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When I was a product manager, I had a manager who was a real sharp-shooter.

(I’ve written about her before.)

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Not a sharp-shooter in the intimidating sense.

She just had this enviable clarity lens.

The ability to cut through the nonsense, non-recklessly, and really drill into the crux of an issue.

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Let’s put it this way:

She once sat through an org-wide readout about what to name a new product feature.

Multiple options. Tons of rationale.

Then she simply raised her hand and said “Why don’t we just call it [xx]?”

And her recommendation is still live on Expedia.com to this day.

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She had a question she’d ask me when things got a little messy.

Typically the issue would be a backchannel request from a stakeholder to sneak in some engineering work as a favor.

As a relatively green PM who wasn’t used to saying no yet, I’d come to her reciting all the context and relationship politics at play…

And she’d cut right through it with one simple question:

“What’s the work?”

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That’s it.

Three words, and a fair enough question.

What are they actually asking for, and should we be the ones to do it?

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When asked so directly, it typically became clear whether to take it on.

But that clarity only came from removing all the dressing around it.

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This happens quite a bit with positioning and messaging in our business.

I’m completely guilty of it myself.

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Wavering on questions like:

What’s my headline?

How do I want to talk about myself?

What should I name this offer?

Is my content coherent with my ‘brand’?

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These are good questions, but they can also get really cloudy.

Spending too much time on them probably means we’re losing sight of that main question:

“What’s the work?”

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That is…

What’s the actual service you provide to your clients?

What’s the A-to-B transformation?

What can they do now that they couldn’t before?

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From there, you can back into what sort of wrapper you want to put around it.

But if you can’t say ‘I do [xx]’ clearly…

Your prospects won’t see it clearly either.

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💡

-Wes