What does a Product Manager *actually* do? 3 ways I spend my time at work

so what do product managers actually do now you probably heard that product managers are responsible for setting the vision of a product for creating the product strategy and roadmaps that are going to be implemented by the engineering team you may also have heard that product managers commonly work with design and with engineering to bring product ideas to life and launch them so that customers can use them but how does that actually translate to the work that a product manager does on a daily weekly and monthly basis how are you actually spending your time what kind of meetings are you having who are you meeting with what kind of work are you actually doing how do you split up your time between the 10 million tasks that you have going on and as you progress throughout your product career how do you start to think more strategically how do you let go of some of the tactical day-to-day work and make more time to think about product strategy and what does product strategy even mean like like all these questions i hear all these questions all the time and in this video i want to distill down for you exactly what a product manager does daily weekly monthly so you can walk away from this video knowing exactly how you might spend your time as a product manager or at least you can understand how i spend my time and that will give you a lot of insight to make an informed decision about whether this kind of career path is right for you and maybe you're already a product manager and you're just looking to get an understanding of how someone else does things because that is also really really valuable so i have actually gone ahead and created a crazy visual diagram because i think that's the best way to represent everything that a product manager does and in case you can't tell it's a lot of stuff i've split it up into three different sections so there is meetings strategic product work tactical product work so my time as a product manager is usually pretty chaotic in the best way possible at the moment i look after about five to six different products some of them have existed for a while and some of them are currently in development and some of them are totally new product ideas and while i have these existing products that customers are already using i'm always thinking about the future and the next thing that we want to do and preparing for that so that once an engineering team is finished working on something that there is another thing ready for them to pick up now how you spend your day as a product manager will really depend on a number of things it'll depend on the nature of your company and your product it'll depend on whether you own one product or multiple products because you will then have to split your time up accordingly it will depend on the size of your company and the size of your team it might also depend on whether your team is in house or your development team is outsourced it can also depend on where you are in your career if you're just starting out it can be valuable to focus on current problems uh current or existing products and as you gain more experience you can start to bring in a little bit more of the strategic thinking and thinking about product vision and more long-term stuff i'm at that stage where i spend my time pretty 50 50. i spent a lot of time on my current products and working with my engineering team and then i spend half of my time thinking a lot about the future preparing for future product road map items and making sure the team is ready to pick up new stuff when they are finished working on their current stuff generally speaking what i do as a product manager is determine what products we are going to build whether those are entirely new products or they are enhancements to existing products and then i will work with our designers to design what the experience looks like then i will work with engineering to translate the functions that i decide a given product should have into the work that needs to be done to actually build those out to actually code them and i will then work with product marketing and sales and some of our customer facing teams to figure out how are we going to launch this thing so with all that being said i think we can jump into looking at all of the different types of meetings that you will have as a product manager now i've broken up the different types of meetings you might have into company meetings product team meetings engineering team meetings cross-functional team meetings one-on-ones and projects let's start with company meetings this is pretty self-explanatory um but i want to highlight three types of meetings that are very very relevant to product so for my company we will have a town hall once a quarter this is like a company get together where a lot of our leaders including product leaders will talk about what is going on more high level in the company a lot of that can then distill down to affecting you and your product area the second one is q a's so at my company we have product leaders who will post a session where we can ask them anything those are great sessions to ask product leaders questions directly about your product area your specific product about competitors and any other questions you might have that you may not get a chance to ask them about frequently and then lastly is kickoff so we will typically have a company kickoff at the start of the year and that should lay the product direction and the product strategy for the rest of the year next is one-on-ones this is easy um there are different people that i prefer to catch up with every week because we work together very closely and there is often a lot to discuss so i have one-on-ones with my manager of course once a week i have a one-on-one with my product designer once a week then i have a one-on-one with our design director once a month once every two weeks with my team's engineering manager so that is who all the engineers report to and this is the person who helps a lot with organizing the team estimating how long work is going to take and really organizing a lot of the sprint level delivery stuff and then a one-on-one with our tech lead who is responsible for setting the technical vision and making technical solution decisions for the team and our products and i have various product managers that i work with our products are sometimes dependent on each other or relate to each other and we will have one-on-ones um once a month but it really depends on who that product manager is and what kind of work we are doing together next let's talk about the engineering team so this is like the scrum team the development team this is the team that is actually going to be coding and building your products and maintaining existing products we have um sprint planning we do this once every two weeks to figure out what are the tasks that will be developed in the next two weeks we do daily stand-up and that's a quick 20 ish minutes for everyone to give a quick status update on where they're at and ask for help where they are blocked once every two weeks we will do a retro this is to reflect on the previous two weeks um share any feedback about what's not working also to celebrate things that have gone well and then we do epic kick off every time we start off a new product initiative or a new feature that is big enough we will have a kickoff with the whole team so everyone understands what is involved the timeline the tasks the estimation all that kind of stuff next let's go to product meetings i don't really have too many fixed product meetings because a lot of them fall into project meetings or meetings with the engineering team but what we do have is product roadmap presentations this is this is something we do quarterly as part of our planning process so every quarter we will do a presentation on our next um six to nine months roadmap and then we also do product town halls product town halls are like company town halls except really focusing only on product teams and the content in this varies sometimes we might hear directly from customers we might hear directly from different product initiatives that are going on we might hear about the growth of products or the challenges we're having in certain areas etc and a bunch of ad hoc stuff with product so customer calls i try and do at least a few custom calls every single month but this can depend sometimes there's an emergency sometimes someone needs assistance and i will jump on a call but that is ad hoc and then there's road map requirements and product strategy discussions this just depends sometimes you just need to jump on a call with one or more product managers or sometimes i do this with my manager as well just to get some feedback and kind of collaborate on ideas around requirements around roadmap around future product strategy so let's go to project so we'll typically have project teams when we are working on something really big that will take a significant amount of time so multiple quarters and there are a lot of people involved and it touches other product teams as well so it makes sense to centralize everyone in a project team so that we can be on the same page share updates and and more easily work together if we have something like that we will typically have update meetings and lastly we have our cross functional meetings so as a product manager you will work with in some way pretty much every single part of the company that means you will need to have meetings with different people at different times so these are all ad hoc you will meet with product marketing if you're about to launch something or you want to think about how your product is being um promoted externally to customers you might meet with your product translation teams if your product is being translated into different languages product security this is often led by engineering but i do like to attend product security meetings so i can understand what security expects of us and they can also be updated on what is on our roadmap and then i'll also meet with technical writers so that they can update our documentation with customer support if they need assistance for particular products or if they have feedback about our product that they want to pass on to us and then sales and research teams as and when required the number one thing that has helped me in managing my meeting time is calendar blocking i block my calendar out for no meeting time or focused time that just blocking out a few hours in the morning a few days a week works really really well for me but you also have to be ruthless and you have to say no to meetings because as a product manager you need to understand everything that is going on around your product it's really easy to say yes to attending everything and i think there is value in that when you are first starting or when you are first learning about maybe a new product you are taking on over time that is going to make it really hard for you to focus on the important stuff so you need to say no to meetings where you feel like you can't add value now as i mentioned strategic work is thinking about the future it's thinking about the next problem you want to solve it's thinking about the next customer segment you want to go after it's thinking about innovation and everything around your future roadmap okay so what feeds into your roadmap and how do you create that well firstly you need to understand your company's priorities this should be communicated to you clearly by the ceo the chief product officer the vp of product all your different product leaders it should be documented and clearly articulated once you understand your company priorities that will really help you understand how your specific product area can help to work towards those priorities once you identify what kind of space that is what kind of products you want to maybe consider developing or what types of problems you want to solve research is key you can do general market research look at what is happening in the landscape of the industry within which you operate it's just primary research secondly look at what your competitors are doing you should know who your competitors are and you should be stalking them like you should be using their products setting up trials reading their documentation reading their product releases reading their messaging you should know exactly what is up with your competitors so if you understand what your competitors are doing you can use that to rationalize your roadmap and explain to people within your company why you should or should not be doing something also in looking at your competitors you might identify gaps things that they are not doing and that might be something worth exploring and lastly is customer feedback if you work at a company that already has a presence if you already have an existing customer base your customers are your best source of defining your future roadmap because they will be telling you what isn't working they will be telling you what they want you will know why customers are potentially leaving your product for other products so understand customer feedback you can do this by talking to your customer support teams by reading public forums you can do this by um using your product a million ways in which you can do that once you've got your roadmap it doesn't mean it's finalized you need to present that roadmap to people within the company you need to present it to product leaders other product teams you need to present it to engineering leaders and obviously eventually your own engineering team and you need to get feedback on it ultimately we need to be collaborative with all of the other people we work with especially design especially engineering and work with them to make sure they are also on board with the road map now i also have reviewing dependencies so dependencies is more common in larger companies where there are multiple products whereas where there is a lot of complexity and lots of different teams working on lots of different parts of the product so you have to make sure that what you are doing doesn't conflict with what another team is doing and if they need something from you you are able to deliver that to them before they need it and vice versa so managing dependencies reviewing dependencies is really important and it can often dictate the sequencing of items on your roadmap you should be doing strategic thinking for your product no matter what stage you are at in your product career of course over time as you get more experience you are likely to very naturally pick up more and more strategic work especially as your ownership area grows but if you are in the early stages of your career in product that doesn't mean you shouldn't be thinking strategic and if you can demonstrate that you are a strategic thinker then that is extremely valuable for your career and product more generally okay now let's talk about the tactical work you will do as a product manager i think of this as the fun but really hard category of work this is taking an idea and shipping it and putting it in the hands of customers so it's really fun because you get to create designs you get to see those designs being built and brought to life but then you have to manage customers as well and that can be really really difficult it can also be difficult just going through the process of development so while you as a product manager are not doing the development you are very very closely working with the development team as they go through the software development lifecycle which is a whole other process and you will depend a lot on other cross-functional teams and other cross-functional partners to be successful in the tactical work you will do as a product manager i think the key to balancing tactical work is but know the areas where you really need to focus your time because you don't need to be across everything all the time but you need to generally be aware of what's going on and i think over time you will learn where the right areas are for you to really focus on so tactical work product development let's get into it when i talk about tactical product work i'm really talking about the product development life cycle when you take something that is just an idea and then you research it you come up with requirements that are then translated into tasks that engineering can pick up they go through the software development life cycle to build out those functions and then you will go through pre-launch activities and then you will release the product and you'll get customer feedback so that's what i refer to as tactical product work so let's go through this in order of the product development life cycle now once you have a rough idea of what you want to build informed by your strategic work you want to do more research now you'll do research for the strategy part of it but you also want to do more specific research for the specific product or feature that you want to build again you can do competitor research you can do market general market or industry research customer calls is incredibly important and then also looking at existing backlog items that you might already have chances are you're building up a backlog of customer requests and customer feedback um and especially if it's an existing product and when you are putting together requirements for something that's always a really good point of reference to make sure you're taking into account any feedback that's already been received once you've done your research and you have an idea of what you want to build that needs to then be translated into product requirements so product requirements are really the specifications of what you want to build product requirements are what you will use to communicate with engineering and design what needs to be built so as an example if you're building some kind of app we need to answer questions like what should be on the login page what should happen if someone enters the incorrect login details are there any additional things that we want someone to be able to do from a login page once they're logged in where should they go what are the next options they should have like basically getting down to the super specifics of exactly what a screen in a product should do i don't think writing requirements is a one-time thing you don't just write your requirements and they're finalized they are always going to be um changing based on feedback and you should get feedback from engineering and design and even other product managers as you write them so making sure we gather feedback is incredibly incredibly important now once you have finalized your requirements that will help to then inform your release plan sometimes if you are building a more complicated or bigger feature or product maybe you don't want to release everything at once maybe you want to incrementally release something and it's important to have the sequence of releases written down so everyone knows that the first thing that we're going to be releasing in may is this then the second thing we'll release in june is this and you can see how gradually the releases build on each other now once the requirements are finalized we can discuss and share those with our product designers and you'll work with product designers to figure out what the product should look like what the specific screens should look like what should happen when someone clicks on a particular button so there's the design of the physical screens and then there's the user experience of what happens when you click on certain things on a screen and when you go between screens so some of the things you'll do with a product designer will be to map out that user journey and then you have the actual mock-ups feature mock-ups these can start as wireframes of what the screen actually looks like and then those will be created into higher fidelity designs so that is something your designers will do um i think product managers can be very useful in terms of conveying ideas by just doing really rough sketches and that's something i will often do previously on whiteboards or on paper but now i'll just do a really kind of scrappy wireframe just to communicate my thinking also very common for you and your product designers to have customer calls once you have some designs created you might want to get on customer calls and ask customers for feedback on what they think of those designs do some testing and validation of those designs again i find these often to be led by design but you also want to be there in case customers have questions about product functionality roadmap etc and depending on the company and the size of the product and project you're working on uh sometimes there are also things called design reviews this is something we do where if it's a very significant product or it's like a brand new product that we haven't touched before we will go through a design review with a lot of different stakeholders and really get like a sense of agreement by everyone because we are going to be introducing something dramatically different and new from what we have before so that's design now once you've got your requirements and you've got the design we can actually move on to development now development does not start before you translate requirements into user stories basically you want to make sure you take the requirements of a product and translate those into sizeable tasks that engineering can actually code once you have user stories this is kind of where prioritization comes in as well i realize i haven't mentioned prioritization you'll also prioritize requirements because you don't want to necessarily build everything at once so you will prioritize what features you want to start with and that can feed into your different releases but you also need to prioritize what goes into a sprint so a sprint is made up of many many tasks a sprint is not always all of the fancy new stuff you're building and you will need to prioritize what user stories go in for some new things you're developing what user stories go in for maintenance tasks for existing products and any other kind of work that needs to be done that then feeds out into the software development lifecycle which again is a whole separate process that engineering teams go through in order to actually write the code move it across different environments review the code test the code and then release the code but where does a product manager fit into the software development process you're always going to be lingering right like you're going to be going to daily stand-ups so that you understand what is happening in that development process you should also get an understanding of any challenges issues big decisions that engineering are making while they are building something oftentimes there are uncertainties unknowns issues that come up when you actually start building something now one other area you will feed into the software development lifecycle um kind of before the development actually starts is understanding how something is implemented you don't need to understand the details of the technical architecture but i think it's important for a product manager to understand the general approach so how you can do this is by getting engineering to walk you through maybe like some kind of visual diagrams maybe some technical diagrams they can kind of convey to you the big components involved in what they're building uh maybe there are some decisions that they have made that could impact customer experience they should be conveying those to you so you're aware of them having a general understanding of how your product works is important so not necessarily exactly how it's built but how it works now trade-offs are a huge part of product management you could build something in five different ways just like how you could have 10 million different requirements for a product right you're gonna pick a few of them and prioritize a few of them with technical implementations there are so many different ways to build something so if you want to build something in the absolute best way possible that's great but it could take a really long time and so if you decide to take a different approach maybe use some different technology or maybe a different language maybe that will get you to a faster path to releasing something however maybe it won't deliver the most optimal customer experience so basically whatever decisions are made for how something is built it could have some trade-offs that you need to consider now once something is built and you have somewhat of a functioning product i think it's also important for you as a product manager to test it yes engineering will do their own testing they will do manual testing and automated testing but you should also test it just try to break it and see what breaks so then that can be prioritized to fix if it's relevant before you actually launch the product in terms of launching the product there are a number of things that need to happen you need to make sure you have adequate documentation maybe that's instructions maybe that's videos some general documentation that gives customers somewhere to read about what the product is how it works how to set it up now typically you will work with a technical or documentation writer to help create your documentation and then you need to work with people in your marketing and go to market team when are you going to release the product is it going to be priced in a certain way or is it going to be free what kind of branding will you have associated with it will it have some promotional material email campaigns that will go out with the product launch those are all things that you should be aware of that you should contribute to but that's not your job as a product manager to actually set those up i'll caveat though if you work in a very small company or a startup maybe that's something you will do but i'm currently speaking from the lens of working in a larger tech company where there are very separate areas for doing all of this kind of stuff so you launch the product now customers are going to start using it and that's the last part i want to touch on is customer management you need to monitor how customers are using the product and also the feedback they are giving you so monitoring how they use a product is a matter of having appropriate reporting and appropriate dashboards by which you can see hopefully real-time adoption and real-time usage and engineering can help to set up some of those things and then feedback could be in the form of customer calls it could be in the form of customers leaving reviews or feedback on public forums or the products documentation you will have the appropriate channels within your company for them to send you feedback and contact you now the feedback customers give you should be used to inform what you do next with the product separate to getting real-time feedback on a product you've just launched you're going to have customers potentially using existing products that you have and you need to you need to manage those customers as well so what i like to do with general customers of the various products i own uh have calls with three different groups of customers one is happy customers you always want to stay connected to customers when they're not having problems right you will hear about the problems that customers have and you will probably have to deal with them but it's really good to talk to customers who are satisfied who can give you positive feedback and you can have a really good relationship with secondly yes you will talk to frustrated customers customers will escalate issues that they have that are not being solved and they will want to talk directly to the product manager and thirdly there are strategic customers these are the customers that are extremely important to the company these are the customers that pay a lot of money these are the customers that the company sees real a lot of value in partnering with and as product managers you should always make time to prioritize speaking to strategic customers and that is almost everything a product manager does it's a lot and i i tried my best to condense that down as much as i could but i hope this makes you realize how many things there are and oftentimes a lot of these things are happening in parallel at the same time i also want to emphasize that many of these things will vary slightly depending on your company your product the nature of your industry your team your team size so many factors so i think it's really important to learn how others do things it's also important to share how you do things with others and so i hope this video was a glimpse for you into how we do things at a larger tech company and thank you for watching if you got this far and i hope this video was of immense value to you and i look forward to seeing you in a future video thanks so much bye you

Channel: The Product Pup

Views: 35,617

Keywords: product manager, product management, tech, women in tech, how to become a product manager, what is a product manager, Product requirements, Product roadmap, Product owner, business, working in tech, working from home, day in the life

Id: 4rA_vADcD6Q

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022