6 of the best gifts to buy your Product Manager for Christmas this year
Quick! There’s only 11 days left until Christmas. If you are planning on buying a Christmas gift for a work colleague, you most likely have even less time than that.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen blog posts with Christmas gift ideas that consist of the following: books, notebooks, software, apps, tech, zzz.
Forget those ideas. I’ve created the ultimate list of 6 perfectly untried and untested Christmas gifts that are bound to be well-received.
1. Compass and ruler
Product managers only speak in two languages — Venn Diagram and 2x2 Matrix. If it can’t be communicated in one of these visualisations, then product managers don’t want to deal with it — i.e. it’s an engineering problem. I’ve seen so many terrible manifestations of these charts over the years, not because of the content but simply the horrible sketching skills. Do your product manager a favour and get them a ruler for their 2x2s and a compass for their Venns. For extra points, buy them supersized versions for best whiteboarding results.
2. Egg timer
Meeting overruns — the stuff product manager nightmares are made of. If you want to see a PM sweat, speak for 10 minutes too long in their next showcase. Nothing makes a PM scramble more than having to move around agendas and create last minute calendar invites to accommodate unstoppable speakers and participants. This is where the timer comes in, which can be used in one of two ways.
- As a personal reminder to hurry a speaker along
- An object to publicise upfront and then alert the speakers when they overrun
If your product manager is into the pomodoro technique and other Zen pastimes, try buying a timer in the shape of a tomato.
3. Icon and illustration set
If you’re anything like everyone, then you’ve probably sat through 1,234,2342 PowerPoint presentations. While thankfully those stick people clipart have disappeared, most PowerPoint presentations are still boring and generic. Help your PM really stand out amongst the crowd and buy them some icon and illustration sets, with a bent towards your industry of course! It will take their slides to the next level and will help distract from all the boring things they’re saying!
4. Street directory
Back before the days of the Google Maps, the street directory was the ultimate road map. If you’ve seen some terrible product roadmaps in your life, encourage your product manager to take it back to basics and see how the pros used to do it. There’s also a lesson is disruption, with street directories now just a relic of a pre-Google life.
5. Shampoo
All the best product ideas are conceived while standing in the shower. To get the creative juices flowing forget all those old, tired facilitation techniques and head straight for the bathroom. A bottle of shampoo will encourage the product manager to release their inner creative.
6. Pre-paid coffee card
Bribery aka “let’s catch up for a coffee” is 101 in the product manager’s playbook. What better way to deliver difficult news on a Monday morning than with a accompanying hit of caffeine. If your product manager buys you lots of coffees, give them the pre-paid card to say thanks for all the free beans. If they never buy you any coffee, use this gift as a subtle hint that you expect compensation for all the bad news you receive.
Happy gifting!!
- Have I missed anything from this list?
- What gift have you bought for a product manager (or received)?
