WFT: A New Workplace Acronym

WFH, OOO, and TPS Reports. There’s no shortage of acronyms in the business environment. The brevity and universal understanding of workplace acronyms make them the low-tech precursors to 🏠, 🤒, and 📑. Before emojis completely takeover humanity as we know it, I wanted to try to contribute a new one to the ever-growing list: WFT.

WFT?

Not to be confused with WTF, WFT stands for Working from Tablet. It’s pretty clear this acronym is intended to indicate someone is working from a tablet device. However, as a product professional, I feel this is a pretty big distinction to make and it actually represents a shift in how I’ve been attempting to supercharge my productivity.

Tablets have gotten pretty powerful over the years, but they are still not replacements for laptops and for the purposes of WFT I don’t want them to be. The beauty of WFTing is embracing the constraints. Ultimately, this presents several benefits including:

• Prioritizing actual PM work
• Increasing your focus
• Improving mobility

Throughout this article, I’ll be discussing how my desire to at least partially WFT has led to me becoming a more effective product manager.

Prioritizing PM Work

The first constraint of WFT to embrace is it’s not a laptop/desktop computer and therefore you can’t do many laptop/desktop types of things. This challenge actually represents the first hidden opportunity of WFT: forcing the big picture.

Today, my laptop allows me to do a lot of things and has led to a number of overly complicated spreadsheets to manage roadmap priorities, getting obsessed with misaligned boxes on presentations, and often finding myself querying our data warehouse for the same information over and over again.

I could probably do all of these tasks on a tablet, but they’d be tedious and definitely harder than if I were to do them on a regular computing device. Instead, if I really want to embrace WFT I need to adjust my focus away from these sorts of tasks.

Avoiding Complex Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a product managers best friend and also a secret enemy. They allow for incredible complexity making them extremely robust and fragile all at the same time. In a company that had a poor backlog management solution, I’ve built a spreadsheet with capabilities comparable to the leading enterprise backlog management solution available on the market. Additionally, to help keep a transparent roadmap, I’ve created incredibly intricate pictures of our roadmap in a spreadsheet.

The spreadsheets I used as examples have a lot in common:

• Adequately served the business need they were built for
• Required a lot of work to upkeep and consistently were broken/out-of-date
• Despite being a team resource, were poorly documented and therefore had a high bus factor
• Don’t work well on my tablet

If I am really being honest about why I was hired to be a product manager, it was not to manage these spreadsheets and every minute I am managing these I’m not actually doing real product work.

Focusing on WFT has allowed me to move away from these product productivity dementors through a number of strategies:

• Advocating for better tooling (especially solutions that are tablet friendly 😉) when it’s clear a more proper solution is needed instead of Franken-sheets TM
• On spreadsheets that aren’t going away any time soon, providing documentation/cross-training so I’m not the sole person that knows how to work them.
• For spreadsheets that I still need to access even when WFT, building informative cover pages so that I can get the essential information at a quick glance.

Overall, focusing on being able to WFT means I can’t focus as much time on maintenance of tools that are not actually contributing towards my product goals.

Drafting and Nothing More

A day that I don’t find myself drafting a presentation or some sort of specification is likely a federal holiday. If I was compensated for every presentation and document I created, I’d have enough saved to book that trip to Mars everyone keeps talking about. The problem with the traditional method of drafting documents on a laptop is I find myself doing much more than drafting.

I become hyper-obsessed about the formatting of bullets point, placement of pictures, and finding the perfect GIF. As someone that takes great pride in my presentation quality, these are important final polishes; however, they distract for what’s actually important while initially drafting documents.

All of the above, are nice polishes but if I want to make sure I am doing my best as a product manager, I need to reduce the distraction. I have a keyboard for my tablet, and a distraction-free markdown-based writing app. The WFT approach makes sure I prioritize getting the content nailed down before even thinking about the presentation style.

Refraining From Skill-Biases

Every PM has a particular subject-area that they are advanced in that actually ends up being overly distracting. In my case, data is my kryptonite. I know our data warehouse inside and out. Whenever there’s a question that can be answered by data, I often spit out the entire query joining multiple tables without even having to reference documentation on the fields available.

While this is pretty easy to do on my laptop, cranking out these sorts of advocacy reporting is challenging on a tablet. My WFT strategy has worked well to help me prioritize the types of reports I need to put into shareable dashboards instead of whipping up a one-off query every time I want the answer.

Needing to build shareable dashboards is more unique to my case, but I imagine every PM has preferences that led them to not properly prioritize their time. A design-focused PM may have Sketch open too often. An engineering-focused PM may find themselves checking out branches when they shouldn’t be. In all of these instances, WFT helps probably prioritize a PM’s time by requiring them to make their skill-bias into shareable and easily-accessible assets.

Increasing Focus

We’ve all heard hundreds of times that humans can’t multitask and we continue to ignore the advice by using more and bigger monitors. WFT can help here too, because it’s hard to multitask on tablets. Most tablets support some sort of split-screen capabilities, but it’s still not like having 30 tabs open on your browser on one monitor and email, work chat, etc. open on another monitor.

I’m currently writing this article on a 9-inch tablet screen. Even if I wanted to multitask, I can’t and overall it’s leading to a better quality article completed in a much faster timeframe than if I were using my distraction machine (aka laptop).

As long as I’m not presenting, I also really love taking video conferences from my tablet. Unless I want it to be obvious I’m not listening because my camera is paused, I have to keep the video conference app in the foreground and therefore am actually paying full attention during the meeting.

There are definitely times, where the capability to multitask is important. A classic example is if I need to reference and interact with the content of different applications side-by-side. If this is the something I need to do, then I will undoubtedly use a computing device more equipped for this type of activity.

The WFT approach requires you to think about your day and the types of tasks and focus required to plan the hours in which you can WFT appropriately.

Also, do yourself a favor and turn off notifications if you are really in the middle of a WFT session.

Improving Mobility

I hope I’ve convinced you that WFT is a serious exercise worth considering to ensure you are prioritizing the right level of tasks and when you are working on tasks you are actually focused.

As a fully remote PM, there’s one last reason why I like WFT: mobility. I have a desire to fully embrace the principles outlined here and move 80% – 90% of my work to WFT-based. There’s something satisfying about being able to generate output from such a simple looking device.

There are countless mobility benefits but to the additional comfortable to use on planes, small coffee shops, ground transport, etc. is a big one. Additionally, the USB-based charging simplifies charging in foreign countries and ensures I don’t have to purchase a complicated converter to be productive in a car on a road trip.

I don’t foresee myself transitioning back to an environment that requires physical presence in an office any time soon, so embracing the core concepts of WFT allows me to take full advantage of the mobility presented by my current working situation.

Parting Thoughts

I hope this article helped provide some insight into why WFT should be a more-regular practice by product managers. Even if working on a tablet just isn’t your thing, enabling yourself with this capability means you are prioritizing your tasks better, more focused, and have the capability to be more mobile.

For anyone that is seriously considering this transition, I have a few suggestions.

• Get a paid VPN app and use it while on any public WiFi. With increased mobility, comes increased responsibility.
• Find a good writing app. There are tons to choose from both free and paid, but get one you like because it will make any long-form output much easier.
• Get a portable keyboard. If you actually want to be productive, you’ll need something better than the onscreen keyboard. Getting a keyboard that can double as a tablet stand will also go a long way!

Thanks for being part of the WFT movement!