Two weeks in the life of a product manager

Starting a new job can be exciting. For a product manager, going into a new environment, working with a new team, learning a new domain/market can also be very overwhelming. This is mostly due to the fact that the role of a product manager spans such a wide range of activities, especially in tech startups, where you are as likely to be involved in in-the-trench activities as you are in strategic planning. Most product managers did not start off their careers as product managers and never had formal training. Throughout the years, I learnt my art from peers, from books and articles (including many found here on Medium), and pretty much from just doing it. A product manager has to use their detective skill to seek out the best sources of knowledge, data and signals to make the product shine. Starting a new job can seem like trying to do it all within a very compressed period of time — a huge amount of detective work before you can confidently write your first user story!

Two weeks have passed since I started my new job. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write down and review what I actually did. I figured, if nothing else, this would at least allow me to spot any areas I may have ignored. So this is my list:

Vision, goals and strategy

• understand company vision
• understand business metrics and goals
• understand existing product metrics and goals
• understand existing product vision, strategy and roadmap

Company

• understand company setup
• understand business/revenue model
• identify who I am most likely to interact with

Pains

• spend a lot of time trying out the existing product and breaking it
• talk to customer support to understand top product pains
• do actual support shadowing!
• go through shit loads of support tickets!
• talk to engineering to understand the development, testing and deployment process, and identify the major pain points (that can potentially put the product at risk)

Market and competition

• study competitors
• talk to sales and marketing to learn about market segments and market trend
• talk to sales to understand product strengths, weaknesses and opportunities

Users/customers

• start talking to them
• understand their needs/challenges
• understand their workflows

Data/analytics

• understand what business data is being gathered
• understand what user analytic data is being captured
• understand what usability testing practice is in place
• start asking questions!

Product team

• talk to other product managers!
• understand cross-team dependencies
• discuss key product objectives

Sprint

• decide on what are the most valuable items to build right now
• start writing user stories (finally!)
• start working with designers and developers on new ideas
• start communicating plans and releases to the company

Phew, that turns out to be a long list. One thing I actively reminded myself to do during this period was: don’t just scribble down endless notes, actually take time to review them, to absorb and analyse the information, and to build connections between all the different topics.

It stopped me from going insane :-)

For all you fellow product managers our there, I would very much like to hear you thoughts!