Surviving One Year as a Product Manager — My Top 5 Learnings
How does it feel to want something in life, getting it the harder way and then living with it? Surreal, isn’t it? I wanted to be a Product Manager (the backstory of why & how is a story for another time) and today I complete a year of being one.
How do I feel? It’s a mixed bag of emotions. This one year has been full of learnings, some of which I want to share.
1. To establish accountability, do your homework well!
As a Product Manager, the entire system depends on how thorough your research is. Hence, it’s important to invest time in first understanding the requirements yourself, only then will you be able to steer the project in the right direction. If you do this right in the beginning, you’ll find a lot more time in hand because then you won’t be attending meetings and/or calls for discussions you could’ve preempted.
This is additionally important as it addresses one of the biggest challenges for a PM, i.e., getting work done by a team that doesn’t report to you. Only when the team trusts you to provide complete and correct information, can you fix accountability on each member to deliver their part. Accountability is essential in ensuring all parts move together in the right direction and in eliminating confusion and diffusion of responsibility.
Documenting discussions crisply in emails and Jira tickets (or whatever you use for project management) comes in handy here.
2. Be a hard taskmaster while displaying empathy
I learnt the hard way that being miss goody two shoes doesn’t always help and you cannot keep everyone happy all the time. In the interest of product roadmap delivery (the primary KRA for a PM), you have to sometimes take hard calls and push people to get work done and at times to meet unreasonable time constraints. However, the most important thing here is empathy. The team needs to know that you’re there for them and you appreciate their work.
Engineers, I’ve felt, are not as expressive or chatty as others and connecting with them personally is a great way of understanding their problems. A one-to-one connect really goes a long way.
Once one of my engineers was working on a big feature all by himself and it was taking him a lot of time to fix certain bugs in the end. Because we shared a great rapport, he was able to tell me that he’d gotten bored of working on it and hence, he’d need a break. Thankfully, it was not urgent at that moment and I could delay it by a day or two. I then prioritized another small interesting feature for him for the next two days. And, because he took a break, he was able to look at the previous feature with a fresh mind.
If you were to take one learning from this article, it should be this!
3. Delegate work (Keep learning along the way)
A PM is expected to potentially know everything about the project. Even though I know pretty much about my product (or so I think), very often I am expected to provide a solution to a problem that I’m not well researched on. Earlier, I would start learning about it, which of course, would take some time. This would eventually lead to an unintentional delay in response. I later learnt to delegate solutioning to someone who would know more than me, which helped with faster responses. However, I would learn about it in the meantime so that I can tackle it myself the next time.
For instance, if a user is seeing some issues that I haven’t heard about, and if I’m crunched for time, I would ask the engineer to coordinate directly with the user. After he/she is done analyzing the problem, I discuss quickly to validate the solution and have him/her take it forward. However, I make a note of it for future to handle it myself.
4. Separate noise from real work (Ruthless Prioritization)
I make a task list for myself in the morning and work towards checking items off my list throughout the day. Even though I would keep busy the whole day, sometimes I wasn’t able to complete even 50% items from the list. And then would constantly feel inefficient & unproductive at the end of the day. I then realized that I was spending most of my day killing the noise, only to start another day doing it all over again. Therefore, as a PM you must bucket tasks to understand where your time is being spent, in order to accomplish real tasks that add value.
The below quote really resonated with me —
Remember that if you don’t prioritize your life someone else will.
― Greg Mckeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
5. Beware of Energy Vampires
Finally, because the PM is the focal point of the entire system, he/she is subjected to multiple conversations with different people throughout the day. And you might be mindlessly expending your energy with the energy suckers who suck time and enthusiasm out of you without providing value in return. Hence, it’s important to quickly reflect on each conversation and your energy levels later.
Think about the time you were in a productive conversation, and now think about your energy levels after that. I’m sure you would’ve felt energetic and accomplished. That’s the feeling I’m talking about!
In all meetings, keep two things in mind:
a. Keep a razor-sharp focus on the meeting agenda
b. Time-box every meeting
It’s been just a year and I already feel I’ve unlearned and learned so much, with so much more to learn.
P.S: This is my first medium article, finishing this has rekindled the joy of writing in me and I shall be back with another one soon!
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