How Unplanned Work Kills Product Managers — Part I
Every product manager, as well as many other disciplines, feel like they don’t have as much time as they would like to, and yet every day PMs find ways to keep their teams running on the current work, plan future work, and keep the product roadmap on track.
You can plan your goals for the day as much as you want but at the end of the week, you realize you didn’t achieve much.
Sometimes you can even be asked, “what did you accomplish this week?” or just assess yourself and ask, “what did I achieve this week” just to find out that you did almost nothing valuable. Sounds familiar?
Time management is the biggest blocker PMs face as they advance. You can’t reach the higher levels of leadership until you learn how to carve out time for strategy. So, what’s the secret?
It all comes down to two things:
- Accepting that we have more work to do than can actually be done.
- Managing your time and priorities to decide what we choose to do.
Do this: Take a break from work, take a deep breath and think about how many different work streams you currently have.
You might realize you have a business workstream with the company needs, you might identify an internal workstream that can enable you to achieve the business goals and you might recognize one more workstream, planned changes that can come from either of the previous workstreams. However, there is a fourth type that is hard to identify.
As per Gene Kim in his book, The Phoenix Project (great book) there are 4 types of work:
- Business Projects, the work needed to keep the business moving and growing.
- Internal Projects, internally focused workstreams that enable you to meet the business needs and keep the Business Projects on the right track.
- Operational Changes, the everyday operations and changes which may also include managing the process to deploy a change that relates to either of the project types above.
- Unplanned Work, is considered the most destructive type of work and it is not even considered work. All it does is distract you from delivering your product roadmap and business goals. As the author nicely put it, “in the presence of unplanned work, all planned work ignites with incandescent fury, incinerating everything around it”.
One of the main reasons the unplanned work is always present is because The Product Triad (Product, UX Design, and Engineering teams) never quite scoped the proper amount of work needed (due to lack of time or proper resources), which can lead this team to constantly cut corners and most likely new technical debt is accrued (which is not necessarily a bad thing, as technical debt can be a faster way to learn).
How To Prevent Unplanned Work?
If you are one of those who plan their days the night before, the weekend before, or the same morning, you would have a clear picture of how your day or week will go. This allows you to properly plan your time and sets you on the right track to achieve your top 3 goals of the day or week.
Now, you start your day working on your product roadmap or just doing your product magic when an email, a message, a colleague, or a last-minute meeting comes in with new requests, bugs, or emergencies.
You have been programmed back in school to immediately take action, therefore you put on hold your planned work and you try to tackle the new requests, one after another. The moment you go back to your product work again, you realize it’s 6 pm and your day is gone.
How can you prevent this from happening?
Planning and managing the unplanned is key. There are several time management and organization planning techniques that can put you on the right path.
Things like optimizing your calendar, your meetings, your priorities, delegating, and saying “NO” when needed can make or break your whole career. Here are a few points to think about:
Optimize your Meetings
You might spend most of your week with back-to-back meetings with stakeholders, engineering, design, reviews, discussions, planning, etc. Some of them are recurring, some are planned weeks or even months in advance and many are either just ad-hoc 15–30 mins “quick questions” or just fire fighting meetings.
Truth is, people love meetings and yet, we all hate meetings. Let me rephrase that, we all like efficient meetings that bring value and hate empty meetings where in the end there is no value added at all.
You own your time, do not let other people control your calendar.
As any flight attendant will tell you, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first because it’s the only way you can be at your best for others.
Stop being a slave of your own calendar and give yourself time to do the things you need to in order to feel you are a valuable human being and valuable to your team and organization.
Take control of your time and calendar and play the same game, schedule “Heads Down” blocks of uninterrupted time, and take no calls or meetings during that time so you can focus on your own work.
You must be ruthless with your time!
Start thinking about how you can optimize your calendar and just be transparent with people, tell them you are trying something new that will benefit them as well.
I will be sharing more tips on how to optimize your calendar, meetings, tasks, and priorities in my next blog.
Until then, keep things simple!
