Being a Productive Product Manager
This articles examines who a product manager is and steps to take to be productive.
Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or services. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market.
Product manager on the other hand, is the person who identifies the customers’ need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision to reality.
Productivity directly impacts a products’ success. The faster and more effectively a product manager can move a product through its lifecycle, the higher the chances of its success in the market.
Being a product manager is not so much of a walk in the park, there are challenges they face in other to get their works done. They include:
* Balancing multiple demands and priorities
* Managing product launches
* Prioritizing which new features to build next…… and so on
A product manager would work hard to ensure all of these challenges and more are managed properly. A notable person in the line of work is Tobi Otokiti a well-known lead product manager at Flutterwave and a founder of ProductDive. (Learn more about her on our Instagram page).
Steps to being a Productive Product Manager
Setting Clear Goals
As a product manager, you probably have a million things on your radar and business goals to achieve. Making your user and business goals specific offers better alignment and allows you to select the right key performance indicators. These help you understand if the product is creating the desired value and if you are making progress towards the goal. Setting a clear goal helps trigger new behaviors, help guides your focus, meet deadlines and helps you sustain momentum in life.
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Focus on One Thing at a Time
Having too many task comes with the work of a project manager. It can also get tempting to dive into everything at once. The belief that using 100 percent of your energy on one task is a skill can lead you to neglecting the others. This is not entirely true as it has been proven from the American Psychological Association (APA) that human can’t actually focus on multiple things in parallel, and what we tend to think of as multitasking, is actually task switching.
Moving constantly from one thing to another can lead to many errors therefore taking longer time to finish tasks. Instead of trying to solve everything at once, identify what needs to be done, prioritize your tasks, and then go through them one at a time. Devote your total attention to each item on your to-do list.
Use the Nike Rule (Just Do It)
The Nike rule is very simple: if a task can be done under two minutes, just do it. It’s really easy to postpone tasks, I’ll reply later, I’ll call back tomorrow, I’ll check back after lunch. All of these just piles up on your to-do list, where you would have avoided them, taking care of the little things as they came up.
A two or three minutes task doesn’t seem like a big deal, but lot of them being neglected can start to add up. Try as much as possible to prevent pile up of little works.
Treat Your Inbox as a Temporary State
Email inboxes are not the only inbox spoken about. Intriguing ideas come from everywhere all the time, but due to neglect they will often get piled up and abandoned.
The ideas from meetings, suggestions from clients, customer feedback you received, ideas gotten from reading a post or seeing a movie. All of these comprise your inbox, and it’s your job as a product manager that they don’t sit there and become forgotten. Don’t just take note of new opportunities as they arise, take action.
Follow the 4 D’s; Do it, Delegate it, Defer it, or Delete it
Do it: Few questions are required to determine if a task deserves immediate attention
* How long will it take you to complete
* Can someone else equally do it well or better? If so delegate the task
* Is it a priority? If not, defer it or simply delete it.
Delegate it: Delegating is an easy way to get something out of your way, but it comes with risk that the task might not be done as efficiently as you would have done it. In this case trust as well as guidance can bring out an individual unique perspective that may become a great inclusion to the task. Tasks can be delegated internally or outsourcing tasks.
Defer it: Postponing or putting off things is generally not a very good policy, but low priority task are justifiable reasons why you might choose to defer a task.
Delete it: As a product manager you’d have to delete big things like feature ideas, but also little things like unnecessary meetings. This is to ensure you don’t waste time with tasks that don’t yields product in the company.
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Timeboxing Tasks
Timeboxing is the idea of devoting a fixed amount of time to working on a task, and at the end of the time limit simply moving on to something else.
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Following the guidelines above, a product manager has every opportunities to be productive and make meaningful contributions to the company and customers alike.
