Start prepping for the quarter
Product anecdotes from PM life
A lot of organizations run on quarter goals which means we seek a chunk of work that we are going to complete within a quarter.
The work that we are supposed to complete requires some amount of preliminary work. Preliminary work means we have to do some prep work before the quarter starts.
Since I joined my current company, this process has gone through a lot of cycles and has been improved after looking at a couple of challenges and feedback from every person on the team.
I will not get into the evolution of the process because that would be a pain to read. We will directly dwell on the preliminary work steps. This would help you in getting an understanding as a PM that it is not sufficient to keep an eye on the short-term goal but on the long-term goal itself.
Every quarter is for 3 months. While you are keeping up with your current quarter responsibilities, side by side you start looking into next quarter's responsibilities too.
But when is the precise time to initiate looking into next quarter’s responsibility?
It is at the mid of the quarter. It is the most opportune time when the current quarter has stabilized a bit and you have an idea of what is working and what isn’t, and you are at a comfortable distance from your next set of goals.
In my organization, the agenda for the next goals comes from a variety of sources.
- A list handed over to us by the business
- Spilled over work from the current quarter
- Product team enhancements
Once we look at these 3 different sources we try to arrange the priority. It will never be like that today you prioritize something and that particular piece of work will hold the same priority forever. You have to re-visit the priority over and over again.
If people can change, so can goals(Being philosphical here)
Once we have finalized our list, we as Product Managers get the designated work that we need to pull off in a quarter.
The next step is to start talking to the respective business around that piece or start talking to your designer if you already have all the information with you.
The idea is to iron out enough details so that you can give a high-level picture to your dev leads for the high-level estimation. Estimations are a core part of the preliminary work, which gives you a very high-level idea of what can you pick up and what you can’t.
High-level idea: I need a login page with a user name password and submit button. Username can have certain restrictions.
Here if you see we have not discussed the design of the page or the restrictions, just on what we are trying to do.
Once we have an idea, we do work with designers, but getting all the designs ready is not possible for anyone and is not even needed. Though there is no harm in getting the work started if there is already some bandwidth. It is always good to have some head start.
The next step would be to discuss with dev leads about the upcoming scope of work where they ask some brilliant questions that we as Product Managers would have missed. It is an informal chat with your team members where both of you are trying to make a success out of the product. Both of you want to cover maximum scenarios and have a sound and common understanding. The dev leads provide high-level estimates in the form of t-shirt sizing or story points. Based on your ease you can pick either. We work with story points. It is easier that way as we also quantify one person's work using story points. So if people estimate and feature estimate are quantified in the same unit then it is easier to add or subtract.
Once that is done, we do a final review of the upcoming work with the entire team even before the quarter starts. We do want to take leverage the initial exposure of the scope to the entire team in case someone has any queries or raises some very good points. There is enough legroom to cater to that.
Once everything is finalized and presented, we share this with our leadership and business and with other teams.
Why other teams?
Because you are never working in a silo (even in life). You are always connected, what you do at your end might make and break someone else’s hard work. So always remember to keep your line of thought clear in your organization and gear up for another successful quarter.
I hope this blog finds you in great spirits!
