Duckey Horsey

One of my favorite conversations this week was with a product manager who told me about what she called the “duckey horsey” approach to…

One of my favorite conversations this week was with a product manager who told me about what she called the “duckey horsey” approach to stakeholder management.

I mentioned that I’d seen a PM skills matrix that said something like “PMs should alter their communication style to meet the needs of executive stakeholders.”

That’s very nice, I said, but it would be great if it explained *how* to do that!

The idea behind “duckey horsey” is to reduce your ideas to their simplest form:

The duck goes quack. We ride the horse.

Onboarding gets shorter. Conversion goes up.

You don’t need to run the entire meeting like it’s four years old. But it’s a very good idea to start and end it with ducks and horses.

Why? Senior executives often like to operate on big-picture concepts and ideas. They are very capable of drilling down into the details, but that’s not what they’re paid for.

Simplify complex material in your executive discussions and focus on the inputs and outputs of your project. These are usually the areas senior leaders want to focus on.

If they want to drill down on specific areas, you should continue to keep it high-level and concise.

Sometimes I see a PM trying to make a detailed explanation of some part of the equation, when it might be summarized with “it quacks.” Again, it’s helpful to focus on inputs and outputs, or the outcomes and goals of each component.

Another mistake is having a meeting about “A+B=C” and starting out by launching into what A is without reminding everybody why we’re doing C in the first place.

Also, when answering stakeholder questions, remember that you cannot go back and make an answer shorter. But you can always expand on it if asked!

Earlier this week my favorite senior executive Dragana Ljubisavljevic asked me a very simple question about one of my teams. For some reason I started to give her an entire book report on the team, their people, their history, customs, you name it.

She interrupted me and said “Sorry Matthew: I just meant, what do they *do*?” 🤦🏻‍♂️ Uh, they quack, Dragana!

I talk to my team all the time about being concise, but “duckey horsey” gives us all something to aspire to. Thank you Terri Czerwinski !