How a product manager motivates her family to organize
Alternate title: the agony of living with a product manager
Thank you for reading Your House Machine — an analytical, systems-based approach to organizing and running a home. This week’s system is all about how I use my professional skills as product manager to get my family excited to (or at least willing to) organize. At the end is a link to a podcast that forever changed my relationship with clutter.
How a household manages their shoes determines a lot — how often you have to clean your floors, your ability to leave the house on time, how much yelling the mom does (or is that just my house?). I have small kids, so finding shoes, putting on shoes, taking off shoes, running upstairs to get forgotten socks, etc, consumes a lot of our time.
This is a post about shoes, but it’s also about galvanizing household support for making new systems.
If shoes aren’t a huge struggle for you, use our shoe adventure as a proxy for some persistent household struggle you face.
Our 120 year old Victorian entryway is lovely, but has no obvious place to put shoes. I created a drawer-based solution for all of our non-shoes items which you can read about here.
To get my household’s shoe situation in order, I evoked my professional skills as product manager, built over 15 years working in tech and finance. Product Management is a difficult job to describe, but in a nutshell you:
Make sure the team is working on the highest-impact projects
Ensure the project gets well and meets the stated goals
Keep your team aligned and happy
You guys, it’s not that different from running a household. The tech bros may not see it, but having cajoled both software engineers and toddlers to stay on task while ensuring everyone is fed and hydrated, I am telling you it’s eerily similar.
In product management you spend a lot of time getting input from stakeholders, ensuring your team is motivated, and getting everyone on the same page (so many alignment meetings!). You do lots of the work up front to build support, helping ensure execution goes smoothly.
At home, it’s the same.
Your team will generally be the people you live with, whether that’s your family or roommates or even yourself. Everyone in your home needs to help run the systems. Having one person solely responsible for keeping the house in order is not fun and can lead to resentment.
Your team also generally is your stakeholders, since the people you live with have the most to gain or lose with the success of your project. That means you can get faster alignment — a win!
Here are some approaches to help get everyone onboard with implementing a new organizing system, like entryway shoes: