My PM Journey — Surviving my first month as a Product Manager
Thirty first days of bloodbath and what they taught me
Week 1
My first week went as expected. The development work seemed unaffected by my sudden appearance, as they were working hard on a roadmap put in place by my predecessor in order to, half-jokingly-half-seriously put, “allow me to mess up as little as possible”.
It is often said that PM-ing is principally not about initiating and executing processes, but about catalyzing and improving them. With that in mind, I was happy to see that everything was in place even without me, and excited to get myself up to speed and catalyze shit up. I was right where I wanted to be — I was meeting crucial stakeholders, experiencing key routines, and starting to develop a deep understanding of my product and its ecosystem.
Weeks 2–4
Two words — SHIT. SHOW.
Exactly seven days after my first day as a PM, all hell broke loose. In an instant, my first week’s Product heaven transformed into a burning inferno. Suddenly, I was surrounded by three hundred fires, which I could immediately divide into two categories:
Best case - Problems I didn’t know existed
Worst case - Problems I didn’t know existed, in domains I didn’t know existed
Clearly, this flaming disaster demanded experience to be put out, and my experience was a plastic toy squirt gun. Many optimistic thoughts and positive perceptions from the first week soon melted in the heat of trouble. I felt hopeless.
You’re probably asking yourself, “how”? I wrote before that everything was in place — the team was running and the new platform was ready, and I was merely supposed to gracefully accompany its launch.
Well, all that was true, but then it turned out that…
Our security wasn’t on par with company standards, our business plan was failing, the sales organization angrily refused to accept the new platform and we had trouble onboarding clients.
What insanity it was.
Daily, I was being rushed to urgent meetings discussing problems that I had zero tools in my toolbox to even fully understand, let alone solve. I felt like I was simultaneously being pulled in all directions, while remaining in place and not making progress towards any of them.
Looking into the future from that point in time, it was truly hard to see myself overcoming all these obstacles.
So how did I survive?
It definitely was not easy or smooth, but most importantly, it WAS. As usual, I always strive to make this blog actionable. I believe that many of the problems I faced and the solutions I used may be natural in the first months of a PM career, and I hope that looking over them might ease others’ rocky beginnings.
- Making sense out of the mess — First, I harnessed the PM’s number one tool — prioritization. With help from my boss (an absolute Product Magician), I was able to turn an anarchy of problems into a categorized, prioritized task list which consisted of:
- Urgent matters
- Short term tasks
- Long term, strategic items
This step was critical in restoring in me the sense of progress being made. Everything became clearer from there. A prioritized backlog of items allowed me to put out fires, while setting the infrastructure to deal with upcoming items, and starting to grasp and consider the long term goals.
- People — If there’s one thing that made this month survivable, it was being surrounded by great people. With all the difficulties, it would only be logical to assume that toxicity, politics and blame-games would be inherent to the situation. The thing is, they were not. The highly supportive atmosphere and across-the-board sense of responsibility were crucial to the extent that I can not imagine having overcome this trying period otherwise.
Ownership is crucial, but there’s a limit
A. Over-claiming responsibility — I started the job with a 100% sense of accountability. Having heard “CEO of your Product”, “End-to-end Ownership” and similar sayings dozens of times, I came prepared to plead guilty to every charge. This fell apart quickly.
Taking false responsibility:
A. Led to lacking solutions, given that I wasn’t the one who should’ve solved them in the first place.
B. Diverted me from focusing on the crucial items that I was actually responsible for.
It’s taking me some time to internalize the limits of my ownership, but as I do, it enables me to operate much more efficiently.
B. Over-owning third party tasks — As I mentioned previously, one of the aspects that terrified me the most was the amount of domains a PM has to juggle on a daily basis. I was worried about not being able to be worried about enough at once.
Then reality knocked at my door. It seemed like a few minutes into the job, suddenly everybody needed me. It was great to be reminded that a lot of these tasks were pre-delegated and managed by professionals who are paid to do so.
I soon realized that while managing my product’s entire ecosystem at once may be impossible, it’s also unnecessary. The most important was the distinction I made between the items that require my initiative and would not happen without me, and those in which I am just a stakeholder. This allowed me to focus on what really matters. A framework I adopted for making that determination is asking myself: “Am I the main person getting paid to make this happen?” “If I completely ignore this task, will it still get accomplished fairly well?”
C. Mental health, well-being, and personal growth — These are the perfect example of things which would not happen without me. Nobody will worry about them if I don’t. Therefore, this is a friendly reminder to myself: I am the sole owner of those aspects of my life.
So, I survived.
First month was definitely not the easiest, but I truly hope the tools and lessons I acquired will make the rest of the way smoother.
Catch ya’ next month!
Need some background? Check out my previous posts :
