What is Product Management ?! Part 2

1. When did you decide you wanted to be a PM, and what specific things led you to that decision? Tell us your story.

Here’s a Medium post I did on this question!

2. What does your day-to-day look like?

I spend most of my time balancing priorities between ongoing projects and planning for the future. At any given time I have 5–10 projects that are somewhere between design, build, test, and analyze.

I may have a morning meeting with legal to discuss compliance for a new project idea. Then a chat with a designer to go over final wireframes for another project before going into a review meeting with the head of product.

I almost always take the full hour of lunch and theorize with the other PMs about the difference between a nautical mile and a regular one. Or escape velocity versus orbital velocity.

In the afternoon, perhaps I’ll have an hour or two to plan through some aspect of my initiative before sitting in on a research session where a user will walk through how she uses our product on a day-to-day basis.

Then I’ll take a half hour to respond to any questions or requests that need my immediate attention.

After that, I may meet with an analyst to go over some experiment results and build some responsive theories. And then before dinner I’ll look over my list of projects and take any actions needed to ensure we’re unblocked & moving forward as best as we can.

Everything changes. Every day. But that’s a pretty fair look at an “average” day in my life.

3. What’s a specific challenge you’ve had in PM and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge I’ve found is prioritizing contemplative work over responsive work.

Say I have 8 projects and 6 people on each. Even after you remove any overlap (Dan and Emma are each on 5 of my projects) there are about 30 people who could reasonably reach out with a question at any given point in time.

I could spend 100% of my day just responding to what people need.

While responding is valuable, there’s a ton of issues with prioritizing that.

• You get stuck in the “now” and can’t plan for future projects. Once the current ones wrap up, your teammates won’t have valuable projects lined up to work on!
• Worse still, you’ll end up working on lower priority projects, missing the opportunity to shift your team’s focus to bigger problems because you don’t take the time to find them.
• On a subtle level, you train your team to escalate things when they could reasonably handle it themselves. That slows everyone down and reduces the general empowerment that you should be fostering in your org.

This problem is particularly acute because it feels so GOOD to respond to a question, to have an answer to a problem, to feel needed and helpful.

How have I fixed it? Well, it’s still a challenge, but I’ve been working on a system that’s pretty effective.

• I schedule all of my time. From the moment I walk into the office to the moment I leave, my calendar is chockablock full with what I plan to do when.
• That means I’ve scheduled time to respond to emails or Yammer threads. I have a few half hours in the day dedicated to that, and I do my best to not check that otherwise.
• If anything comes up in the moment, I add a note to my “Getting Things Done” system in Evernote and tag it with the relevant project. When time comes on my calendar to work on that project, I’ll look at the relevant notes and handle things there.
• If someone comes up with an ad-hoc request, I’ll ask “Is there anything I can say that will change what you do between now and {whenever I’m next working on that project}?” If no, I ask them to wait. If yes, I’ll shuffle things around so I can address the issue on their schedule.

Inherent in this system is the need for a lot of buffer time. In our culture, we expect that a quick response means we matter to someone and a slow response means we don’t. Because of that, it’s important to rearrange things on occasion so people feel included and welcomed, and for that, you need a fungible system with a lot of buffer.

• Lastly, I keep notifications off (when possible) and work on a browser window that doesn’t have tabs with incrementing counts on them. The urge to check those is just too strong.

All of this is incredible difficult for me — I LOVE getting a ping from friends or coworkers saying they need me for something. I live for the dopamine hit from my push notifications. But in the long run, letting those behaviors run wild is net negative for my teams, my company, all of our users, and my career.

4. What is consistent in PM with every company you have worked for? What’s different?

The push/pull of responsive work versus contemplative work is everywhere in PM.

What’s different? Cultural expectations around how and when people want to be pinged about things.

Process around how work is prioritized and who drives that. Some cultures decide on work based on strong opinions and even stronger personalities (these tend to be smaller orgs). Other, larger orgs tend to use codified frameworks & metrics to prioritize work. If you want a project to kickoff, you’d better have some dang good quantitative evidence that it’s a viable path forward.

Of course, both types will use both strategies, but to different degrees.

5. What does a senior PM do that a junior one might not?

A senior pm will be significantly better at long term planning and contemplative work. She will have more success in identifying what responses can wait, and will work with ruthless prioritization.

More senior PMs will also do a better job of inspiring their teams and drawing direct connection between the team’s specific project and the over all success and vision of the company.

Lastly, the senior PM will likely do more to empower all team members, bring out their talents, and promote their long term success.

6. What things have you done in your career as a PM that has really helped you level up?

Talking to PMs who are only a step or two behind me in their careers has really helped me focus on what’s most important to move my career forward. There’s no better way to learn than to teach!

Similarly, starting my podcast (ClearlyProduct.com) has helped me reiterate my learnings and bounce those ideas off my cohost, a product person from outside my org who has a vastly different perspective on many things.

7. How might a PM role at a startup be different from a PM role at a large company?

Oh, so many ways. The biggest difference is the mandate that a small company PM work mostly from intuition, whereas a large company PM usually has the benefit of data to inform her. The skills behind blind intuition are VASTLY different from the skills of data analysis + intuition.

Large orgs tend to be slower, because there are so many more stakeholders, so a lot of your energy will go to moving quickly in spite of that.

For smaller orgs, work will be flying by, and it won’t always be the best in the long term. A lot of your energy will be keeping ahead of that and making the best tradeoffs you can between velocity, technical debt, business needs, and user needs.

8. Who do you collaborate with most on a daily basis? What usually brings about successful collaboration?

“Successful collaboration” is such a loaded term. What is success? When something ships? When a test fails, but you learn a great deal for the future? When a project wraps and the whole team is satisfied? When people feel heard even if you made decisions they don’t like?

I think it’s pieces from all those things and then some. What brings all of that about? Literally everything you do. The biggest input to bringing people together for their best work is active listening. A manager once explained it to me as “seeking to understand before being understood.”

This goes way beyond not interrupting. It’s about being able to feel when someone has something to add, drawing that out when they would have otherwise been silent. Driving the conversation toward a concern someone has but isn’t voicing for whatever reason. This compounds project-over-project till your teammates know they can speak freely, suggest the crazy, fear out loud and work to their fullest without any worry of judgment or loss of status. The holy grail of teams — psychological safety.

It’s a skill I’m working on right now, and I’ve seen great results when I’ve been on top of it. Some days are worse than others, though, and it’s pretty easy to spot when I’ve let other concerns cloud my mind and pull me away from good listening.

Such a subtle skill.

9. What words of wisdom might you give yourself 5 years ago? And what advice would you give to people just starting out in PM?

Teach yourself how to think. Read books like “Thinking fast and slow”, “Decisive”, “Diaminds,” and “How to Read a Book.”

Getting better at thinking (and getting better at getting better!) is the best thing you can do for your career. Your mental acuity will show through clearly and translates directly to all variety of product management roles.

Second, do not go and take classes on PM. Do not waste your time. Do not waste your money. Yes, you’ll learn valuable skills in those classes, but if you work on side projects (with others!) you’ll get not only the learning, but also the experience, which is way more valuable to hiring managers. Best yet, you’ll demonstrate that you’re a doer through and through, which is a mandatory skill for the role. If you’re waiting around for some instructor to tell you the best way to do something, you’ll never learn the ultimate PM skill: figuring-it-out-on-your-own-itude.

One caveat. If you’re working on an internal transfer into PM, those classes could be helpful to give you a lot of the right terminology, etc. I’m of the personal opinion that you can find all of this online from reading PM authors, but there’s a strong argument that it takes too long to find (and read!) all the good articles. The PM curriculum in those classes should include a lot of good literature, so that’s valuable.

10. Anything else you would like people to know about PM?

Go do things. Don’t wait. Don’t worry. Don’t ask for permission. Just do.

Other Resources:

Blog — Read more by Anna!

Podcast- Join thousands of other listeners of Anna’s book club podcast & improve your PM skills.

Twitter @TweetAnnaMarie- Keep up to date with product news or get in touch with Anna (her DMs are open!)