The Product Manager's Guide To Drawing On A Whiteboard

Are you terrified of whiteboards?

Just the possibility that someone might hand you the pen in a meeting and say ‘go on then, draw it’, sends a shudder down many spines. A bunch of self-loathing thoughts run through your head…

‘I CANNOT draw’ ‘I’m useless at drawing’ ‘I struggle to speak confidently in meetings, let alone draw on a whiteboard.’ ‘The last time I drew something was with a crayon when I was 7 years old.’ ‘This isn’t pictionary. Leave me alone.’

As product managers, it’s often up to us to convey ideas, build strategies, solve problems and understand technical restraints. The whiteboard helps us to visualise many these things and it is an irrational phobia of whiteboards which prevents some of us from using it to our advantage in situations where it would help facilitate better meetings. We don’t want to look like idiots so we instead gesticulate with our hands which often results in us looking even more ridiculous than we would by scribbling on the white board.

How often have you sat in a meeting with everyone flapping their hands around, waving their fingers and pens in the air trying to communicate some complex dependency or reason why a strategy will or won’t work. A picture can really help to facilitate meetings in a much more efficient way so it’s in our interests to become better at drawing on whiteboards.

If you can master a whiteboard, people will treat you differently; you’re the PM who writes on the whiteboard and solves problems efficiently. It’s a good thing to be known as that person. But first, you need to overcome your fear.

If you’re ever going to become a whiteboard ninja, you’re going to have to overcome that fear of whiteboards. And to do that you’re going to need to re-condition your fingers and your brain to feel comfortable with drawing.

You could splash out on some 1-1 cognitive behavioural therapy sessions with a personal therapist or you could get yourself a pen and a piece of paper and learn the ropes yourself 🙂

Too often, our days are spent staring at screens and we have forgotten how to put pen to paper. Remember when you were a child first learning to write? You developed your own hand writing style, you would spend hours drawing in art classes and you’d love to draw, without a care for what other people would think.

There are meditative benefits from drawing and it’s becoming increasingly popular for adults to take art classes purely for the meditative effects. It calms your mind, forces you to focus on 1 thing only and enables you avoid the temptation of opening 30 tabs in your browser and manically switching between them and other applications on your laptop, preventing you from focusing on deeper tasks.

Reunite with the pen

If you don’t have a pen and paper, go get some. These moleskin beauties are my favourite notepads to use. They’re approximately the same size as an iPad which for some reason makes them weirdly pleasing to write in; large enough to allow you to scribble some thoughts and images, but still small enough to fit into your rucksack comfortably.

Grab your pen, close your laptop and draw the first thing that pops into your mind, and become comfortable with using the pen again.

If you’re someone who uses productivity apps to manage your daily to do lists, try transitioning from digital apps for to-dos to using pen and paper to write your to do list instead.

Re-engage with pen and paper for a week or so and you’ll eventually overcome your fear of the idea of writing / drawing with physical instruments.

Spend 10 minutes or so drawing these on repeat:

• Parallel lines
• Dotted lines
• Squares
• Circles