Many (oh my word, so many) years ago I wrote that I thought “fairness” is the most important characteristic of a good Product Manager. I still stand by that, but I had another thought recently about a related characteristic that forms the other side of that coin.

Jakob Nielsen’s 30+ year old usability heuristics remain true to this day, but it’s not just relevant to UI/UX. In particularly I think “Visibility of System Status” is one of the most important skills a PM can internalize. The principles states:

The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.

When users know the current system status, they learn the outcome of their prior interactions and determine next steps. Predictable interactions create trust in the product as well as the brand.

A PM can do nothing without trust. And to build trust in an organization, applying “visibility of system status” thinking is the #1 way to gain (and keep) that trust. That means a PM needs to:

1. Ack: Acknowledge comments or questions as soon as reasonably possible (within hours, not days), even if it’s just to say, “I saw this and will get back to you.”
2. Think: Respond to the original comment/question—with ultimate clarity—in a timeframe that balances thoughtfulness and pragmatism (days, not weeks).
3. Act: Follow through on any commitments / next steps with regular proactive updates (for as long as it takes).

Note that the order is important here as well. Don’t Ack only after you’ve taken the time to Think. Don’t Act before you Think. That seems obvious, but I’m sure we recognize the wrong order all around us (and in ourselves!) all the time.

This all might sound hard, but once you’re in the rhythm of this cycle, it becomes second nature. “Ack, think, act” becomes just the way you go through your day. I think this is something we should all aspire to more in product (and probably beyond).

There’s a concept in UX design that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the context of interpersonal work relationships. It’s called “The 9x Effect” and I wrote about it… checks watch… 10 years ago. In short (and heavily simplified), customers value their existing solution/product 3x more than any new “innovation”, and companies overvalue their innovative new product by 3x of what’s currently in the market. So you end up with a 9x mismatch between what companies build and what people believe they need.

There’s another adage that when someone cuts you off in traffic they’re a jerk, but if you cut someone off you had a good reason. We tend to rationalize our own actions while not giving others the benefit of the doubt.

So I’ve been thinking about this in the context of competence at work. I wonder if we sometimes overvalue our own competencies by 3x, and undervalue others’ skills by 3x[1]. And I wonder how that affects the efficiency and health of organizations. We all have a tendency—especially in large organizations—to disagree with strategy, or at the more extreme end of the spectrum, view leadership as “inept” or “clueless”. And I wonder if it’s because of the 9x effect, and if we can all just divide our own opinions by 3 things would get a lot better.

What might happen if as employees we go “well maybe the way I think it should be done is only ⅓ of the answer”. And what if, in turn, leaders go “maybe the way I think things should be done is only a ⅓ of the answer.” Would we be able to come together in the middle and make better decisions together, and in doing so massively improve a company’s culture, autonomy, and efficiency? Sorry, I don’t mean to be a vague question-talker with this post, but I am genuinely curious about this.

A little more critique of ourselves, a little more grace for others… I think I’d like to try that.

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1. Yes, I’m very familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect. What I’m talking about here is a bit broader and through a different lens.  ↩

I don’t think that Threads—the new Twitter-like service from Meta—is above critique. It’s noisy, it lacks a lot of features, and there seems to be a lot of desperate land-grabbing going on by various celebrities and brands. You might even say the whole thing feels off—and there is even a fairly academic reason for that feeling. In It’s Not Cancel Culture—It’s A Platform Failure Charlie Warzel reminds us about “context collapse”:

Context collapse occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another—usually an uncharitable one—which then reads said information in the worst possible faith.

We’ve probably all experienced this to some degree—you say something and it gets misunderstood or misconstrued (sometimes understandably!) by an audience that doesn’t have all the context. Anne Helen Petersen uses that concept to explain exactly why The Thread Vibes Are Off:

Twitter was for thoughts, and Instagram is for vibes—and Threads is trying to pull your Instagram feed into a Twitter format. And I’m here to tell you: THE VIBES ARE OFF. […]

What’s happening early on with Threads is that influencers are experiencing their own kind of context collapse, where their vague, sometimes vapid messages are traveling toward a different type of audience. This is pretty much what Threads feels like to me now: a place that’s ostensibly interesting (look, so many people are already here!) but is actually totally boring. It’s “fun,” but definitely not funny.

So, like I said: Threads isn’t above criticism and there’s a lot of work to be done to improve it. But I also think it’s important for the complainers to realize that it’s possible that maybe—just maybe—Threads isn’t for us. And that’s ok. One example is the constant complaints I see (and I have as well!) about the lack of a “following-only” feed, and a lot of “how could they launch without it” incredulousness. However, to that point, Sara Morrison makes this observation in TikTok is confusing by design:

TikTok is the ultimate example of how our digital world is shifting from seemingly limitless possibilities and choice—the internet of my formative years—into a controlled experience that’s optimized to know or decide what we want and then deliver it to us. And TikTok is one of the best examples of this change.

That piece is worth reading in full, but it explains how the chronological feed might be a thing of the past—and not because companies want it, but because user data shows that they want it. This is why posts like Facebook’s Threads is so depressing—which I’ve seen quoted and mentioned a lot in my various feeds—really rubs me the wrong way. It is one big wall of snark about how bad Threads is, how it should die, and how it has no redeeming qualities at all. What’s worse is that I’ve seen lots of product people quote that piece and praise it, which I find really confusing.

Yes, Threads has lots of room for improvement. I find it too chaotic (right now) for what I want in a social network. But if you scroll just a little bit it’s clear to see that people on there are having a blast—so how about we don’t judge anyone and everyone who gets on there! Isn’t having empathy for users and curiosity around certain behaviors everything in product? Shouldn’t we be impressed and interested in what we can learn from how Meta built that product to scale to 10 million users in 24 hours without a hitch?

It’s natural to get riled up about products that mean something to us, but we have to guard against blind spots when it comes to how people who are not like us use the web. It’s ok to not like Threads, but it’s not ok to negate and mock the experience of millions of people who are clearly enjoying the product immensely. Not just because it’s unkind and unnecessary, but also because we’d be losing out on a huge opportunity to learn from how that team executes.

P.S. If you are more of a visual person, here’s a 16-second Youtube video summarizing this post.