# A user guide working with PTZ. By [PTZ](https://paragraph.com/@ptzee) · 2022-05-09 --- Introduction ============ I’m a product manager that sees businesses as fascinating rubric cubes to solve. To create a great business you must work through a mind boggling amount of permutations of vision, strategy and execution to get it right. I love diving into the weeds of those permutations and finding the right one to go to market with. But I always find myself abstracting away from the doing and thinking through the process... Philosophies / Mantras that shape my thinking --------------------------------------------- 🤔 **How I Think** * Strong Beliefs, Weakly Held * Balancing Systems Thinking & First Principles * What got us here won’t get us there. * There's things that have the right to be complicated * See both sides of the argument, and make your best effort to choose a side. * Businesses are the hardest game to win 🛠️ **Ways of Working** * Always be experimenting * Outcome is more important that sticking to a process * Focus on answering the right question, even if that means spending less time on answering **\-** Principals over Frameworks * Delivering the wrong feature faster still delivers no value. * Better than best in class is necessary for core differentiation 🤼 **Culture** * If not us, then who? If not now, then when? * There is a false dichotomy between the culture of learning and a culture of results * Access to knowledge isn’t nearly as difficult as the desire to learn * Take two managers. Manager A is 100% confident about their decision — just because. Manager B is 70% confident and explains why they’re at 70% and what they’re unsure about. Who do you believe How I view success: ------------------- Outcome - Properly defined, and makes sense for the vision of the company Bonding - Seeing how people work, and working through the trenches together to achieve a common goal Learnings - Can be done through success and failure. Ability to reflect does not necessarily result in learnings. How I communicate: ------------------ **I like to communicate in writing** - as it's concrete and doesn't provide leeway for fast words to replace coherent thoughts. **I like to abstract into visual doodles** - that might make sense to me (because of internal monologues) but not make sense to people who see it without explanation. **Direct** - For 90% of my interactions, I like to stay objective and provide feedback and thoughts which are rationale in nature. Things I do that may annoy you or be misunderstood: --------------------------------------------------- **Pushing the envelope into dangerous rabbit holes** - I sometimes feel the need to understand nuances even if they don't seem relevant. It's usually because I'm trying to connect my own internal thoughts and may seem tedious and off-topic. **I like to jump in my conversations** - It's not necessarily because I've lost interest in the previous conversation, but rather I have come to a conclusion that has led me to the next topic. I often forget people can't read my thoughts and may lose people when I do this. Please stop me if something stops making sense. **I like to skip small talk** - It's not that I don't want to know you, it's just that when I'm focused on something in particular, other things can seem like less of a priority. My sense of camaraderie is not correlated with small talk, but rather my ability to trust your intuition and banter through work. **I need the bigger picture** - Because I like to solve undefined problems, if I'm given discrete tasks without the bigger picture, I have a tendency to assume the broader picture and solve for the discrete tasks with those assumptions in mind - leading to misalignment and potential re-work. **I work much better in the 80/20 space.** - Working through unknowns give me energy, filling in the blanks takes away energy. **I don't have a sense of work/life balance** - if my brain is on, I might message you during off-work hours. (I need to better respect other people's work/life balance). What gains and loses my trust: ------------------------------ **Gaining my trust** * Working in the trenches together. * Presenting your ideas & your thinking without filters **Losing my trust** * A clear misalignment between perceived knowledge and actual knowledge * Afraid of asking dumb questions * Clear violation of transparency (taking advantage of opaqueness) My strengths: ------------- * Ideating on how things can be **better** * Providing refinement in thinking * Asking questions that generate further discussion * Abstracting away from the detail and understanding the broader processes, mindsets and constraints that can suppress potential step-change. My Weaknesses: -------------- * Interest wains over time and follow through capability - Once I get uninterested, my brain goes onto autopilot mode and wonders towards unsolved, more interesting problems. * Providing my rationale as definitive, even when they're not - * I have strong beliefs on non-verified assumptions. It’s necessary to build towards a bigger picture. This does not mean I don’t want to hear evidence to the contrary. --- *Originally published on [PTZ](https://paragraph.com/@ptzee/a-user-guide-working-with-ptz)*