My PM Journey — Q2 as a product manager — Finally out of the backlog!
Hey!
For this post, a very busy schedule *real reason* and a desire to try to give you a slightly wider perspective *excuse*, has led me to cover a whole quarter in one go. On the previous episodes, my first quarter as a PM ended on a very positive note. A crazy first month, led to a challenging but empowering second and ended with a triumphant third. I headed into Q2 with the feeling that I’m no longer a complete noob.
Platform is up to speed — What now?
As you probably know, I had A LOT to do when jumping head-first into this PM journey. Besides putting out immediate fires, I was required to develop a short, medium, and long term strategy, all while implementing basic team methodologies and playbooks. For every little hill I climbed, I could immediately see the shadow of the enormous mountain coming up behind it.
One day, somewhere in the beginning of month 4, no more. Upon finishing a routine task, I habitually went to my backlog to find another longer term task and… nothing.
I was thunderstruck. For a long time I’d been in this dramatic race to bring the team and the product up to speed. Now that I’ve hit that milestone, I had nothing to do. I mean, of course I had things to do, they just weren’t as obvious and critical as what I’d been dealing with so far.
This was a strange, scary feeling.
This brought on a somewhat strange cycle which I’m not sure I’ve completely overcome.
The cycle goes like this:
- During a very rocky start, flooded with endless infrastructure tasks, I look forward to the day where everything will be up to speed and I’ll just have routine tasks.
- Suddenly, I’m faced with an empty backlog. This causes me to feel scared and nervous because surely I’m missing out on things I need to do.
- I take my time to think more widely and strategically, and come up with a healthy list of tasks and goals.
- A few days later, I‘m standing in front of a packed backlog. This causes me to feel scared and nervous because there’s so much stuff I have to do and not enough time.
- I go into ninja mode, knocking out tasks by doing them or by changing priorities, successfully emptying the backlog.
- See step 2.
This cycle really reminds me of a pattern that I’ve noticed myself and my surroundings suffer through time and again.
- In a certain part of my life (work, health, hobbies etc), I start to feel dissatisfied because I’m stuck and unchallenged, so to regain a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment I decide to take on a new challenge.
- This challenge is difficult and trying at first, which makes me uncomfortable in some ways. I’m looking forward to overcoming it and feeling comfortable and happy with my new accomplishment.
- Not a month passes by from the moment I overcome this challenge, I forget all about it and go straight back to step 1.
Now, I’m not sure I have the answer to either of these phenomena, however I’ve learned that as usual, simply identifying and understanding this pattern in which my brain chooses panic as a default response to any and all scenarios, has helped me a lot.
Getting out of the day -to day- strategy starting to be more familiar
It took, and is still taking me some time to get used to being “up to speed”. I won’t deny that I’m constantly paranoid that I’m forgetting something (what’s been super helpful is my PM routines calendar).
Suddenly, however, new and interesting worlds started opening up to me.
Undoubtedly, my weakest PM skiil is strategy. As opposed to many other fields which I’ve been able to pick up fairly quickly, when it comes to strategy I just don’t understand how it could be developed without having experienced similar situations in the past. I was frustrated because I could not for the sake of me understand where we might want to go, why, and how. I couldn’t even figure out where we didn’t want to go, and why. I knew of course that these abilities come with time and experience, but it was nevertheless raising doubts in me about whether I had what it takes.
After months of being locked in a backlog, I finally got to see the light of day outside of it, and with surprising speed, my mind was able to shed some light into the complete darkness that was Strategy. I can’t explain exactly how or when, but over time I just simply started to understand things.
It’s also quite embarrassing yet critical to say that some of that time cleared up from not doing endless tasks, which I often felt was wasted on nothing, enabled me to think and reach these conclusions.
The fruit did not fail to come. One evening, while halfway watching a work related webinar, I had an epiphany. One of the most difficult challenges for my product is that due to its very niche solution, conveying its value in a simple, catchy manner, is quite difficult.
Suddenly, it struck me! There was a catchy, well-known term that perfectly defines us, and we haven’t been using it at all.
Soon after, with the involvement of my manager and our VP of marketing, we launched a mini marketing campaign to rebrand the product using this term.
More than anything, this story finally enabled me to feel like I’d finally been able to get my head out of the day-to-day and start seeing the bigger picture.
Joyfully, this was only the start. Visions for features and a roadmap started to become clearer by the week, long term strategy and potential business directions stopped being absolute strangers.
One of the reasons I fell in love with PM from the start was the variety of fields and topics we get to work on. I absolutely love the tactical, hands-on “project management” side of PM. Nevertheless, discovering this mysterious kingdom of strategy was a breath of fresh air.
With each post, I feel as if I’m writing to you more as a PM and less as a lost child pretending to play in the big league, and that’s incredibly exciting for me.
As I begin to experience more and more of the PM world, I’m really interested to hear what you, my readers, would like to read about. What problems or difficulties are you experiencing as aspiring, new or experienced PMs? It fascinates me if perhaps we’re going through the same things. Please feel free to reach out to me and let me know, and if we are, I’ll try to incorporate it in my upcoming posts.
Either way, catch you soon!
If you want to experience my story from the beginning, check out my previous posts-
2. Analyst to PM in three months. How?
4. Surviving my first month as a PM
