Over time, I have had the honor and privilege to work for and with incredibly talented individuals. As a peer, subordinate, and boss, I could only call myself the luckiest guy on the planet to have worked with this group over such a short period. It was a pleasure engaging with this cohort — from brainstorming ideas to delivering pitch decks to architecting solutions — there were innumerable moments that felt wholesome and most importantly, attributable to direct results. But there was one particular subset that I chose to place my complete trust in when it came to making decisions. Decisions such as:

1. Which feature(s) do I prioritize for my users?
2. When do I pull the trigger on my next spike?
3. How do I break the bad news?
4. Who do I grab to get shit done?

Naturally, the geek that I am, I started seeking out patterns to identify what separated these believable individuals from the rest. At first, the exercise was less about going after the cause-effect relationship as much as simply looking for triggers that made me naturally trust and respect the opinions of such individuals.

Habits and Principles (talk about this later) were two common traits that I noticed amongst the folks who seem to positively aid my decisions. It was fascinating to watch them bring a sense of framework into their daily lives and those around them.

Not all day was filled just with habits though — outside of their dedicated hours where they go through emails, conduct their one-ones and staff meetings — there was always space for brainstorming sessions, product powows, and pushing each other to iterate on ideas.

It wasn’t long until I decided to bring the topic up directly with one such influencer over dinner. I said “Look, there’s this thing that is puzzling to me about your routine. Clearly, these routines help you otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it so often. But what drives you to that day in and out?”

His response started with the obligatory tone of modesty, but I knew he’d thought through this given the speed and conviction by which he got to the point. It was all about maintaining Equilibrium.

“You see Abi, most guys are constantly taking big bullish swings. They look for such opportunities that gain momentum, create the hype and just focus on the shiny bits. But you can’t exclusively go after the big wins. The problem with that approach is two-fold: First, you have to quantify the “big wins”. More often than not, what you or your team considers big isn’t necessarily as important a feature for the end-user. It was possibly an idea that was rushed in with little to nil user validation. Second and more importantly, you just cannot keep hitting it out of the park. Period. It’s all a game of probability that rewards excessively in the short term (if you succeed) but washes you out should you face a string of failures. Routines is what helps me maintain my sanity as I lean on process. And with that extends my ability to weather rough days where I can’t get Engineering/Design resources I need or get the stakeholders to come to a decision to move forward.”

As PMs, we tend to naturally chase the ‘aha’ moments. The glory shots. The sexy facelifts. That most requested feature from executives. The problem with perennially chasing big-ticket items is that it takes away from our trusted routine and adds to the stress of uncertainty. As my colleague pointed out, building and maintaining habits bring a sense of liberation through humility that ultimately helps you embrace chaos. Not to mention a dependable framework that you could fall back on, esp. during such days where you find yourself paralyzed over things outside your control.

1. Make it a point to dedicate daily/weekly slots to curate your backlog
2. Inbox zero is great through the day, but mark such emails that deserve well-thought-out responses to stay in sync with your fellow designers
3. Evaluate your top N priorities (where N≤3) and give yourself sufficient time obsessing over the details
4. Get in the habit of writing your one-pagers — Spend more time shaping the feature through peer feedback rather than noodling over it yourself
5. Reserve time to hunt for quant/qual data to support your hypothesis. Keep a running track of questions that need help from your Data Science teams

It’s all about maintaining Equilibrium.

Cheers!