The Potato Checklist
If someone calls you a potato in Norway, it means you’re versatile and can be used for anything. Here’s a list of four questions that I call The Potato Checklist, because it’s useful for pretty much all of my tasks and projects.
The Potato Checklist:
What are the goals?
What are you trying to achieve? What does success mean?
Who is the target audience?
Who are you doing this for? Who will use/read what you’re producing?
What does the end product look like?
Which format should it be in? What are the key components?
What are the most important failure modes?
What are the potential bad outcomes? Which are most important? How can those be mitigated?
I use The Potato Checklist when someone gives me a task, when starting a small project, or if I’m doing a work test as part of a hiring process.
I find that using the checklist reduces the time I need on a task, increases the quality of my work, and makes the systems I create more user friendly.
It also reduces the back-and-forth I need to have with the person I’m doing the task for. A lot of the time when I get asked to do a task, the person asking doesn’t include all the relevant information for me to answer the questions above. When that’s the case, I can use The Potato Checklist to uncover what information I’m lacking upfront. That way, I reduce the risk of getting vital information about the task mid-way, when I’ve already spent a lot of effort.
Quite often, the person giving the task doesn’t have the answers themselves. In those cases, I make assumptions about the information I’m missing, and make those assumptions explicit to the person who gave the task.
I’ve now used this checklist so much that I no longer write down the answers to the questions for every task. Instead, I’ll go through it as a mental checklist before starting on the task or project.
The Potato Checklist will often be too simplistic for larger and more complex projects. For those types of projects, you may want to add questions on who has what responsibility in the project (e.g. through a RACI matrix), if there are any dependables that you need to take into account when planning (e.g. what decisions are going to block progress), and outline relevant user stories (e.g. if there are multiple target audiences).
If you want to practice using The Potato Checklist, I recommend using it for every task or project you do over a 1-2 week period. Make the checklist as visible and available as possible. Here are some ways to make the checklist easier to remember to use:
Add it to your template in Google Docs
Bookmark it in your browser
Write it on a post-it and put it on your monitor or by your desk
Add it as a bookmark in a relevant slack channel
Example of how to use The Potato Checklist:
Someone from another organisation is hiring an operations associate, and asks if I know of any potential candidates for the role.
What is the goal?
To give the hiring manager a list of potential candidates that has sufficient information so they can figure out if they should approach them about the role.
Who is the target audience?
The hiring manager at the other organisation.
What does the end product look like?
A Google Spreadsheet of potential candidates I’m aware of, that includes:
Name
Email address
LinkedIn / CV
Relevant experience
What are the most important failure modes?
That I give information to the hiring manager that the candidates haven’t consented to.
I need to check the permissions they have given me previously, or check directly with the candidate that they’re okay with me sharing information about them.
That I spend too long adding a lot of information about the candidates, when all the hiring manager needed was a long list of names to reach out to.
To mitigate this, I’ll check with the hiring manager upfront how many people they’re expecting to reach out to in the initial round, and whether I should err on the side of including those I’m unsure about or only include those I’m confident about.