Why Product Managers Hate Vacations

Alex Mitchell

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Published in

Frontiers

5 min readApr 28, 2016

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A passionate Product Manager’s worst nightmare

I’m writing today’s post from the Collision Conference in New Orleans, where I’m spending the entire week. Collision caters to technology visionaries across all industries. This year’s conference includes speakers on AI, Robotics, Sports, FinTech, the VC climate, and more. It’s been fantastic so far; however, it’s this conference, and my past few vacations, that have inspired me to write on this topic.

As a Product Manager for the past few years, I’ve realized something surprising about myself and this career:

I don’t like vacations (and neither do my most successful colleagues)

Sure, I enjoy the travel, the learning, the free space to think, the time with friends and family, but it all comes at a very real cost.

The Many Costs of a Product Manager’s Vacation

1. Team Loses Spirit and Vision: If you’ve done your job well as a Product Manager, you’ve crafted a strong vision of where the team is today and where you’re planning on going in the short, medium, and long term.

In an ideal world, when you leave for a vacation or a conference, this vision would be perfectly preserved in the minds of each and every Scrum team member. They could recall it at will, just like their favorite JavaScript library.

However, just like the children’s game of telephone, the longer the absence of the Product Manager, the more opportunities there will be for this once-perfectly-clear vision to become distorted, confused, and lost. Even the highest functioning teams are subject to this vision dilution.

2. Priorities Are Lost: Even the most perfectly groomed backlog falls out of priority order within a few days. You may have decided on a two week commitment of work (a “sprint”), but each piece of work in that sprint is subject to changes: changes in scope, changes in design, changes in technology approach, and changes in importance.

Development Backlog: Right one hour, wrong the next

These changes happen hourly (if not even more frequently) and vacations or conferences often leave a team to fend for themselves or rely on others who will almost always not have the full context on an issue.

While managing the backlog is far from the most important function of the Product Manager position, it does have a large impact on what the team works on day-to-day and for that reason alone, it’s significant.

3. Other Product Managers Don’t Love Your Product: Alright, so your team could quickly lose spirit, vision, and prioritization without you there. Why not simply have another Product Manager “cover” you while you’re out of the office?

While I definitely suggest doing this, and it may mitigate some of the more immediate impact, other Product Managers don’t know and don’t love your product.

They don’t know which parts of your product are fragile, which are robust. They don’t know which parts of your product need more investment and which need less. Another Product Manager may reduce the impact of your absence, but they won’t eliminate it.

4. There Is a Cost on the Product Manager: Not all of the cost of the vacation or conference is levied on the team. There is a cost of this absence on the Product Manager himself/herself.

But wait, haven’t we read countless inspiring stories about Product Managers/CEO’s “detaching” and coming back to the office with world-changing ideas?

See Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, explain his vacations here: http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/03/technology/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-vacation/

When it’s time for a significant change of direction, this detachment can be perfect. However, in almost every other case, long-term detachment (more than 1–2 days) has a serious cost.

There’s a lot of nuance here: I am actually a strong believer in offsite strategic planning (2–4 times per year) and even a monthly work-from-home “regroup” day for the Product Manager.

Find what works best for you and your team, but if you’re anything like me, my colleagues, and many others in this career, a lot of the cost of long vacations and conferences actually rests on the shoulders of the passionate Product Manager.

Benefits to Vacation

Alright, so if I am a Product Manager, I should just cancel all of my conferences and vacations longer than 2 days? Definitely not. Rather, try to understand the benefits of this time off and, more importantly, the costs.

Once you know your (and your team’s) costs, you can work to reduce them. How?

Maybe you lessen impact by following your team’s Slack/Hipchat channel remotely.
Maybe you lessen impact by dialing into 1 standup each week.
Maybe you lessen impact by spending 15 minutes, 2–3 times while on vacation grooming the backlog.
All of these sound too pushy for your team or too much like micro-managing? If so, then use your time off to launch and watch UserTesting videos of the different parts of your application. With an outside-of-office perspective, you may notice broader themes in these tests than you would see otherwise.

Again, these are just a few ideas, find what works for you/your team and balance the costs and benefits of your absence.

Your Vacations

How do you manage your vacations and time out of the office?

What do you do to minimize the impact on your team and your product roadmap?

How do you balance this with your significant other (if you have one)?

I’m curious to hear your ideas as I’m always looking for better ways to manage my time out of the office!

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