An average day for me (as a PM)

Not what I do everyday but what the average looks like

Context; The product, the company and me:

• Newly launched Product in its early growth phase
• Medium sized SaaS company in health-tech
• Senior Product Manager who does an ok job 👌

Before work

In our house we have; My wife and I, our son, one dog (Marvel) and two cats (Captain & Ziggy). A typical morning is food for everyone and get ready for the day. As I write this I am training for a half-marathon so I run 3 times a week… anyway my home-life doesn’t matter, I just wanted to let you know I’m human!

In the (home) office

Our company is mostly remote with some using our offices from time to time. The below is less a timeline and more a series of activities that usually occur. Main activities:

• Check Slack
• Stand-up
• Refinement
• Product Demo(s)
• Customer Discovery Calls
• Meeting Plan and Prep
• Context switching!!

Slack

The first thing is to check and respond to slack. Most of our comms are done via slack, I think I have sent (internally) less than 10 emails in the time I have been here (3 years). I typically don’t have many but we have a team in AUS so there may be some to respond to. Most of the time I am just peering into channels I am a part of but don’t contribute much to. Throughout the day a lot of my comms will be handled through it.

Stand-up

Morning stand-up with our squad. At the moment in time we are a small but agile squad which means our WIP is limited. 2 stand-ups a week works well for us. A typical stand-up generally digresses into tangental issue discussion, maybe one of us just spoke to a customer or had an internal meeting we want to discuss. These are always worth it, it pulls out a lot of hidden information and exposes the full squad to further context.

Refinement

We are a small team, this means refinement happens less often. Most of the time its an as and when needed. We do however have refinement sessions to look at the backlog items as a whole and compare them to our overall goals.

Product Demos

On a good day I will have some product demos to do. Our commercial team does a great job with marketing to outreach to our customers and prospects. I join the calls to demo the product and answer any technical questions they might have. This is not my main time for discovery but it does give me insight into our customers.

Customer Discovery Calls

Customer discovery should be at the crux of any good product team. Admittedly we don’t spend enough time with our customers and are constantly looking at ways of improving our discovery recruitment. When we do perform discovery 30% of time is spent with the customer and the other 70% is spent detailing and processing the insight from the calls.

Meeting Plan and Prep

We try to communicate our progress as best we can and have a series of different meetings with different stakeholders to do this:

• Product Review (sprint review, we just don’t call it that)
• Working Group session — cross-functional meeting
• Corporate Updates
• Product Steering
• (New) Product & Engineering all hands

I will typically spend as fair amount of time prepping for each session. Communication is our best tool to create alignment and focus, and it takes a lot of time to get it right.

Context Switching

If only my day was a pure and exact as the above. A lot of time is spent talking to different stakeholders generally about loosely connect items that take up way too much time.. but.. this is a necessary evil especially in a remote world. You still have to connect, so I generally don’t push back unless I am up against a deadline.

End of day

Finish and get my son from nursery, then I go to the gym and relax. NFL pre-season has just started so I try to watch as many games as possible.

I am fortunate that I love my role and I enjoy all of the above. I am always trying to improve processes, it will be interesting (to me) to come back to this in a year and see how its moved on.. or not.