Building product skills through hobbies (1/n): Watching anime
Lessons about being intentional, prioritization, and nuance
This will be the first of N posts, where I share how exploring and engaging in my personal hobbies and interests has taught me about product management.
I like to joke that I collect hobbies, so I hope you gain some new perspective about product management—or perhaps even discover a new hobby.
Watching anime, or hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan, has become one of my favourite pastimes. Though I had a late start jumping on the anime hype train that has caught wind in North America, I have yet to get off the ride anytime soon. From exploring the mysterious world of giant, human-eating monsters in Attack on Titan, to an adorable family consisting of an undercover spy dad, assassin mom, and telepathic, laboratory-created daughter in Spy x Family, I truly believe there is at least one series out there that is bound to resonate with everyone.
Aside from anime being a delight to consume as a viewer, watching anime provides me with a fresh lens into refining my product sense, or making better decisions about the product I work on for my team’s customers present and future.
Let’s face it—a big component of our job as product managers revolves around making decisions. So if we can improve our decision-making muscle, we increase the odds that we capture the hearts and minds of our customers. If we don’t exercise this muscle, no matter how much experimentation we do, customers or prospects we interview, we won’t be able to draw meaningful and actionable insights that guide how we shape our product.
Here are three principles that watching anime has reinforced about building my product intuition.
Understanding the universe that your customers live in takes time and intentional diligence.
Why things are the way they are may seem obvious to you. However, are the reasons you think for why things are the way they are really reality?
Spoilers ahead.
Early on in the first season of the show, we think Titans are the enemy. It makes sense, right? After all, they are huge monsters that eat humans for the sake of devouring them, even though it’s been discovered that they don’t need to eat human flesh to survive.
Then, we find out that within each of these titanic monsters is a human being.
Suddenly, it’s difficult to see these titanic characters as being purely evil; they have endured immense suffering, and opposing governments wield them as weapons of mass destruction to carry out political agendas.
Since things aren’t always what they seem to be, it’s important to talk with our customers and users to understand their deeper intents and motivations. However, we must be mindful that they, too, are only human and may not always be consciously away of the true motivations behind the actions they take and the decisions they make.
So, be patient as you make strides towards stepping into the shoes of your customers.
There is no singular correct way to prioritize which problems you solve for your customers or users.
I feel a lot of joy when I recommend a series to a friend, then they come back to me with the feedback that they enjoyed the show and appreciated the recommendation.
Some of the questions I consider before recommending a series to a specific friend are:
What genres or type of story have they enjoyed watching in the past?
Do they prefer for an entire season to finish airing to binge watch, or would they rather tune in once per week for the season?
Where do they fall on the watch time to perceived payoff spectrum?
What’s the length of a series? Is the series still airing?
Why might they engage with watching anime? Are they more like a casual viewer, who watches what’s hot during a particular winter, spring, or fall season of anime? Are they more like a core viewer around a particular genre of anime? Are they more like a power viewer who maximizes the series they watch throughout the year?
Like building products, it might feel easier to use an off-the-shelf prioritization framework to decide what functionality to provide to your customers now, next, and and later. However, it’s easy to fall into the mental trap that assessing every opportunity through a prioritization framework is sufficient research or sufficient due diligence, which is a gross oversimplification of reality.
The foundations of these frameworks were most likely not developed with your customers’ universe front and center.
Treat these frameworks as methods to sense-check your decisions, rather than end-all-be-all solutions that make the decisions for you and your team.
You can only distill down so much nuance about your customers, users, or both.
To me, some of the most memorable moments in Attack on Titan were character arcs that shone the spotlight on both main and supporting characters as they went through impactful moments or periods of personal development, or we saw flashbacks of their childhood to better understand why they are the way they are in the present day.
For example, the viewer sees how Mikasa, one of Eren’s best friends, was kidnapped. Eren finds her in an abandoned cabin deep in the forest, where her kidnappers were holding her hostage before transporting her off to be sold as a slave. Eren manages to fight off two assailants; however, he didn’t realize that there was a third and is unfortunately taken hostage as well, but not before secretly freeing Mikasa. Mikasa finds one of the assailants’ knife and is put into the situation to use it or see Eren die before her eyes. We see the moment in which Mikasa’s dormant power was awakened as she plunged a knife into her and Eren’s assailants to defend themselves.
Though Mikasa is portrayed as a tough, strong character, we see her moments of vulnerability, too. After surviving the attack and Eren’s father bringing along the Military Police to report the case, Eren notices Mikasa’s distraught, removes the red scarf that he’s been wearing around his neck, and wraps it around Mikasa. Tears well up in her eyes at the display of affection, despite the lack of relationship between them before their brush with death.
Even if we conduct plenty of insightful research and are capable of distilling an entire segment of users or customers into a user or buyer persona, we must be mindful of the unique individuals of whom we’re serving, and their needs, wants, and preferences.
Through the simple hobby of watching anime, I’ve reinforced three important lessons to continuously develop my product sense:
It takes deliberate practice and patience,
There is no universal method to prioritize what we build for our customers, and
There is nuance behind the customers we serve, no matter how effective we are at synthesizing data.
The next time you’re engaging with a favourite hobby of yours, I challenge you to reflect on how it has made you a better product manager—and how it might continue to help you hone your intuition about your product, market, and business!
💬 If you want to share, what is a hobby that has inadvertently taught you about being a better product manager?