A day in the life of a product manager with schedule

In the last few decades, few positions have had such a meteoric rise as product managers. My first job as a PM was back in 2016 at Paytm, one of India’s biggest e-commerce companies where I joined as an Associate Product Manager. I then moved to Zalando in Berlin, Germany and worked with different teams as a PM.

As a PM yourself, you know how difficult and multifaceted the role can be. You need to talk with customers, engineering, design, marketing, sales, customer service, and higher management all at the same time.

So how do you manage time? How should you optimize your working hours for better efficiency? And how do you listen to your team and customers at the same time? Keep reading to learn all of this and more.

Importance of time management

As obvious as it may sound, few things matter more than time management:

Prioritize

Working with different teams means having a stack of problems to deal with. So how do you prioritize which problem to deal with first? Time management enables you to allocate your time to the most important tasks rather than getting distracted by minor low-impact tasks.

Meet deadlines and timelines

You need to own deliveries and stick to your timelines. However, this becomes complicated when you have multiple ones involved. Strong time management skills help you track progress, identify potential risks, and eventually meet the committed deadlines.

Balance strategy and execution

You mainly need to deal with two kinds of deliveries – strategy (long-term roadmaps, maintaining the product’s overall vision, etc) and execution (actual development of the product, fixing bugs, and customer problems, etc.). Neither of these categories can be avoided. And this is where time management comes into the picture.

Avoid burn out

Product management demands a lot out of you. Talking to multiple people and managing multiple tasks requires constant context switches and this can result in burnout in the short or long term. On top of this, PMs also have their own life. Time management can help you safeguard your mental, physical, and emotional health.

A typical day in the life of a product manager

Product management involves a mix of working on strategic initiatives and execution-related work. Because of this, you need to focus on the work that delivers the most value for you. A typical day might look like:

A detailed description of the day would include:

• Morning routine and planning
  • Checking emails, reviewing the day’s agenda, and setting priorities — In my experience, two important things set the day: Any email that requires immediate intervention and priorities
  • Attending daily standup meetings — This ideally should be the second step. Execution is one of the most important parts of product management and a PM should know the progress of the products and any blockers the team has. However, sometimes standups can be boring and not worth the time
• Mid-morning tasks
  • Meeting with customers — I recommend prioritizing anything with customers as the second most important thing. This might include meetings or interviews with brands, sellers, or users
  • Meeting with sales, marketing, customer service, and other stakeholders — Meeting with customers should be ideally followed by sales, marketing, customer service, and other stakeholders. These stakeholders provide information on product strategy, as well as short and long-term goals, and it’s important to keep them all aligned and in a loop
• Lunch break — Lunch is an important part of your day and should not be overlooked. Back at Zalando, we had an initiative where we could have lunch with a completely new PM. This was a great opportunity to connect with other PMs and learn about their products while sharing details of yours
• Afternoon work sessions — This session should be all about deep work. I used to block this time in my calendar so no one could schedule a meeting at this time. You might focus on:
  • Documentation — Writing strategy papers, user stories, etc. Any sort of work that does not require any external interruption should be prioritized in this part. This could range from writing a vision paper, strategy paper, creating a roadmap, writing user stories, etc.
  • Estimation, planning, and prioritization of the next sprint — Another important part apart from the documentation is the planning of the next sprint. Estimation would require insights from the engineering team but planning and prioritization are something that you can work on and prioritize during the after-work session
• Late afternoon wrap-up
  • Reviewing product metrics — You need to understand data, find patterns, and take appropriate action. Keep aside some time to review product metrics and see if anything seems critical
  • Sync with leadership and send updates — I kept this part separate because you might want to update leadership at the end of the day. You can use this time to formulate emails or messages that provide the status of the products, sharing roadblocks/dependencies, key metrics, etc.
• Evening routine — In product management, a good tomorrow depends on how well you plan it today. End the day by reviewing all the items that you couldn’t do and prioritize the most important ones the next day. Also, make sure you respond to any email that you received, but couldn’t respond to

Conclusion

As a PM, no two days are the same. Most of the time your day will depend on the stage of the product that you’re in. In an initial phase, you spend more time with customers, sales, and marketing and work on the planning phase. If your product has recently gone live, you focus more on bug fixing, prioritization, handling urgent issues, etc.

You need to use tools well to manage time. But overall, the goal should be to pick up the most important topics first. How do you plan your day as a PM? Please feel free to share your thoughts/ideas.

Featured image source: IconScout