Mastering the art of time — guide for a Product Manager
As a product manager (PM), you are bombarded with requests coming from all directions. There is a customer who wants to have a certain feature in the product; you are asked to demonstrate functionality to another customer, you should participate in internal meetings to discuss the direction of the product, a product vision should be written, a roadmap planned, backlog prioritized, and so on. As Marty Cagan has said, being a product manager is hard. It requires a certain skill set and a lot of work. For him, product managers should be viewed as future leaders of the business. If a product manager cannot be seen leading your company, this person is not suitable for this role. It has also been said that to be a successful PM one needs to work at least 60 hours a week. However, this is not possible for everyone, especially if you have family or other things in your life that prevent you from just toiling at your desk. So as a product manager, how do you ensure that you are working smart and using your time the most effectively?
Start with why
As Simon Sinek has put it, it all starts with why. What this means for the product manager is the product vision. It should tell you why you are trying to build this product and what change you want to see in the world. This vision should be linked to the company vision, strategy, and objectives, from where all cascades down to departments and product areas and eventually to your team and to you as well. What you do should be linked to the broader whole and you should ensure that you are creating value for the company through your work. When you have created this link with company vision and strategy, prioritizing your own time and product work (especially backlog) becomes much easier too. Next, let’s look at the key themes and how you can use the limited time you have.
Maker vs Manager
The role of a product manager is unique in that this person doesn’t have direct authority over the team. In a typical product team, you also have a designer and an engineer, but those persons have their own respective managers they report to. The product manager needs to collaborate closely with these two to solve the problems and create products that are valuable, usable, feasible, and viable for the business. In addition to that, the product manager also needs to communicate effectively with other stakeholders.
This means that the product manager has to do different types of work. On the one hand, they need to be creative problem solvers, and on the other, they need to be more traditional managers. Especially if we think of smaller companies or start-ups, PMs need to wear a lot of different hats as there just is no one else to do things. It could also be that you don’t yet have an empowered product team, and you need to do some tasks that a designer or engineer would normally do. This necessitates a split between these different types of work. Paul Graham has put this aptly in his blog, in which he talks about two different schedules — one for maker and one for manager. What he means by this is that one must split the workday into two. One part is for problem-solving, which requires large blocks of uninterrupted time, and the other is for management tasks and meetings, which can be as short as a few minutes. If you mix up these two, you often end up with a situation where you really cannot focus on anything as your working time has been splintered into too small pieces that prohibit that focused work.
Reduce the number of meetings
This is probably the most important advice I can give you. We waste a huge amount of time in pointless meetings. Too often meetings are poorly planned and executed and end up wasting time for a lot of people. It is not uncommon to have even 10 very important and busy people sitting for one hour in a meeting, half-heartedly listening to what the organizer has to say. Usually, these meetings could be handled asynchronously with a memo, an email, or a Slack message. Make sure that if you participate in a meeting, it is something where you are most definitely needed. Ensure that the meeting has a proper agenda before you accept. If there is no agenda, feel free to just decline the invitation. Remember that these rules apply to you, too — if you really need to have a meeting, think very hard about who needs to be there and why. What is the desired outcome of the meeting? If it is just to share information, could you do that via email? If it is to make a decision, ensure that people who need to be there participate and that all the materials that are needed to make that decision are shared beforehand. If meetings really need to be had, they need to be planned so they can be as effective as possible.
We waste a huge amount of time in pointless meetings. Too often meetings are poorly planned and executed and end up wasting time for a lot of people.
Leverage, scale, and learn to say no
Keep constantly thinking about what is work that you must do and what is something someone else can do for you. Think about what is the best use of your precious time. You, as a PM, are responsible for building the right product. This is your most important task. One should be vigilant in saying no to things. As long as the PM says yes, those things will keep coming. When it becomes apparent that the PM will not do them, the business will find a person to do them if they are deemed important. To put this bluntly, if a task is not part of your role don’t do it. Rather delegate it to someone else. This is where the release or development manager can help tremendously.
Quite often biggest time thief for a product manager is actually project work, not product work. It is usually very tangible and gives one the enjoyment of being able to cross off tasks from the to-do -list, but quite rarely, is that important work PM should focus on. Therefore, rely on the development manager for these kinds of tasks, such as preparing presentations, helping with organizing meetings, facilitating internal communication, and so on. In addition to that, there are a lot of other departments and roles PM should rely on. Try to get your presales function onboard as soon as your product is mature enough. They can then help with those customer meetings and demonstrations and it is not you anymore who needs to attend all these meetings with customers. It must be mentioned, however, that you as a PM still need to have that customer interaction to be able to gather insight and make discovery, but having this help from presales available, e.g., in different time zones, can prove to be invaluable.
It is often easy to neglect documentation, but for you as a PM, that is essential. When your product documentation is well done, your organization can really start to scale. Customer operations can start to do the implementations without you participating in each and every one of them. It is valuable to be there at the beginning of the project for the discovery, but after that, you can leave the responsibility to the customer-facing team, knowing they can handle the implementation as you have provided them with the detailed documentation they need to be successful. The main thing here is that the PM can remove themselves from being the first or second line of support. Instead, PM is contacted only if there are some challenges with the product itself, such as bugs in the code. I know it is not often easy to let go, but once you start to leverage other bright people in your organization, you start to see the benefits very quickly.
Plan upfront
We humans often face decision fatigue. I am sure you have also experienced this in one form or another. It is the feeling when you just avoid making a decision; everything feels difficult, especially when trying to start something. However, there are powerful methods to mitigate this. You have probably heard about Steve Jobs or Barack Obama and how they just had one type of clothes to put on each and every day. That effectively removes the need to decide. You can also avoid decision fatigue and kickstart your day by planning what you do in advance. Ensure you reserve some time each day to prepare the following day. Think about the most important tasks you need to achieve and put them into your diary. Reflect also how the day went so you can improve the next day. By planning upfront, you can just jump right into the task you have selected for yourself the previous day and avoid the decision fatigue the next morning. I have written a whole story about how to do this and why it is highly beneficial so make sure to check it out.
Avoid decision fatigue and kickstart your day by planning what you do in advance.
Don’t forget learning
To succeed in product management one needs to constantly learn. It is imperative. However, as we have seen, there are a lot of things PM must do. This means that squeezing the learning into your agenda requires timeboxing it and prioritizing it over something else. Otherwise, that learning will not happen, as it will always be pushed further away because of all that “important” work that comes your way from various directions. This is something I know from my own experience, and I struggle with it constantly. One way of accomplishing this is to split the learning into smaller pieces and incorporate it into your daily routine. It doesn’t always need to be multiple hours at a time but could be 15 to 30 minutes combined with some other activity. As an example, it could be that when you think of updating your roadmap, you take half an hour to first learn how to craft a compelling, outcome-based roadmap and only after that start the actual work.
How am I managing my time?
I have tried to put all the things I describe above into practice with my own time management. My day starts with a block of time that is reserved for my most important product tasks. It is not for meetings, Slack, or anything like that. Then I have my lunch, before moving to that “manager” schedule. It is very important to have breaks during the day and that’s why I do not take any meetings that collide with my lunch.
After I have eaten there is time for processing emails and messages from Slack or Teams. I handle these in batches so I don’t get distracted by them throughout the day. Then afternoon is something I can use for meetings. As you see, I have split my day into these two parts, maker’s and manager’s. This is intentional, as I am at my best during the morning, and that is when I want to be doing that most important product work. The afternoon also happens to be my least productive time of the day, as I often experience the so-called “afternoon slump”, especially after having a hearty lunch. Before I end my day I will have a look at my emails and Slack again. It may be that there are some things that require my attention the next day or maybe I need to handle some communications to the US (as I am based in Europe). The last thing I do before logging out is to check the to-do list for the next day and hatch a great plan that I can just start executing first thing in the morning.
These are the broad guidelines I follow to manage my time. The important thing to remember is that life is unpredictable, and anything can happen, so keep enough slack in your plans to accommodate those surprises. Also, keep in mind that no one is perfect, and your plans can get easily derailed, so don’t be too hard on yourself if you cannot always execute your plans with 100% accuracy. Like everything else in life, this, too, is a learning process. With constant work, you will get better at it.
