The first day I was a product manager, I was a little nervous about what my life and career would be. But now I know that it was the right role for me and it totally might be the right role for you as well. I've been a product manager for about eight years in the consumer travel space. I'd say the life of a product manager, over time, it's something that I've grown even more passionate about. I go into the office three days a week.
On Mondays and Fridays, I'm at home. A product manager is ultimately responsible for the success of the product. They're the person who is the liaison between a bunch of different internal functions. Let's say, product design, engineering, marketing, sales. And ultimately what they do is they create a story or a narrative to convince the company and the greater world that the thing that the team is working on will drive the business forward.
The first meeting of the day is stand-up. The engineers on the team, the designers, and myself will provide a brief update on what we've been working on, as well as things that are blocking our progress. Okay, great.
Yeah, I'm glad we figured out that blocker. I feel like you would have been stuck on that for like two weeks at this point. So it's a really good way to, first thing in the morning, kind of connect with your teammates, because at the end of the day, we're all working together towards a shared goal.
Hey everyone. Okay, so here's what I'm thinking that we should prioritize today. Every two weeks, we have a meeting called sprint planning. A sprint is a set period of time where the team will work on a series of user stories.
A user story is basically one change and it's oftentimes defined by both me, the designers, and the engineers. And I'll walk the engineering team through all of the things that we want to shift. Try to move around that other story.
and focus on this one instead, because I think it's going to impact sort of our power users. Each of the engineers will then provide some input. They'll say something like, I think this will take one week. I think this will take two months. So how many story points do you think that is?
Based off of that, we'll break each of those things down into smaller and smaller user stories until each engineer has a full enough plate to keep them busy for the next two weeks. And what's exciting about sprints is you get this sense of accomplishment after two weeks. that you've shipped something that your end users will benefit. So when we launch this, what kind of QA are you thinking we should do? I also have a lot of cross-functional meetings and they come in two flavors.
The first flavor is cross-functional meetings when it comes to a specific project. Here are the folks that I'm working with in order to ship something soon. Let me get...
Analytics opinion on this. And then the second flavor is cross-functional meetings with leaders of certain groups or departments. And in that case, it's a little bit more about making sure that those leaders fully understand everything from timelines to the reasoning behind certain decisions, and that they're comfortable with the direction that the team is going in. Okay, so here's where I think we need to focus today. The work life of a product manager can sometimes be a little hectic.
Every day, someone is relying on you to know the answer to something, and you have to be an expert in your field. We need to... break it down even further. Like, how does this part of the product work?
I just want to make sure that we're thinking about this from a business standpoint too as well. Let me set up some time this afternoon for us to walk through it. It's my responsibility to be able to facilitate a communication or just and outreach to the right people within the company. Let's get started. Design Review is a meeting that happens weekly.
In this meeting, everyone will talk about pixel-level feedback. Let's double check to make sure that the character count will fit the screen properly. Where should this button be?
Should it be different on our website versus on our native apps? And it's super fun because you get to see this idea now presented in a way that actual users will see before you start writing code. I have a couple follow-up questions. Can we talk about it over coffee maybe? So how is this going so far?
I'll really try to meet everyone that I work closely with in some form of one-on-one session, probably once every two weeks, and a lot of times once every week. Okay, I definitely hear you. Talking to them about updates on what the team has been working on, concerns I might have around certain strategic directions. I'll also just be like, hey, how are you doing? We can just talk through it.
Cool. I think this is where you gain a lot of trust. And I really like to leverage this also in the space of just morale.
and motivation. Works up an appetite, I guess, right? On the days that I'm in the office, I use this as a bit of a social touchpoint. So I'll ask someone that I work with, hey, you wanna go and grab lunch? In between meetings, one of the things I really enjoy doing is keeping up with industry trends.
And I'm mainly looking for things like, are people using our product in ways that they enjoy that I'm not thinking about? As a product manager, it's your role to stay connected with your community and your audience. Seems like a pretty interesting idea. Concept review is one of the most exciting meetings of the week because it's a forum for a team to basically pitch an idea. And that idea will come equipped with data, user research, and possible concepts.
Between concepts A and B. Which one do you think is the one that will be the least interruptive to the user experience? The collective brain trust of the product managers, the designers, and the engineering leaders will then offer feedback.
It serves two purposes. You can communicate to everyone else what you're working on, and also you can kind of justify the fact that you're spending the next month on this one project. Love it.
This one's great. I say that we run this test and see which one of the variants ends up winning. I especially love working on products or features that I would like to use myself. Of course, not trying to be biased because I'm not all of our users, but it's just really exciting to be able to get paid honestly for something that you're so passionate about. Have a good rest of the evening.
Hopefully this gave you a good sense of what my day is like as a product manager. Maybe it's even something that you're interested in pursuing at some point in your career.