Years of school taught us to apply ourselves across all subjects so that we can get straight A’s. What this instills in us is that we must apply ourselves equally across all areas.
In PM, this isn’t true. In fact, this behavior can hinder your success longer term and lead to burnout. “Always put in your best effort,” is probably the worst advice for a PM.
PM’s have a million tasks to do. But, not all tasks are created equal.
On Feb 1, 2020, the inimitable Shreyas Doshi published one of the best frameworks for PMs to focus on the right work and decisions. As he framed it, “You can increase your impact on the organization (and reduce the tremendous stress that often accompanies the PM job) by avoiding the trap of doing a great job on all tasks (and even features). Seek leverage, actively try to do a bad job for certain tasks.”
The thread is a masterpiece. And although Shreyas has promoted the LNO framework a few times on Twitter since then, a Google search for the term “LNO framework,” yields no results.
The closest thing to an article on the topic is Brandon Chu’s excellent, Applying Leverage as a Product Manager. But applying leverage is one thing. Having an actionable framework with which to sort tasks and adjust your work is another thing.
If Brandon’s piece is the why of leverage, Shreyas’ thread is the what of LNO, and this piece is the how of LNO. It hopes to help answer the questions of those like Fred Witting, wondering how to determine which tasks fit on which category.
But, attempting to detail a framework to sort product work across contexts and companies is ambitious. I am not Shreyas or Brandon. So, this week, I am really excited to present a collaboration with Courtland Halbrook, VP of Product Management at FourKites. Together, we have spent the past few weeks iterating and improving on this LNO framework for PMs.
Join us as we explore:
- Applying leverage to tasks in practice (L)
- Identifying neutral tasks (N)
- And how to slowly eliminate overhead (O)
Hopefully we’ll change those Google search results, as well.
LNO Basics
The LNO Framework Effectiveness Framework, at its core, allows PMs to: 1) classify and 2) appropriately act on the tasks that hit the to-do list either as Leverage, Neutral, or Overhead. As Shreyas visualized:
Leverage tasks are those that 10x your impact. These are the types of tasks, once you identify, you should focus on. On the other hand, Neutral tasks are the kind that offer regular impact in exchange for time. Finally, overhead tasks are the type that have very little impact for the time they take.
That’s just the high-level, of course. Let’s get into how to identify each.
Leverage
Leverage, the word, has its roots in basic physics. The fulcrum offers a mere man the ability to move heavy weights. It’s as Archimedes said over 2,000 years ago:
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
As a PM, our job is to identify points of leverage within our products. We should point this same critical eye at our work and ourselves.
Applying it in Practice
Step 1 – What Work is Higher Leverage
The first step is to understand what type of work is higher leverage. There are different ways to think about what is high leverage. For Shreyas and Brandon, this tends to be work that is more foundational. This pyramid illustrates it well:
So, the types of work that PMs should prioritize in the leverage category is primarily vision and strategy. Scoping work is lower leverage, and executional details of the backlog is the lowest leverage.
After identifying the work, the challenge is to prioritize it. Most of the executional work has to be done by someone. PMs have a few tools to offload it. The first method to offload the scope & backlog work is to involve engineering early in the process of strategy and vision. This gives them the context to make product decisions on their own.
The second method to offload the scope & backlog work is to empower engineers and designers to make those decisions on their own. This is easy to say but hard to do in practice. PMs have to let the team ship features, and cheerlead on their decisions, even when the PM does not agree. Many times, product leadership will express this intent but then act completely different in product reviews, dictating details of the product. This must be avoided to focus on high leverage work.
Step 2 – What’s High Leverage For You?
The other side of the coin to what work is highly leveraged, is what is high leverage in your specific context? Each one of us has a unique set of skills and abilities as PMs. Mehta has a phenomenal piece, What’s Your Shape?, where he illustrates several different shapes of PMs:
In the context of your skills, the way to think about leverage is to focus on what you are best at. If your core “package” as a PM is more of The People Manager, then it may make sense to spike slightly more on stakeholder management, team leadership, and managing up.
By contrast, product Innovators tend not to focus on these areas. They are better suited to focus on tasks like voice of the customer, user experience design, product vision & roadmapping.
Evaluating tasks in a vacuum is a recipe for distress. Just like there are a million ways up each mountain, there are a million ways to PM success. Figure out what’s high leverage for you by evaluating your skills, your team, and your environment.
Step 3 – Be a Perfectionist About It
After you identify and spend more time on this work, you should strive to continually raise the bar on how you complete such work. Leverage activities are the type of thing you can always get better at. Study the product strategies of the best companies.
Doing so will level up your impact. Feel free to keep iterating on the work, driving towards perfection. You want the A+. These are the tasks through which you will move the world.
Neutral
These tasks, while important, will deliver lukewarm evolutionary results. The tasks are necessary and will move the needle, but the movement is in inches not miles.
Many frantic Product Managers find their to-do lists filled not with the frivolous, but tasks that would classify as Neutral. At any company today, it’s easy to quickly find calendars filled with Neutral tasks keeping PMs from truly leverageable tasks.
Applying it in Practice
Step 1 – Pick out Neutral Work
This category may be the hardest to pick up. Neutral work can pop up in all kinds of places.
There is some strategy work, for instance, that bleeds into the category. Making decks look pretty like McKinsey – with rare cultural exceptions – is not worth the time of a product manager. PMs are typically better fit focusing on content over form. The job is about delivering results. Leave the pretty visuals to people with strategy in their title.
Even vision work can be neutral. Explaining the vision to stakeholders who are unimportant and uninterested is a waste of time. Repitching information for the tenth cross-functional team is not worth a PM’s time either.
There may also be work assigned by a PM’s boss that is fairly neutral. PM’s have to remain clear-eyed about what their boss’s are asking them to do. Some projects, like a plan for a medium-level stakeholder are merely neutral, even though they come from the boss.
Then there is the more obvious neutral work, like unblocking engineers on executional details. This work has to be done, but PMs do not need to edit grammar on slack messages. In fact, they should strictly do a good job on this type of work:
Step 2 – Do a Strictly Good Job, No Better
Because these types of tasks demand attention, it is important to recognize these and understand that you are looking for just good enough. The easiest mistake of frazzled PMs using LNO is to consider neutral work leveraged, because of their perfectionist natures.
We have likely all heard “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”. This is the perfect mantra for tasks that fall into this category. Aim for C+/B- when encountering these types of tasks.
Overhead
This is a direct analogy from finance.
Overhead as a financial definition, refers to the ongoing business expenses not directly attributed to creating a product or service.
These are the necessary evils that find themselves on the to-do lists of every PM. This administrata often has no impact. These tasks are the illusion of the PM world, where there has been sleight of hand to make one think that a particular action will have a direct impact on the individual, team, product, or company. Do not be distracted, these tasks are reserved for the barest amount of your time and attention. Aim for being bottom of the class on these types of tasks.
One word of warning on these types of tasks is that your peers and many within the company can get caught up in these activities and social proofing is a real thing. If everyone is pouring their heart and soul into an Overhead task and you aren’t, the pressure to conform will be real.
Applying it in Practice
Step 1 – Identify the Work
The types of activities that are most easily put in the bucket of overhead are project management. These are coordination activities, taking notes, making sure people do what they said they would on time. As Marty Cagan recently shared, this is the way to avoid 60 hour work weeks.
In addition to project management, anything related to packaging up how work is presented, like:
- recasting a spec into a template for another
- submitting something you e-mailed as a Jira ticket
- switching a conversation to a ticketing system
- being asked to fill out a brief
is overhead work. Generally, the larger the organization, the more PMs get pulled into this work. There are rare exceptions like Microsoft and Meta. But, for the most part, the more teams that are involved, the higher the likelihood some are asking for overhead to fulfill requests.
Step 2 – Just Get it Done
Overhead work is the type of work you need to actively try to do a bad job. Because you are a PM, your bad job will be good enough. Just get the work done.
Focusing too much on this work is the easiest way to spot a PM who is headed for burnout.
Step 3 – Architect it Away
The best PMs eliminate the overhead work to zero. Indeed, the best product leaders proactively help. They recast the PM role. They staff teams so that the PM can hand off the execution work. The best product leaders create what Mark Bruno calls a, “leveraged culture.”
Even in companies and cultures where there is not product leadership support, the best PMs find a way to architect away overhead. Often, this is accomplished by having conversations with engineering managers, engineers, and designers to empower them when the PM is not around.
Putting it All Together
One of the best ways to implement LNO in your day-to-day is to use it to revise your to-do list and time allocation. Shreyas shared pre- and post-LNO to do lists in his original thread:
The key is to spend less time on activities that are overhead, and use that time to work on leveraged activities. In the long run, this simple change compounds for PMs, so that they have a higher impact. It’s like the fulcrum: the slight changes in positioning have a big impact.
Other Frameworks and Adjustments
LNOD
There is a whole discussion on tasks even getting to this point of consideration. One might consider an expansion of the framework to include a D to the framework for Don’t or Distractions, i.e., LNOD.
It isn’t as catchy, but as a PM, much of the work our colleagues expect of us is a distraction. They are distractions like, “can you write this doc for us to outline the campaign strategy?” PMs have to say no to these activities and redirect stakeholders to the documents being created out of LNO work.
Eisenhower Matrix
If LNO is not your flavor, you may like the Eisenhower matrix. Invented by the 34th president of the US, the matrix was made famous by Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Our friend Sam Higham has a wonderful visualization for it:
The Eisenhower matrix is an easy sorting and prioritization framework for the more 2×2 visually inclined.
Context Matters
Context is everything.
In some PM jobs, the entire job is focused on scope & backlog. Not all product organizations are the idealistic Silicon Valley versions. Many product organizations are forced to be delivery teams. For these teams, PMs may need to re-evaluate what is high leverage.
This advice should apply to the majority of PMs where they are allowed to build the strategy and vision for their teams. That is the “ideal” way to structure the role. But, of course, the world is not always idealistic.
Takeaways
As a Product Manager, it’s easy to follow the advice of Marty Cagan in Inspired to work 60 hours a week and still feel like there’s more to do. It’s a never-ending set of tasks one could dream up for themselves: more discovery, more details in tasks, better strategy.
But the neverending treadmill of product work is a recipe for burnout. As we learned on Twitter this week, people almost kill themselves trying to achieve the Cagan ideal:
Product management can and should be a 40-hour a week job. But, your boss, your head of product, and certainly not your engineering manager, are going to suddenly make it a 40-hour job for you. That decision is fully in your hands.
Use the LNO framework to focus your time on the leverage activities, and take back control of your life. As Shreyas said, “This framework improved the quality of my life as a PM & my work more than anything else I’ve encountered.”
If you just can’t get enough, be sure to check out Shreyas explain it himself:
