The 3 timeframes for a Product Manager
One of the first concepts I try to instill into every new team member is the different time-frames one needs to pay attention to as a PM. I have found it helpful to explain the responsibilities of a PM, as well as serve as a mental model for taking tradeoffs w.r.t bandwidth — team’s bandwidth as well as personal bandwidth.
Imagine building a Product as going on a long road trip. Your starting point is getting out of your home, which is akin to starting with your current existing product, or the lack of one. Your final destination, a land of untold wonder and bliss, is the final product experience you are aiming to deliver to your users. Along the way, many stories will play out — dead-ends & wrong detours will show up as failed features, monsters/stakeholders will try to derail you off the path, sometimes you may take detours for the scenery / capitalise on serendipitous market opportunities, but always there will be the camaraderie of fellow travelers/team-members, camaraderie with others you meet on the road (who may be heading in different directions), and of course traffic jams when bandwidth doesn’t allow one to move as fast. I can go on and on on this analogy, but you get the point.
Happily, the 3 timeframes are as applicable to a road trip as to product management.
Timeframe 1: The Long term (2–3 years)
This is your long-term vision of where you want to eventually reach. The end vision of what your product experience should be like. You may not know the route to get there or even the exact name of the location, but having this vision is still important so that you know whether you are getting close or going completely off course. If you don’t have this, you are boldly going nowhere.
However, no need to panic if your team does not have the long-term vision completely defined right at this moment. Many teams don’t. The key insight is that in this situation, it is important to ensure that the team is spending a significant portion of their bandwidth (>30%) thinking at this timeframe. To engage in market research, customer research, competition analysis, technical analysis, and brainstorming. There will always be significant pressure to deliver month-over-month and on your quarterly OKRs, so it is possible the team gets no time for figuring out the long-term strategy. This is wrong. Your quarterly/half-yearly targets are important, but you would be doing your company a disservice if you later find out that what has been built isn’t relevant in a year’s time and you have to start from scratch again.
Even if you are lucky to be in a team with a relatively well-defined vision & strategy, your team needs to spend less time thinking of this timeframe as a lot of that thinking has already been front-loaded. It is still important to revisit this every once in while though, to ensure you are adapting to new market developments and new learnings you have had along the way. If you were going to Disneyland but realized that there are a lot of traffic jams on the way, or that it is going to rain, you may wish to change your plans, no? Adapting to new information is a strength, not a weakness.
Timeframe 2: The Medium-term (3–6 months)
The medium term is your planning cycle, the timeframe over which you will be reporting progress to your leadership. Obviously, this is an important timeframe because it determines your bonus and those of your team members. But more than that, this is a reality check, a time to reflect and plan. This is the time when you get off your car to admire the scenery, look at the path behind you and plan the route ahead. This time frame acts as a bridge between your grand vision and the day-to-day execution. A grand long-term vision is of no use if you are not making it a reality step by step.
Plenty of management concepts can be applied effectively for this timeframe. OKRs work at this timeframe. What is important is to be planning backward, with an end in mind. Every OKR should have a plan of how to achieve it. And if an OKR wasn’t met at the end, one should be able to disambiguate whether a) The plan was not followed, or b) The plan did not work. Both are very different reasons. The first may be due to a lack of bandwidth, the latter is a lack of adequate information. Continuing our road-trip analogy, you want to be able to say whether a particular road was not even explored or whether it is a dead-end.
Timeframe 3: The Everyday (1 day — 1 week)
This is the daily grind of driving, eating in new eateries, and pooping in unknown lavatories. All in the service of reaching the next destination. Of having standups, spec reviews, customer interviews, usability tests, and handling support escalations.
At the outset, activities in this timeframe look very different than the other two. This is about actually doing the work, while the other timeframes are focused on planning and imagining. But the daily work is what makes the medium & long term come to life. If one is only focused on the other timeframes and not the Everyday, then one is being busy without producing any outcome — one is probably discussing vigorously, fantasizing, and spinning tales.
How effective & disciplined you are Everyday will determine how well you are proceeding towards your Medium & Long term destination.
All 3 timeframes are important. As a PM, how much time you spend thinking from each timeframe’s vantage point will vary from time to time. The Long-Term vision is important to figure out & regularly rehash. If it’s unclear, make sure to carve out bandwidth for working on this. Once the vision has more or less stabilized, you can start spending less time on this. The Medium-term (planning timeframe) will rear its head every quarter or half-year based on your company’s planning cycle. Do a good job here & you will be well set to tackle the Everyday. And then resolve to become more effective Everyday.
Arguably, this mental model is not limited to just product management or road trips. You could apply this liberally in many other fields, and life as well.
