You Are Your Own Product: 4 Productivity Tips For Successful PMs
A Product Manager’s guide to preserving your time, removing friction from daily tasks and solving the Solow Paradox.
Back in my high school senior year, I remember reading about the Solow Paradox, with this quote: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in productivity statistics”.
American economist Robert Solow coined the phrase in 1987, as a way to qualify the sluggishness of productivity growth* he observed in the 80s and 90s, as Information Technologies (IT) were becoming ubiquitous (* if you’re interested in this topic, Wikipedia tells me the debate is still pretty much raging on).
Working as a Product Manager (PM) you realize time is both your best friend and your worst enemy. In order to help fellow PMs cope with this reality, ManoMano’s Product Team has compiled the following tips to help you become a productivity machine 🤖.
Want more PM tips? Come read the 8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Became Product Manager published on ManoMano’s tech blog.
Plan your week like it’s a Sprint
- 🛑 No meeting day: 2 years ago ManoMano instituted 2 no-meeting-mornings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This has been a time-saver for a lot of people (especially in tech) as it confers weight to deep-work and gives employees an excuse to reschedule meetings.
- 🦓 Fight the Zebra Calendar : Imagine a half day with only 1.5h of meetings — you still have a good 2.5h of focus right?
Now imagine that all of your 30min meetings are separated by half an hour breaks — what meaningful tasks do you think you are going to accomplish in interrupted 30 min slots?
Clockwise provides a great solution to this problem by automatically rescheduling meetings so as to minimize what they call fragmented time. It works best if your team uses it too.
- 👨🏻💼 Hire a secretary: Next time I have to interview a candidate on their analytics skills I’m going to ask them this question: “How much time is lost every year by people doing a lot of back-and-forth via email, looking for availabilities in their calendars?”.
This is not the 50s anymore, no secretary is going to do this for you, which doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself.
Some solutions are dedicated to this problem, like Calendly or MixMax.
We found that the killer feature was the free and built-in Google Calendar’s Appointment Slots feature, which allows you to set up time in your calendar to receive meetings and share a link with all the slots.
YouTube user Richard Byrne has a good tutorial on this feature.
Fix in-person meetings like they are Bugs
There is an abundance of literature on the topic of in-person meetings and how they are ruining productivity — in French business culture we even have a disease-sounding name for it: la réunionite.
Starting from the conviction that everyone’s time is their most valuable resource, spending it should be the last resort. Following this logic it has to be costly to organize in-person meetings, which means the organizer needs to clear the following 7 questions:
- 📅 Do we need to meet now? If the answer is “no, it can wait a week”, then the issue is not urgent and maybe doesn’t require your immediate attention.
- 🕞 Does it need to be synchronous? For 1 hour? Some discussions are best held asynchronously rather than in-person. Additionally 30 min should be enough — one hour meetings are the norm in the business world maybe as a result of having too many people in the room (see #4) and not preparing the discussion enough (see #5, #7).
- 🧑⚖️ Is there a decision to be taken? Meetings serve a purpose, if the purpose is information rather than decision, consider other formats like slack post, vlog, memo or even a One-to-Many meeting (where you convey or receive an information in a large gathering).
- 🔗 Are all required attendees in the room? Are all attendees required? It is ineffective to have an in-person meeting with someone who doesn’t have the power to make decisions. If that’s the case, we fall back to #3: this is an information meeting and should be avoided.
- 🎯 Is there an agenda? Expected outcomes? To be effective, meetings have to be framed: some topics will be out of the scope and shouldn’t be addressed. The best solution is for the organizer to state outright what they want to discuss and what they expect out of this meeting before it starts.
- 📝 Will there be minutes? In-person meetings become especially inefficient if you have to repeat them to reach the same conclusion. To avoid that, appoint someone to take notes and share them at most 24h after the meeting. It has the added benefit of allowing non-attendees to catch up on the meeting (see #4, not everyone should attend).
- 📚 Is there a document summarizing this project? This question has become especially crucial in the context of remote working, where conveying information has become so difficult.
At ManoMano we require meeting organizers to share a single document keeping track of the initiative ahead of the meeting.
The first 10 to 15 minutes of the meeting are dedicated to a silent-reading of this document, which allows for all attendees to immerse in the issue at hand at their own pace.
Want to know more about our documentation process? We have compiled our best practices in an article that will be published in the following weeks. Follow me (Clément Caillol) and ManoMano team to find out when it comes out.
Prioritize your tasks like it’s a Backlog
Product Managers are just like Product Teams: they have a finite velocity. The best way not to have an impact? Focus on the wrong things and take commitments you can’t honor.
- 🧹 Organize your tasks with the Eisenhower matrix: “What is urgent is seldom important” goes the saying attributed to the famous WWII General — these two dimensions are a great way to organize your To-Do list in four sections:
- Important + Urgent: Do first
- Important + Not Urgent: Schedule
- Not Important + Urgent: Delegate
- Not Important + Not Urgent: Don’t do
- 🧩 Break down big tasks into smaller chunks:
Say you have a new problem space exploration coming up. Instead of just creating one task vaguely named “Explore topic Y”, break it down in pieces: Carve out 1h for analytics in the morning, 45 min to look into existing UR at 4pm and the next day 30 min to organize next steps and communication. Use your held time to make timely progress.
- ⚽️ Define a goal for your day: If Scrum taught us one thing, it’s that the key to productivity is motivation. And the key to motivation is accomplishment. Want to be more productive? Define a goal for your day, first thing in the morning.
Todoist has been a game-changer in managing my to-do list, for multiple reasons:
- It lets you organize your tasks in section
- Tasks can have subtasks, deadlines and reminders
- You get a nice little gamified experience when you do X tasks a day
- But the 🔪 killer feature is the desktop app keyboard shortcut: add a task by hitting Cmd+Shift+space
Continuously improve like it’s a Retro
- 👩🎓 Learn keyboard shortcuts of apps that you use on a daily basis. There is no overstating the importance of preserving your conscious mental energy and not getting out of your focus. Learning keyboard shortcuts is a great place to start.
- 📋 Use a multi-clipboard application so you can copy and paste multiple things from the same source. I use Copy’Em Paste, it’s expensive (10€, one off purchase) but worth every penny.
- 🛣 Define your own web-based shortcuts with Google Chrome “other search engines”. I hit J + Tab + a four digit-id to get to Jira issues on my main project.
- 🤖 Rely on automation for any multiple-steps operation you do. I use Todoist’ built-in keyboard shortcut to automatically create Jira tasks in my project by applying a tag, thanks to Zapier (you can steal this routine with pride here).
Don’t let the productivity machine overheat
As my good friend and former ManoMano PM Jonathan Levitre wisely pointed out to me: there is such a thing as too much productivity, and it is called a burnout.
We work hard, we challenge ourselves, we try to improve —but unless you are a healthcare worker, a fireman or a police officer, chances are your impact on things that really matter urgently is limited.
Authors Bao Dinh, Guillaume Declair and Jérôme Dumont who co-wrote “La 25e Heure”, a must-read on the topic of productivity in the context of start-ups , actually present it that way (roughly translated):
Apply [their (and my!)] tips and you will know how to find an extra hour every day to free up time and do what makes you happy.
And that’s really all that should matter.
Want more PM tips? Come read the 8 Things I Wish I Knew When I Became Product Manager published on ManoMano’s tech blog.
