Product Manager’s Diary
A reflection on optimizing productivity
Over the past few years, as a Senior Technical Product Manager with Lifion, by ADP, I’ve been enamored with coming up with new ways to optimize my output, the output of our engineering teams, and to improve the quality of the products I am responsible for. I’m driven by the belief that the more one can produce, with the highest possible quality, the more value one can then deliver to customers and the more win-win opportunities they can create.
At Lifion, one of our credos is to master your craft. Following this, each of us is encouraged to think of new ways to perform more effectively within our roles towards us building the best NextGen HCM Solution possible for our clients. Provided with this freedom to experiment, the goal of this article is to document and share what’s worked for me in my role and might help others.
Let’s level-set on what a Product Manager is responsible for. For a formal definition, if one were to look up what a “Product Manager” is, they’d find “an organizational function within a company dealing with new product development, business justification, planning, verification, forecasting, pricing, product launch, and marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.” Given this definition, the Product Manager role can be very diverse in its responsibilities and it takes a lot of self-reflection to really hone the craft over time.
There are key changes to working patterns that can be incredibly useful and help a product manager work more effectively in their role. While not all may be generalizable to everyone and every situation, regardless, some that stand out to me are shared below.
Despise Meetings, Love Efficient Processes
A product manager is likely one of the top three people on a team setting up the most meetings. Meetings can be expensive especially when the team is trying to hit deadlines. Keeping in mind, when scheduling a meeting, especially with engineers, it may be taking time away from the people that contribute to the team’s goals. It goes without saying, supporting the team as much as possible is something that works for everyone’s benefit.
In modern technology product development teams, there are generally two types of meetings; those that are part of regular scrum ceremonies, and ad-hoc meetings. If a team is following the Scrum framework, as part of ceremonies, at a minimum, there exists stand-up, backlog grooming, sprint planning, and retrospective. Of these, the product manager is responsible for running and facilitating backlog grooming. Grooming should optimally take 30 minutes to 1 hour, regardless of team size or complexity of tasks. Given this is a meeting that requires the entire engineering team, this is a top priority for the product manager to optimize. Choosing work items before the meeting to be groomed, and ensuring they have enough detail on them, is critical. When explaining the goal of a ticket, it should require minimal discussion to understand what’s needed, and why. Understandably, alignment, team feedback, and “vision painting” are done within grooming as well, but once the product manager and engineering team are on the same page, it should be smooth sailing. Also — whether using JIRA, Rally, Trello, etc., memorizing the hotkeys needed to add story points to tickets and to mark them as groomed can dramatically speed up team grooming sessions. For example, when I started using hotkeys, my grooming sessions on average went from 45 minutes to around 20 to 30 minutes.
For the scrum ceremonies that the product manager is not directly facilitating, it is possible to assist in improving the efficiency of those as well. For example, before a sprint planning session, I find it extremely valuable to ensure that everything is organized by priority and appropriately groomed within the upcoming sprint. This way ticket organization is not happening during the meeting, taking up others’ time.
As a rule of thumb, where possible, a product manager can use their time as a buffer to save the teams’ time, because expending one person’s 10 minutes is significantly better than 6 people’s collective 10 minutes. Again — the team needs to hit deadlines, a product manager should strive to not be the reason or excuse for when that doesn’t happen.
Regardless of the type of meeting, whether it be a scrum ceremony meeting or an absolutely required ad-hoc meeting, always looking for ways to optimize is key because collective time adds up. If a meeting is scheduled to take an hour, that doesn’t mean that it must take an hour.
Wear Out Your Customer’s Shoes
Empathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. A common buzz-phrase used amongst product managers in the industry is “empathy-driven product management”. While this is excellent in theory, it’s not very descriptive as to how a product manager actually acquires empathy for their stakeholders. Admittedly, this is different from person to person on how they actually empathize with those using their product. To truly get to a place that can be considered to be empathy-driven, it can help to use a consistent process that supports making better product decisions in line with this philosophy.
At the simplest level, a product manager should use their own product. What better way to empathize with users than to walk in their shoes? For example, I schedule time every week to use the products I am responsible for, document pain points, find potential bugs, review product hot paths, etc. This has helped drive more efficient discussions with designers when coming up with new features and improvements, more effective communications during grooming sessions from being able to cite anecdotal reasonings for changes or adding a new feature, and improved communications with stakeholders via being able to better relate to how they use the product(s).
Lastly, product decisions should not be made solely based on qualitative empathetic notions as one may consider it as being opposed to quantifiable data-driven decision-making. As a product manager, it is important to be both empathy-driven as well as data-informed. Features that have been verified by both these decision-making methodologies together have tended to yield noticeably higher stakeholder satisfaction in our organization.
Avoid All-Flash, No Substance
Organizations judge product managers on many different axes, one of which is their ability to roll out high-value features. This can be viewed from the stakeholder’s perspective as enabling them to do something with the application that they could not before or as an improvement to an existing process. While this may be a common way to measure the performance of a product manager, it can inadvertently foster a mentality of incessant feature building rather than a focus on how these features work together to serve users’ needs, along with performance and other non-functional requirements. In this situation, it is easy for product managers to push non-functional concerns to the responsibility of engineering teams and primarily focus on new functionality. However, this can lead to prioritization of work that may not be truly most valuable for the product.
When defining a new feature it can help to include expectations for performance and any other relevant non-functional requirements as part of acceptance criteria. Obviously, this should be considered case by case but if an engineer says they need more time to improve the performance of the feature and there is buffer in the plan it helps to make sure such requirements are prioritized and addressed. These considerations directly impact the overall success of the product as well. Performance affects user’s perception of the product too.
That’s All Folks
Product Management is a unique craft that impels you to be everlearning. It requires wearing multiple hats, balancing various stakeholders, and communicating in a way that influences and inspires others. Learning to enjoy the process, listening to others, and speaking with candor while bringing life to new and exciting ideas is truly the beauty of the craft of product management.
