A day in the life of a product manager

I often get asked what it is I do all day.

Some times it’s by my wife who wonders why I sit up in my office for nine hours straight with the occasional voice being heard.

Some times it’s by my team, when they see me at the daily stand up and then don’t see me for the rest of the day whilst they’re busy delivering the latest set of features.

And some times it’s by people who are wanting to make the transition into a product role, because they like the sound of it, but don’t really understand what that means on a day-to-day basis.

This post is for this last group of people (although if my wife is reading, that’s fine too!).

Every day is different

In reality, there isn’t a typical day for a product manager, which is down to the fact that we’re servants to the rest of the business. We do some proactive work which we (kind of) control, but a lot of the time we’re reactive to the needs of others in the business.

In addition, the way that every business delivers their product is different. They could run one week sprints, two week sprints, kanban, or a version of waterfall, and this has an impact what you’ll be doing, as each approach carries with it certain activities at certain times.

As such, I’m going to summarize the kind of daily activities that a PM will be undertaking, in order to give a flavour of the day.

PMs are in lots of meetings

When you take on the role of Product Manager, you get given a number of (metaphorical) hats to wear, including, but not limited to:

• Customer advocate
• Day-to-day decision maker
• Communicator with the business

In order to fulfil the roles that these hats bestow, you need to be talking to lots of people, inside and outside of the business, which means lots of meetings. Meetings with:

• Customers to find out what they need, what they like, what they don’t like, what’s challenging them, where they want to be in the future
• Representatives from across the business to find out what product information marketing need, how finance need the product payment systems to work, what customers are saying to sales and customer success people etc…
• The development team to find out how they’re progressing, whether the requirements are clear or if they need clarification, or to decide between two options that have raised themselves

Some of these will be regular, such as those that are included in the agile sprint ceremonies (e.g. stand ups, backlog refinement, sprint reviews) or regular checkpoints with department or management heads (e.g roadmap planning, product demonstrations), whilst some of them will be less regular, such as customer visits, user research sessions, or product launches.

Get used to having a full diary as you need it to fuel your work, and your product. On some days these meetings are tedious and you feel like you’re learning nothing new and are banging your head against a brick wall, yet on others they are inspiring and allow you to see into the future, way beyond what the others in the room are capable of. The inspiring days more than make up for the dull days.

PMs look at lots of data and feedback

Product Managers like to know what’s going on, as what’s going on now will help shape what will be happening tomorrow, and the next day, so whether it’s trawling through Google Analytics reports, Customer Support activity, or plain old customer emails, PMs will be there.

You’ll need to know your way around a spreadsheet, using some techniques a bit more involved than addition and subtraction. You’ll need to question what it is that you’re seeing and understand the phrase “correlation does not mean causation”, as that will feed the next questions you need to ask. You’ll also need to understand what is driving customer feedback, not just what the feedback is.

This analytical role on the most part isn’t a daily activity, as monitoring daily activity doesn’t always allow you to see the trends that are important.

If find out you have 10 payment complaints on Monday you’ll look in one place,but if you see the trend is that every Monday there is an increase in the complaint rate compared to customer usage then you might look at something else.

You don’t need a data science degree, but a willingness to want to find an answer and what the next question should be should drive you on to want to get into Excel formulas or SQL queries. If you rely on others feeding you data, then you’ll answer their questions and not necessarily your own.

PMs sit and think (or stand at a whiteboard and think)

If you’ve spoken to lots of people and received lots of feedback, and then analysed the data and got even more feedback, you need to then think about what to do with all the information you’ve received and how you can turn that into something that will improve the product that you have and deliver greater value to both your users and your organisation.

This thinking is not all about coming up with the amazing feature idea. Those can come from anywhere. This thinking is about how this amazing feature idea can be introduced in the most productive and effective way for your product today, and potentially well into the future.

Even those from the “let’s just build it and see what happens” school have given it some thought. They know what the minimum they need to deliver is in order to receive some of the value. They know and can communicate where the future of the amazing feature beyond the minimum is, so that team’s can plan appropriately from the ground up. They know how this feature fits into the wider product environment.

Being the person who has gathered all the diverse views and data puts the PM in the unique position of having a wider view of the landscape than anyone else in the business.

In the famous Martin Eriksson venn diagram about product, you can see that product sits in the centre of UX (customer feedback, design etc…), technology (engineering, devops, data science), and the business (sales, customer success, finance), and from this vantage point we’re in the unique position of having a 360 degree view of what’s going on.

We get to use this to plan features that meet multiple needs. We can make one thing meet the goals of many. We can efficiently deliver value to multiple audiences at the same time, with some smart, informed thinking.

We do this by distilling down the feedback, understanding the goals and motivations, and creating mockups that show what can be done, internal press releases that can explain what can be done, or writing user stories that detail what can be done.

As a product person, this is my favourite place to be. Feedback safely gathered and in my head, standing in front of a whiteboard, distilling it all down into the simplest form it can be delivered in, whilst maintaining the value for all stakeholders.

PMs coach others

You’re not allowed to say it out loud, but product managers train the people in their organisation how to behave and act for the good of the product.

We are in a position to affect change in how we do things, how we talk about things, how we speak to customers, and how we go about making money.

If you bring the engineering team earlier into the process for reviewing potential features, then you’re getting them into a state of mind that the upcoming work is owned by them.

If you liaise with sales teams on how to solicit feedback from customers then you’re getting them to do your user research for you, rather than just tell you what missing features just cost them a sale.

If you regularly communicate with senior teams about the roadmap, then they’ll less likely drop bombs on you that need immediate action and which destroy the work going through the process at that time.

If you can master the art of explaining the process and the value to them of what being a product led business is, then they’ll start to work with you rather than against you, and the results will start to show.

PMs don’t get praised very often

The downside of being good at coaching others into the way of product is that everyone else thinks that they’re the one who’s doing all the product work.

You release a great new feature that is quickly adopted by customers and which starts driving upgrades, then it’s thanks for the sales person who understood the customers needs, the designer who provided a first rate user experience, or the engineering team that got it out of the door in double quick time.

At the opera, it’s the soprano that gets the roses thrown at them, and the cast that takes the bow on stage. It’s the conductor that brought the orchestra together to deliver the sound. The director is nowhere to be seen, but they’ve created the vision, communicated it to the cast and musicians, and removed the pain points that allow the audience to enjoy their evening. Very rarely do you see them receiving the applause.

The reverse of this though is that if it all falls apart, and the set collapses, the extras wander across the wrong scenes, and the orchestra hit the wrong notes, the director is the one that everyone looks to.

Conclusion

There’s usually a little bit of all of this in every day, with some days taking on more of a focus in one area than another, but it all balances out.

The day in the life of a product manager is varied and is rarely dull. There are opportunities to shape the future, and correct the past. There are ways in which people of all backgrounds can make themselves at home, as product managers tend to be good generalists. So if you think you can cope with the things I’ve described then jump onboard and become a product manager.

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About Rob

Rob was a footballer, cinema manager and recruitment consultant before getting in to software products. He’s been looking after products and hiring product teams for 20+ years, is currently product owner at luxury watch retailer Watchfinder and writes about how those who want to get into product can go about doing so.