Product managers: A jack of all trades
What is a typical day of product managers? As a co-founder and a product manager in a startup, this is my typical day:
When arriving at the office, I open Trello to review and prioritize my to-do list for the day, drink some coffee and then start a 10 min daily meeting with my team to find out what we accomplished on the previous day, what we are working on, and what issues we are facing. After the meeting, my main tasks for the day are to define the product function details and build the flow chart and the UI flow. I sit in front of my laptop and open Sketch to draw the wireframe. After finishing the first draft, developers and I confirm details such as error handling functions or what should be displayed in the search result bar. For the rest of the day, I usually update the backlogs in Trello and answer developers’ questions. And whenever it is necessary, I prepare for a product launch and plan the new marketing project.
Even if you are working in a large companies, the following scenario must sound familiar. You check your calendar, which is stuffed with meetings. On many days you have meetings with c-level executives and designers; and the next day, you have more meetings with developers, customers and other PMs. Product managers are like bridges between stakeholders. We digest and convey information to the right person, control the schedule and prepare backup plans, and give our own point of view to help our company to make better decisions. One of my favorite tools to manage the overwhelming meeting minutes is Sligrid (actually it is what my partners and I are building), which can be used to organize your meeting notes and other information such as business ideas, design specs, developer docs, blog posts, and even research papers.
In order to be a solid bridge, product managers need to be familiar with different fields and look at information from different angles. Here is a diagram made by Catherine Shyu, which shows the responsibilities of product managers and its adjacent roles.
I found it difficult to easily convey to the public the importance of a product manager to a company. My jobs includes so many different fields and also overlap with the responsibilities of other roles. It seems I can do anything but master none. Although PM is a vital and pivotal position in many companies, they are sometimes undervalued by themselves. But after reading the articles written by other senior product managers, it became clear that what a product management position entails, what their typical day is like and what kind of responsibilities they have. We should all welcome more product managers to share their typical days.
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The followings are useful articles which I’d love to share with you:
