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.
As obvious as it may sound, few things matter more than time management:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Time | Activity |
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM | Email catchup and task prioritization for the day |
9:30 AM – 9:45 AM | Standup with the dev team |
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM | Meeting with customers as a part of UX research |
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM | Meeting with sales and marketing to discuss upcoming product strategy |
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM | Lunch |
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM | Writing user stories; strategy papers |
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM | Estimation, planning, and prioritization of the next sprint |
3:00 PM – 4:00 PM | Analyzing product metrics |
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM | Sync with leadership; send updates to the stakeholders |
5:00 PM – 6:00 PM | Wrap up; prioritize work for the next day |
A detailed description of the day would include:
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
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