How many product managers does it take to write an article?
Two friends share tools they learned from improv comedy to help you on your product journey
By Becca Groner and Gabby Zilkha
As product managers with improvisational comedy training, we’ve been surprised how often our improv skills have helped us be more effective in our roles. We, Becca and Gabby, have been improvising since our college improv troupe days and have learned a few tricks of the trade. These are our improv techniques for conducting user interviews, consolidating user pain points to create solutions, humanizing your customers, and working with your team to bring it all home. We hope they come in handy for you and your team.
Get ready to hit the road(map) and learn lessons that you can take from Improv to elevate your product manager toolkit.
1. Gift Giving
Listen without preconceived notions to be able to pick up on insights
Imagine this: you get a suggestion from the crowd, like “Robot boyfriend”. One improviser initiates a scene with “What do you mean your robot boyfriend broke up with you? I thought you were able to program him!”. Off the bat, now you, as a scene partner, have what we call a “gift” in improv. You know something about your character or the scene to help it progress and help you formulate your next line or “move”. One gift from this starting line is the starting emotion. Presumably, you are now sad and also may be a bad robot programmer…
In improv, you have to be open to receiving and using gifts rather than sticking to your own ideas. This way, you won’t look like Michael Scott steamrolling your scene partner in every scene. And if we’re getting into the product world, don’t steamroll your customer!
Going into a customer interview, you have a vague idea of what you hope to validate (without asking leading questions, of course) and likewise, you need to be willing to build new ones or reject yours. Throughout user conversations, you’ll pick up on gifts that help you with this validation. It could be a pain point, something the customer likes, the cadence in their voice, emotions they convey, or even what they don’t say. Now let’s take you to how Gabby received “gifts” in her role and what she did with them.
During one interview I led, a customer showed us how they were using our beta product. We learned they were using some of our APIs to build their own tool, creating a workaround for what our product could not accomplish. From there, we were able to move beyond the initial user interview questions and pivot to the more interesting part of the conversation to find out “what is the underlying need that our product didn’t address?” Without this “gift”, we may have accidentally steamrolled them into solely focusing on their mere dissatisfaction with our product on a surface level. Find gifts and use them. And from there, you can start building.
2. A to C Thinking
Finding abstract connections to stimulate creativity
The audience suggestion is the foundation for your scene — not the entire scene. When someone in the audience shouts “robot boyfriend”, the A to B approach is to do what is expected and actually do a scene with a robot boyfriend. But why do the expected when you can do the unexpected and move from A (the suggestion) to C (something more creative)?
This could mean getting inspiration from “robot boyfriend” and improvising a scene where a very monotone couple goes on perpetually more exciting adventures and has “robotic” reactions to each event. In a monotone robotic voice, one character might say, “wow, this is the most thrilling roller coaster I have ever been on. Weeeeee. Weeeee.” I’m curious to see how Becca was able to apply A to C thinking in her role.
Thinking A to C in the context of product management means making creative yet logical jumps. I use this tool when consolidating user pain points to create roadmap items. Recently, I was handed a loosely defined roadmap item and I worked with my UX team to come up with an “A to C” workshop. Knowing all the data points from user interviews and context of the general idea of the product, we prompted ourselves with “if we had an unlimited budget and time for this idea, what components would make up this product?” Where a user may have told us they didn’t like calling their insurance company for help, we leaped to “C”, where we envisioned a user could use voice technology to get on-demand answers from a home device before they even have to find the number to call their insurance company. We came up with radically different ideas to solve for the same need that business leaders were asking us to build and dreamt big before narrowing results down by feasibility.
3. People Centered: Comedy comes from the human connection
Humanize your end users to your team
Scenes are so much more meaningful when the audience cares about the characters and knows who they are to each other. One of the first things that improvisers try to do in the scene is to establish a relationship (ie: classmates, cousins three times removed, wife and mother-in-law).
If two people are working on building a robot boyfriend and one improviser says, “I’ve done it, my single friends and I will never feel alone again”. That could be a pretty good scene. But if their scene partner makes a bolder choice and instead of ending the scene they add on, “I just wish you would look at me the way you look at your Robot boyfriend”. Then, the scene takes on another dimension. There’s conflict, there’s human emotion, and the audience will be more tuned-in to what’s happening. And we promise, scenes like this are often way funnier and more rewarding than scenes filled with one-liner jokes or puns.
In building products, the human element is also the most important part. Find ways to connect your team members to their end audience. Whether it’s bringing an engineer along to a user interview, sharing monthly customer success metrics, or building personas, your whole team should be acutely aware of the “humans” using your products. They’re not just building features they’re building solutions to problems experienced by real people. Becca, back to you.
In my last role, an engineer who was on our team for 3 years had never heard directly from a user. I invited him to join a user call. Throughout the conversation, his eyes lit up — the product became more than what he was building day-to-day, it became something that was making someone’s life easier, bringing joy to a person that he could physically see. Plus, she had some ideas he could grasp that would help her do tasks more seamlessly using our app.
4. “I’ve got your back”: Supporting your fellow improvisers
Always support and celebrate your team
One of my favorite parts of improv is the moment before my troupe goes on stage. We go around tapping each other on the back and say, “I’ve got your back”. We knew that we were going to entrust each other to support our choices on stage for the sake of the group. For example, not taking an easy joke but rather prioritizing the scene and my partner.
Having your team in sync and focused on the same goal is key to the success of building a product across disciplines. We come in together with different ideas and ways of working, but we share a goal and need to find commonalities to understand and support each other the whole time.
PMs need to have everyone’s back throughout the whole product lifecycle so that the salespeople can sell without presenting vaporware, the engineers can have clear requirements, and the users can have products that matter. Whether you instill trust by making your team do small icebreakers (see ideas below) or by getting your team lunch after they ship a particular challenging feature, the sense of togetherness is vital to the success of your product. Gabby has a pretty memorable anecdote to share on a time she had her team’s back.
The day of the global availability of our FAQ chatbot builder, I setup a meeting to do a walkthrough of the final product and for us all to have a moment together seeing it live. While going through the UI, I had little Valentine’s Day cards with plastic animals that I had repurposed as “release treats” and when we hit upon a part of the product that I knew someone worked very hard on I gave them one of the treats with an animal pun thank you. For example, “you were otter this world finding those bugs” or “the UI looks great, I am not lion”. I wanted to share with the team how much I appreciated their hard work and that the product we were looking at was a collective result of all of us.
And, scene!
Now you too can be a pro(duct) at incorporating improv tools into your day-to-day life as a PM!
By taking the idea of gift giving into your user interviews you will key into stronger insights. Then, use A to C thinking to generate innovative feature ideas based on what you have discovered from unpacking those gifts. When you feel ready to write your user stories you can make sure to bring the human element to the forefront of the story. Building products is much more interesting when you can connect to the person on the other side who feels and experiences value from what you have created. Throughout the whole process make sure that you are establishing trust within your team. Take actions to show that you have their back, they’ll have yours too and a PM is nothing without their team.
Both product and improv teach us to be better teammates and better creators. We hope you found these insights useful and that you try out a few of the (UX)ercises below. Plus, it never hurts to fill the work day with laughter and some puns!
About the Authors
Becca Groner is a product manager in the health tech space and she is currently building communication products for consumers at Change Healthcare. She has performed improv and lived in Boston, DC, and New York and now she resides in Nashville. She co-organizes Nashville Product Meetup and co-produces shows with her indie improv troupes and house teams at Third Coast Comedy Club. You can follow her on Twitter @Bgronz.
Gabby Zilkha is a product manager in the enterprise software space working at SAP on the Conversational AI team (a group that luckily appreciates punny user story names). With her team she has launched two minimum viable products. Her improv career started 8 years ago with her college improv group, TBA, and continues now with the ComedySportz San Jose Minor League. You can follow her on Twitter @g_zilkha
Online Classes:
- ComedySportz Online Classes
- Magnet Theater Online Classes
- Unscripted Free Improv 20-Min Work Breaks
Virtual Game Resources:
- Three Uses — Come up with 3 uses for an item on your desk that isn’t the main function then demonstrate them with the team (when possible). (Ex: A mug can be used for holding your pens, used as a hat, used to end meetings early by dumping the contents of your mug on your computer).
- Solve my Problem — Ask a team member if they have an everyday problem and you come up with a silly solution using an object in your space. (Ex: You: I burnt my lunch! Coworker: Well, I have a mousepad that if you wrap it in here and eat it like a burrito, you won’t taste how burnt it is anymore!).
- World’s Worst — Things that the world’s worst [occupation] would say. (Ex: The world’s worst product manager might say “I never listen to the our customers because I am always right”).
- Beasty Rap — Come up with rhymes to a beat based on a one syllable name. (Ex: I once had a friend and his name was Dan, he always had a plan).
- What’s Changed? — Study someones environment on Zoom then have them turn off their video and when they come back 3 things from their environment have been moved.
- Alien, Tiger, Cow — Like rock paper scissors but better! Here you say “Alien, Tiger, Cow go” then take the form of one of the creatures.
- One Line Scene — Take turns building a story with each person only saying one sentence.
- Word at a Time Scene — Similar to “one line scene” but each participant says one word at a time to create a cohesive story.
Full list of improv of improv games can be found here — Improv Encyclopedia
