A Day in the Life of a Product Manager
If you’re considering product management, here’s a preview of what it will be like.
Product manager workdays change depending on where you are in the rhythmic development cadence, on the role you play on the team, and on the approach to product management pursued by your organization.
But there are recognizable patterns.
So, for example, across multiple product management roles I can synthesize a generic typical day that would fit many real days across those years, something like this:
At home / before official workday starts
4:30 am — wake up in the middle of the night and remember something important that nobody else is tracking. Either jot it down on the night-table or get out of bed, move to the home office, and update a jira ticket or reply to a message before getting some water and going back to sleep. (Maybe answer a few other overnight messages from remote teams first, while you’re up.)
6:30 am — get out of bed, look at Slack on phone, reply to some messages. Do morning routine: coffee, shower, dress, coffee, breakfast, email, Slack, Jira, coffee.
7:30 am — review daily update of northstar metric data. If anything seems interesting, dig into the source data and try not to lose track of time. If anything turns up that is threatening or promising and immediately actionable, notify other people of the issue and start a process of figuring out how to address in time.
At work / real “workday:
9:00 am — facilitate daily standup with team (developers, sometimes the UX folks but they don’t always show up, other contributors):
- You bring the donuts.
- Review quickly with each person what was accomplished yesterday (compared with what had been expected), what they expect to work on today, and whether anything is currently blocking their progress.
- Keep the meeting moving, addressing anything that can be clarified right away (“Ankit, can you get Allie the credentials she needs for github?”) and tabling other items to follow up on afterward.
9:30 to about 2:30 — A patchwork of:
- meetings with other managers (in the sense of non-makers; that is, people for whom meetings are productive, as opposed to developers, designers, and other people for whom meetings tend to disrupt their creative flow), such as leads of adjacent teams (such as Eng, UX, Sales, and Operations), your own manager, managers who report to you (if any)
- communication with customers, potential customers, and other stakeholders
- spec writing, roadmap review, backlog grooming, message responding
- data analysis
- lunch eaten at the desk
2:30 to about 5:30
- meeting with makers towards the ends of their days (these can be regular 1–1s with people who report to you (if any), working meetings with team members to explore and solve problems, or task-based check-ins to track progress, provide guidance, and give support.
- spec writing, roadmap review, backlog grooming, message responding
- data analysis
At home again / after “workday”
6:30 to ??
Finally have time to
- read long-form industry articles, product craft essays, reports from colleagues that you can never get to during the work day
- similarly, work on long-form writing, analysis, and modeling projects without interruptions
- try to be present at home with your family and loved ones
- check data one more time before going to sleep.
But that’s just me!
I’d love to hear from other practicing product managers about your typical day. I’m working on a book called Product Management for UX Designers, and would like to collect A Day in the Life of a Product Manager from product people working in a wide variety of contexts. Some I may include in the book and others I can share here on Medium.
If you’d like to share a typical workday with me, please drop by this form that takes only about seven minutes to complete.
Thanks!
