Product Mgmt: Making time for high-value product work
Focusing on customer needs, product and the business
Product thought leaders often recommend Product Managers(PM) should spend at least 4 hrs per day on core product management tasks. What is core to product management might be up for argument. Most PMs might think that working with stakeholders to get aligned, being in meetings to influence others, etc., might be critical but this is not what I am referring to. Core product management work is to spend time on customer problems and working to solve them. In this article, you will find insights into how to plan your week to find time for high-value product management work that will help you become better as a PM and build better products. While some of the details are more relevant for a PM, the stems can be applied to other functions as well.
What should a PM focus on?
Not all PMs are in great customer-first/product lead companies. A lot of PMs end up in companies that are not product-led and are in a project management build trap. No matter how good or bad your environment is for you as a PM, the most important job of a Product Manager is to understand customer needs, solve for their needs and deliver for the business. As Marty Cagan shares in his blog, PMs should be working continuously to address the following risks
value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it)
usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it)
feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have)
business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business)
To be an effective Product Manager, it is important to ensure you find time in your calendar to focus on your core work. To get to that you should
Understand where you should focus
Review your calendar
Identify what gets in the way of being effective
Purposefully prioritize
Plan and
Iterate
1. Understand where you should focus
First, understand where you should be spending your time as a PM given where you are in your career. While some of the core parts won’t change, some will. For ex., I lead a team of PMs. As a product leader, I spend my time discovering customer needs, setting and sharing product vision, hiring PMs with great potential, coaching, and helping my team learn & grow and data. No matter what stage you are in your career, you should spend your time addressing the four risks mentioned above. You can do so by spending time
With your customers understanding their needs
Iterating on solutions with your team to see if your customers can use your products
Helping your team understand if the products can be built
Tuning the product until it drives business value
Quite a bit of no or low-value work can creep into a PM’s schedule. For example, the Pragmatic Institute’s survey shows that PMs spent 73% time on tactical and non-strategic work.
It is important to move more towards strategy by identifying what should NOT be an area of focus for a PM. Some of them are
Project managing your product
Working mostly with stakeholders to align on dependencies
Imbalanced focus on solving only one of the risks
Doing tasks that are low value but make you feel important
Tasks that can be delegated to other functions or team members
2. Review your calendar
The Pragmatic Institute survey run in 2019 indicates that most PMs are not satisfied with how they spend their day. The following indicates how many hours a month they spend on different activities as below. A lot of the time spent on tasks like email, attending meetings, etc., seem important but doesn’t support being effective in our roles.
You need to understand where you are spending your time. Your calendar is going to be your true mirror of how you are spending your time. The most common complaint I hear from PMs is that they are in meetings all day and can’t find the time to do focused work. Spend some time to
Review your calendar for the past few weeks to assess where and how you are spending your time. Are you spending time in meetings that are not effective? Are you in project management or product management kind of tasks? Do you end up doing high-value work like deep work for product management or low-value work like getting to respond to all emails?
Pay particular attention to map how you are spending the time that you have your most energy. For ex., if your peak performance generally happens between 7.00 am and 11.00 am, assess what you end up doing at this time. If you are typically responding to emails or attending status meetings, you might want to rethink if this is the best use of your high energy time.
Pay attention for the next two weeks to identify how your calendar gets filled. Does it get filled by meetings from others or do you proactively schedule meetings that help you with your work? How often do your plans get thrown out because somebody else requests your time?
Look at your last product launches and understand where it could’ve done better? Could you have done better in assessing value, usability, viability or business viability risks better? What does your calendar review show? Did you spend time addressing these?
3. Identify what gets in your way
It is very important to know yourself and understand what gets in your way of doing high-value work? A few things get in the way
Being busy managing stakeholders and dependencies.
Taking on Project Management tasks
Doing tasks that make you feel good about yourself being in a PM role
Getting caught up in responding to every email, slack, or other messages
Spending too much time in meetings that didn’t need your input or add value because they think they might miss out on some critical information.
Not having a way to prioritize work effectively
Unable to own your time management instead of being victim to other people’s plans.
Assess to see if any of these show up in your habits. These behaviors show up because of your underlying needs or behaviors. Remember that you do not have to project manage - It is the role of your project manager. You do not have to prove your worth to anybody - you have the role because you are qualified. You don’t have to be a victim of your calendar - it is a tool to help you better manage your time
4. Purposefully Prioritize
Assess how you should be spending time. You must spend time on
Your customers - Carve out time to learn more about your customer customers, discover the needs of new customers, how they are interacting with your product, their issues with your product, etc.,
Your Product - Understand how your product is performing, how it is being used by customers, if customers are complaining or providing bad reviews about your product, what they are customer service about, how your product is providing customer and business value, etc.,
Your team - Working with your team to constantly solutions for your customers
Your business - Understanding how to drive business value
Yourself - The most critical and often sacrificed area is finding time for yourself to reflect, think, learn and visualize. Make sure you allocate time for “deep work”. Prioritize continuous learning daily, weekly, or monthly. Make time to reflect on what went well and what could be better. Spend time thinking about vision.
5. Plan
Given all that context, it is now time to translate your priorities and goals into a plan. Just like you spend time on creating a vision, roadmap, backlog, and continuous planning for your product, apply the same principled work to your work. I do so by defining my long-term vision and breaking it down into annual, quarterly, monthly, and weekly goals. Laura Vanderkam shares in her book “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” that there are 168 hrs in a week. If you think for a minute, that is a long time! If we plan our weeks effectively, we can get a lot done in a week - while we do a lot of other things that are important to us. While we should not try and multi task there are some tasks that we can stack. For ex., I listen to podcasts or books while driving or exercising.
To effectively plan ahead, I use the following techniques to stay focused on my goals.
Set annual goals at the end of the year for the next year
Translate these annuals goals into quarterly plans
For the upcoming quarter, I translate these goals and break them down by month and if possible by week
Every week, I schedule three slots to be aligned with my goals.
Friday evening: I reflect on what I achieved the past week and what I did well and what I could do better. I plan for next week based on what I need to achieve. I then translate this into how I can achieve this next week. Some of it might trickle into the following week
Sunday night: I do a quick plan for the next week
Wednesday afternoon: A midweek check to ensure I am still on track or need to readjust anything
Daily, I spend 10 mins at the end of the day thinking about the next day and planning for it.
My biggest goal in 2021 was to “do” less and “be” more. This deserves a separate article but in simple words, I have been trying to do less busywork and spend more time in deep thinking so that I can help my team better. This means I spend a lot more time with customer insights, market insights, and thinking.
6. Iterate
Even the best laid plans can sometimes be far off from reality. Just like I continuously iterate on my product work, I iterate on my plans. During the time I set aside to reflect and plan for the next day, week, month, or year, I always take the time to reflect on what could be better to improve for the next period. This is a critical part of improving as a PM.
A peek into a week
The calendar above is a sample week that shows a plan for my priorities for the week including time for meetings, deep work, tasks, reading, writing, reflection, and planning. Please note that this is just a sample week and not ideal. I am also not recommending anybody to do long hours. It includes my own personal focus time in the evenings which is my choice and not recommended for work. It can be used for reading/learning/ relaxing or working on a side hustle. The key takeaway to notice from this view is that you have to find focus time and deep work time during workday and not let it go into the evening/night or weekends.
What does your calendar look like? How would you like to shape your ideal calendar? Do share below