Day in Life of a Product Manager
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Ravi Patel / NY / 05/11/2016
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Day in Life of a Product Manager
- 1. Day in the Life of Product Manager /Productschool @ProdSchool /ProductmanagementNY Venue Sponsored by
- 2. NARavi Patel • Lead Instructor at Product School • VP of Product & Strategy at AD/FIN www.productschool.com Day in the Life of Product Manager PHOTO
- 3. Day in the Life of A PM Ravi Patel – VP Product @ AD/FIN
- 4. Products I’ve Worked On
- 5. What doesn’t a PM Do? • Write Code (Engineering) • Create mock-ups (Design) • Sign deals (Business Development) • Plan PR (Marketing)
- 6. What does a PM DO?
- 8. PM’s Role on the Team • You are a team leader – Set the Cadence and Vision – Brainstorm Effectively – Manage Product Operations
- 9. Product Manager • Definition: A PM helps their team (and company) ship the right products to their users Credit to Josh Elman
- 10. 1: Help your team • Coordination – ensuring that the team is planning, making decisions, and working together effectively • Communication – making sure everyone understands what is happening, when, and why, especially as things change • Company Focus is Your Focus • Understand and communicate the company’s overall goals and objectives
- 11. 2: Help your company • SHIPPING > PERFECTION • Understand company’s overall goals and objectives and how your team fits in the broader vision – founders vision • Align goals and metrics with company strategy • Prioritize Ruthlessly
- 12. 3: Ship • Delivering products to users • Always be testing, trying out the products, and listening to early feedback • Clear goals and objectives can help final tradeoffs
- 13. 4: the right product • PMs must understand the tricky balance between getting it right and getting it out the door • Novel solutions that feel like the right product and solves the right user needs. • Getting a sense from the founders and other leaders to make sure the product feels right • Listening to early feedback from users • Measure whether the product shipped is the right one
- 14. 5: for your users • Articulating core use case – really telling the story of who should use the product and why • PMs are advocates for their users and represent users in nearly every conversation when making decisions • Understand target users, what their challenges and issues are, and how the product should deliver the value and delight • A good product today is better than a perfect one tomorrow
- 15. What is a typical day?
- 16. “Special Days” • Big-picture thinking. • Product & Feature Ideas. • Customer feedback & relationships. • Demos & training sessions.
- 17. What Was my last Full Week LikE?
- 18. Daily Basis • Strategic Planning • Tactical/execution – Project Management • Communicating with senior leaders • Talking to Customers • User Testing • Data Analysis • Internal Meetings • EVERYDAY IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT
- 19. Daily Challenges • Lack of Resources • Internal Processes • Iterating Complications • Prioritization
- 20. Small vs Big Company
- 21. WHAT MAKES A GREAT PM? • Technically Capable • Strategically Oriented • Constantly Communicating • Marketing Aware • Problem Solving
- 22. QUESTIONS
- 23. Upcoming Courses www.productschool.com www.productschool.com brad@productschool.com APPLY AT Weekdays: June 7th Weekends: June 4th
- 24. Product Management Info Session with JP Park – May 18th UPCOMING WORKSHOP www.productschool.com RSVP ON EVENTBRITE
Editor's Notes
- So before we go into a day in the life of a product manager, want to tell you a bit about some of the products that I have built in the past and then a little bit about product management. What do people think of product management ? What is product management in my eyes? What makes the role of the PM fulfilling?
- So before I really go into what I do on a day-to-day basis and explain all the daily challenges, I want to spend some of the time here to really dig into what is product management to me. Product management varies from person to person and from company to company in terms of roles and responsibilities, and this is why I think its an amazing career (at least for me). It gives you insights into business development and sales, and experience in messaging and delivery to ability to really understand business justifications to engineering impacts. They don’t write code – Sure you can write up a quick script to take care of something or answer a question Second, they typically don’t create mock-ups. Yes you wireframe, but you can sketch a wireframe on a piece of paper. Third, you don’t sign deals. You don’t make commission on anything you sell or partnerships you help create. It’s not your job to draft a contract. Yes as a product manager you will potentially review contracts to see if they make sense from a product offering and pricing standpoint, but you won’t be on the road creating these partnerships Finally, you don’t plan PR. As a product guy you may help with product messaging, and adoption strategies but you don’t make the sales collateral pretty. You job is to provide the right content, and allowing marketing to create proper messaging around it – product marketing-.
- The role of a product manager tends to vary heavily depending on product lifecycle and stage of the company. ultimately a product manager is still responsible for doing whatever it takes to collaborate with multiple teams and move different conversations towards closure.
- I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology and user experience. A good product manager must be experienced in at least one, passionate about all three, and conversant with practitioners in all. Business –a business function, maximizing business value from a product. Optimising a product to achieve the business goals while maximising return on investment. Sorry, this does mean that you are a suit – but you don’t have to wear one. Technology – There’s no point defining what to build if you don’t know how it will get built. NOT sit down and code but understanding the technology stack and most importantly understanding the level of effort involved is crucial to making the right decisions. In Agile world spend more time day to day with the development team than with anyone else inside the business. User Experience –voice of the user inside the business and must be passionate about the user experience. Again this doesn’t mean being a pixel pusher but you do need to be out there testing the product, talking to users and getting that feedback first hand
- Set the cadence; Build and articulate the roadmap Hold regular product meetings Take and share clear meeting notes It starts with setting a vision for the product, research and research some more your market, your customer and the problem they have that you’re trying to solve. Assimilate huge amounts of information – feedback from clients, quantitative data from analytics, market trends and statistics – you need to know everything about your market and your customer, and then mix all that information with a healthy dose of creativity to define a vision for your product. Brainstorm Effectively Everyone pitches ideas to drive biggest impact Q&A where people pitch or describe ideas Prioritize Manage Product Operations Share company news relevant for team Gut check for features getting launched Learnings nad analysis of recent features Roadmap check-in on new development
- A lot of people describe a product manager as a CEO of the product or the “owner” of the spec, but I think that over-ascribes influence and authority to the product manager. The best teams operate in a way where the team collectively feels ownership over the spec and everyone has had input and been able to suggest and promote ideas. The best product managers coordinate the key decisions by getting input from all team members and are responsible to surface disagreements, occasionally break ties, and gather consensus. It’s not about building what the product manager thinks is right. Helping your team often means being the person who writes and summarizes notes after a long meeting, or writing a spec to make sure you have captured the team’s consensus and plan in written form. And often it means communication with people on your extended team — getting their feedback, sharing the plan, and making sure there are no roadblocks or traps that could get in the way of the team delivering their product to users.
- Shipping > Perfection As a product manager, it is imperative that you understand the company’s overall goals and objectives and exactly how your team fits in to the broader vision. The best product managers frequently referred to the founder’s vision and ensured that what the team was working on helped get closer to realizing that. They could articulate how beating the goals and metrics of their product would bolster the company’s overall strategy. Just like with helping your team, this isn’t to say that product managers shouldn’t have great ideas of their own, but that they should be able to translate their ideas back to the core vision and goals of the company, and ensure they have top-down support for executing on them. Prioritize Ruthlessly!
- Nothing matters more than actually delivering products to your users. You can be great at helping your team build cool things, figuring out the right products, or embodying the vision, but it only matters if you can ultimately help the team get to a point where you can ship it. Teams should always be testing, trying out the products, and listening to early feedback, but at some point in every project, the team has to make a call that the product is ready enough (and it’s never truly ready, of course). Teams with clear goals and objectives, and a good feel for the user and what they want the user to be able to do, can make the final tradeoffs necessary. It’s usually great product management that helps drive this to completion.
- While shipping matters, the best product managers help the team make sure it’s the right product. Building something that doesn’t exist yet is always fun, but never a slam dunk. However, it’s up to the team to be creative and come up with novel solutions that feel like the right product and solves the right user needs. PM a good feel for what seems right or wrong, and are also good at listening to early feedback from testers and others who try it. They are good at getting a sense from the founders and other leaders to make sure the product feels right. Listen to early feedback from users More importantly, once shipped, the best product managers can measure whether the product shipped is the right one. Once a product ships, they are reading through that data and helping the team figure out what parts are working and what parts are not, and together quickly coming up with a plan for improvement and more testing.
- The hardest part of building any product is articulating your core use case, i.e., really telling the story of who should use the product and why. The best product managers are the advocates for your users and represent users in nearly every conversation when making decisions about the product. Doing this requires a deep understanding of your target users, what their challenges and issues are, and how your product should deliver the value and delight they are looking for. Great product managers listen to user feedback all the time — whether it’s from usability tests, meeting users in the field, reading support emails, or working with the people in your company who do all of those things on a daily basis.
- 8:45-9:00 am – Get Into the Office. Grab a cup of coffee + piece of fruit/yogurt before it runs out 9:00am-9:30 am - Review yesterday’s work, identify areas for improvement, and make notes for this afternoon’s meeting with execs. Then you organize the new tasks you just created via email (or add tasks manually), assign them, and define any next steps. Next, you convert any relevant email conversations into user stories, add them to the team’s backlog, and prioritize them. At your weekly meeting with the development team lead later today, you’ll review the backlog and discuss any new stories. 9:30 am Finish any overdue e-mails that are in my google tasks list. I keep Google tasks solely for responding to e-mails and a chrome plugin called Momentum for product related tasks. 10:00 am - Ooh, apple turnovers! You grab one plus a tea on your way to the daily stand-up with your engineering/development team. You’ll do a quick check in, review everyone’s progress, discuss any roadblocks, and shift focus if necessary 10:30 am Check your Prioritization Matrix, where you define all requirements clearly in writing with weights based on defined metrics. Prepare to know what we will be working on in the next few sprints / few months for a meeting with CEO at 11:00 am. Meet with your product team and communicate any changes you’ve made to the Matrix. Respond to few e-mails to potential partners regarding any implementation guides. 11:00 – 12:00 pm – Meeting with CEO to report on progress, discuss potential new features, and talk business strategy, including how to balance company goals and resources with the product vision. 11:45 am Check key performance indicator (KPI) updates to see how products are performing, and take notes for this afternoon’s report to executives. 12:00 pm Grab lunch with your pal Marvin from the another ad-tech to catch up and discuss product management 1:00 pm Meet with the head developer to review the results of the latest bug check and confirm the new feature is good to go for deployment. Then run through the backlog and PRD together and discuss any updates. 2:00 pm Coffee break! Then meet with marketing managers to update them on developer progress and talk strategy/positioning. 2:30 pm Read your favorite tech blogs, check Google alerts, and scroll through your Twitter feed for the latest on competitors, industry news, and market trends. 3:30 pm Run through the latest task updates in Trello tool, make sure everything’s still on track, and respond to anyone requesting feedback.
- Big-picture thinking. Hold an intensive brainstorm session to answer long-term planning questions like: What’s the next phase of our mobile strategy? Can we offer an international product? Product & Feature Ideas. Take an afternoon or a whole day to tackle your product roadmap and create wireframe sketches. consult your market research and user data, and let your creativity run wild. Customer feedback & relationships. interacting with potential or current customers: pitching, listening, troubleshooting, surveying, etc. Good product managers know customers personally and have a real understanding of their daily challenges. Demos & training sessions. Big releases will require you to take some time bringing sales and support teams up to speed on new products or features. Depending on the number and complexity of products/features, this could take anywhere from an hour or two to a whole afternoon or day.
- No day is the same (aside from agile meetings) and no week is the same. This is how the week of 11/16-11/20 looked for me. It’s filled with meetings from sales, marketing, client services, senior leadership, clients, vendors, partners. Blue is more “Me time” where I am working on specs or reviewing product related issues or answering e-mails or reviewing the roadmap. Yes there are bunch of other things I may have missed, but they happen in the empty slots. Green is more internal meetings. I may have a re-design huddle with the Design team or meeting with the head of analytics to review some new reporting metrics they are looking at for clients, or being part of the weekly sales meeting to here feedback from clients or how I can help sales re-position something. Yellow is anything agile related. In this specific week it was end of one sprint and start of the other. Spring review and retrospective and reviewing product backlog, and inputting user stories, and sprint kickoff (all great things you learn here). If you want to talk a bit about agile do grab me after, I just don’t want to take up the entire time going into detail on this stuff even if it’s interesting Red is client meetings. I try to be in front of the client as much as possible. Especially big partnerships or potential clients that will be more than 5% of our revenue. It’s important to see what the CRO or VP of sales is offering these clients and making sure the product can deliver what is being messaged. For me personally, I am only as successful as my product. If my product does $100 million in revenues, then I feel accomplished, but if my product does not even sell, then it’s a failure. Product managers get reviewed on internal KPIS, - revenue, number of customers, retention, engagement, etc.. So it’s always important to build products that people want! The client meetings help me deliver that especially the big meetings because then I am talking to senior leaders who are responsible for setting the strategy for the following year. It’s important for me to know what Disney is planning for Q1 of next year or next year as whole because that may/may not affect my roadmap if we ink a deal. Or its important what Googles video advertising roadmap is for 2016 because we work closely with them to execute some of our campaigns. If things change, that can be a huge roadblock for us. So I have to make sure client services team is informed of any upcoming changes on any partners we work with. Client services is too busy providing support for clients and helping upsell that they don’t have time to ask questions to our partners.
- Strategy Planning - As a PM, I always keep a tab of short/mid/long term product feature ideas and it’s extremely important to always be thinking about whether or not these ideas make sense given recent market changes or data analyses that you’ve performed. Project Management - A good PM is very organized with gathering information from various teams and properly summarizing/documenting Communicating with senior leaders Talking to Customers User Testing - It’s imperative to find time to sit down or at least speak with your users so that you can understand their problems and get feedback on what you can improve or create. Data Analysis - Data is crucial to making well-informed product decisions so PMs should be able to understand and hopefully pull the data they need to run analyses. Learning SQL and Excel are a must to run basic data analysis on the job.
- Lack of resources: You can never have enough engineers or servers or technology infrastructure. Internal Processes --Continuous improvement is always needed, but where do you draw the line between helping improve internal processes or small enhancements and innovation. Innovation brings up new revenue models, new products, while enhancements do not increase revenue Iterating complications --What happens when you keep adding complexity to the product. What happens when you reach a point where you cannot enhance a product unless you overhaul the entire code base Prioritization --What is most important? Just because the CRO said it would close a deal does it make it important ? Even if it’s not strategically aligned with the company?
- The corporation provides support and structure while the startup provides autonomy and flexibility. The corporation is often plagued by bureaucracy and rigidity, but the startup is often considered chaotic. The corporate employee is categorized as a rule follower while the startup employee is deemed a rule setter. Small Company PM Skills - Dealing with resource constraint (both cash and staffing-related) - Maximizing value of mid-tier engineering/technical talent - Being a creative, innovative force inside the org - Ability to iterate or pivot rapidly - Creative enough to experiment without spending a lot of money - Expertise analyzing data and using it effectively to make decisions Big Company PM Skills - Understanding and performing toward higher-level org goals, which are often outside of your control - Navigating bureaucracy to get stuff done - Diplomacy and communication across multiple stakeholders with different perspectives - Comfort with slow, often frustrating, progress - Understanding that failure is not always an option - Great traditional management skills (setting goals, expectations, accountability) - Strong aptitude delivering polished presentations to senior leaders - Ability to delegate and trust others on your team completely without micromanaging
- Technically Capable. PMs must have sufficient technical ability to communicate with technical group in a way that leaves the technical team feeling like the PM 'gets it'. Strategically Oriented. A core job for a PM is the effective allocation of scarce resources. PMs must understand the dynamics of business strategy Constantly Communicating. Good communication is making sure that everyone *sees* what you are saying. Marketing Aware. PMs don't have to be expert marketers but marketing is woven throughout the product development process. Problem Solving. Creative or Decisive moreso. The point here is that good PMs must have little regard for obstacles and be hard-wired problem solvers.