
"Poor communication" often refers to a fumbled presentation or incoherent doc. Those are valid! But the hidden part that rarely comes up is how you spread an idea. How good are you at saying the same thing x times in y ways to z people, individually? That's the real grunt work.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
The ability to create clarity when there’s no shortage of chaos, opinions, and competing priorities is a rare skill.
In any reasonably competent company, this skill alone will help take you quite far, fairly quickly.
Concretely, this means creating clarity on the main problems, clarity on the right solutions, and clarity on the action plan & priorities.
Very few people can do this well even though most people possess the intelligence necessary to do it.
This is because most people in the workplace have been conditioned to add more information, sound more clever, satisfy more stakeholders, and feign more precision & certainty than is possible.
Few understand that clarity in a chaotic situation can only emerge from subtraction, never from addition.
Clarity comes from communicating what stands out as most important, why it is most important, how it will be achieved, and last but not the least, giving people a way of thinking about why it is okay, even great, that we aren’t doing All The Other Things.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
My fave moment about launching is when you start to get all the feedback, good *and* bad. It's incredibly clarifying.
All the theoretical things you worried about become real or not real. You know exactly how to make it better.
I'm so excited for this moment next week.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Was asked recently how I help orgs prioritize—not the frameworks or systems, but how I get buy in from collaborators.
My answer?
I do sooo much “pre socialization”
Basically much of my time spent on incepting everyone around me on themes and levels of investment. “Do you agree on this direction?” And then check, check, and triple check.
The biggest mistake I see is the big reveal. Suss out debates early, then have them openly. Invite inspection when change is easier.
When “planning” comes all my peers, the team, and my boss should be thinking: oh yeah, I’ve heard this already and agree.
I regularly use this basic formula:
📖 Story: did you hear this about that customer?
💡 Theme: this is why I think we need to double down on [this theme]
📄 Plan: so over [time period] I’m gonna ask the team to really sprint on [these projects]
📈 Outcome: I think we’ll be able to [do measurable thing]
❔ Ask: do you agree? <— don’t forget this
This is not just an exercise in managing up. These convos should happen at all hands. They should happen in team meetings. They should happen in little hallway convos and slacks.
Put the effort up front, have debates early, and create a team that can move fast against shared priorities.
And then remember: people change their minds or forget. So do it again 😎
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Love love love @vikramadhiman's 3-part advice for being a successful PM:
1. Raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with
2. Bring up important topics without drawing importance to yourself
3. You are in charge of getting the decisions made and not making all of the decisions
Brittany Cheng retweeted
in every company there's at least 4 different manually updated spreadsheets of what people are working on, all slightly outdated in a different way
Brittany Cheng retweeted
One of the hardest (but most needed) parts of developing a good product strategy is the willingness to sit with extreme discomfort and anxiety for an undetermined amount of time
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Ok so I rarely (never?) do product breakdowns but I’m really fascinated by the Slack “catch up” feature, both as a power user of slack and someone who thinks about weird dynamics in product optimization.
So let’s speculate: why was this built & how should it be measured? 🧶
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Top Productivity Hacks You Must Know:
ALT PRODUCTIVITY HACKS Pomodoro Technique Work for 25 mins, rest for 5 mins. 2-Minute Rule Complete tasks under 2 mins immediately. Pareto Principle Focus on the top 20% tasks for 80% results. Eat the Frog Tackle the hardest task first in the morning. Time Blocking Allocate specific time slots for tasks daily. Parkinson's Law Set shorter deadlines to prevent expansion of work. Batching Group similar tasks and tackle them collectively. Eisenhower Matrix Prioritize tasks by urgency and importance.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Really good slides by @komorama. On why organizations can often feel messy/chaotic: komoroske.com/slime-mold/
(h/t @_HHFF for the find)
Brittany Cheng retweeted
A thread of visuals that will change how you think about relationships, careers, success, and life:
1. Who we spend our time with over the course of our lives. Time is precious—cherish it.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
I've come to the belief that most people don't actually like strong opinions. Many say they do because they hear about people they idolize (Jobs etc). But agreeableness is preferred.
What this means is knowing how to work with strong opinions becomes an advantage.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
One downside of being a very high agency person is that you are wired to never blame other people or bad luck, which then leads you to internalize failures & nasty jolts as being on you even though you may have tried your very best. Longterm, this is extremely emotionally taxing.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Note: this doesn't mean that anything leadership asks is not aligned with customer needs / insights. They are often right! It's more in *how* you approach the work.
Are you asking yourself "will X like this?" — bad.
Or "why does this matter?" — good.
Brittany Cheng retweeted
The easiest (yet most dangerous) trap to fall into as a product manager is to do things that you think will please leadership but have no grounding in customer insight
Brittany Cheng retweeted
Dear Educators,
You are incredible.
From the bottom of our heart, we appreciate you. 💙
Love,
Seesaw
#SeesawLovesEducators #teacherappreciationweek
