How I spend my time as a PM
Product Pill #6
I get a lot of questions from people asking what exactly I do as a PM, so I thought in this week’s edition of Product Pill it would be fun to dive deeper into how I spend my time as a PM at Simply Wall St.
If you’re curious about becoming a PM, hopefully this will give you a better sense of what you might find yourself working on.
I’ll also be discussing some tips I’ve picked up along the way to make more impact with your time, which you can leverage if you’re already a PM.
🤷🏽♂️ Same same, but different
Before I dive a bit deeper into what I do, keep in mind that although there are shared activities that we usually spend our time on, PMs tend to work on slightly different tasks.
This can depend on a few factors that I’ve observed:
What type of PM they are
Core Feature PM vs Technical PM vs Growth PM - I’ll be diving deeper into the different types of PM roles in the next edition!
The product they’re working on
B2B vs B2C product
The size of the company they’re at
early stage startup vs scale-up vs big corporate
Their seniority
Junior PMs usually spend more time on execution work compared to Senior PMs, who spend more time on strategy-related work
🪣 There are a few buckets that most of my tasks fall into
To get a better idea of where I spend my time, I recently started using Toggl Track, which is a pretty neat web app that allows you to categorise activities so you can break down your time and see what you’re really working on.
From the perspective of a Growth PM working at a scale-up, my time is roughly allocated as follows in a given week:
15% Planning & Strategy
15% UX & Design
20% Research
50% Operational / BAU
The actual time I spend in any one of these areas can vary quite a bit from week to week, depending where in the product development lifecycle we are at.
If we’re in the problem discovery stage, I’ll be spending a lot more time doing research and helping to define the product strategy.
If we’re in the solution discovery stage, I’ll spend more time working with design and engineering on execution.
Planning & Strategy
Planning and strategy is what every PM knows they should spend more time on, but it happens to get drowned out by other competing priorities which seem more urgent at the time.
In Lenny’s recent podcast, I thought Jackie Bevaro defined strategy quite simply. She said strategy boils down to 3 key ingredients: a vision, strategic framework (how you uniquely define the problem - i.e., strategic pillars) and roadmap.
A well defined strategy is important because it empowers the team to self-organise so they can do the most impactful work possible.
The work I tend to do in this area mainly involves:
Weekly planning to review priorities and progress
Reviewing research and identifying the biggest areas of opportunity for growth experiments we can run
Working with leadership and other PMs to define a vision for the product
Defining initiatives that move us towards the vision and creating a product roadmap
I’ve learnt that spending time to come up with a thoughtful strategy can save you a lot of headache later down the track when you’re debating the details.
Get feedback and alignment on your product strategy early so it doesn’t become a blocker to your team later on and keep iterating on your strategy as you validate your assumptions and start to get more clarity on the problems you’re solving.
Research
Research is an input into everything else you do as a PM. Research helps define your product strategy, which is an input into design and operational tasks.
The work I tend to do in this area mainly involves:
Organising and running user interviews and user testing sessions
Researching into competitors and other products for ideas and inspiration
Doing data deep dives to understand growth drivers
Synthesising and communicating insights
Speaking to users is arguably the highest leverage activity you can do as a PM.
Prioritise speaking to users regularly to help determine if you’re heading in the right direction.
Are you solving the right problems? Does your solution achieve the desired outcomes?
Make your research easily accessible and share your learnings with other teams to empower them to build better products.
Get together regularly with your team to discuss how you can leverage and act on what you’ve learnt from your research.
UX & Design
As a PM you’re the voice of the customer, so you tend to be quite involved in bringing a design prototype you’ve worked on to life.
Personally, this is the work I find most enjoyable, as it really lets your creative side shine.
If you have a well established product development process in place, design considerations shouldn’t take up much of your time as a PM.
An important part of the job as a PM involves working closely with the design team to ensure the solutions being proposed are viable from a business perspective, feasible from an engineering perspective, and desirable from a user perspective.
The work I tend to do in this area mainly involves:
Mocking up design prototypes - I usually find myself creating low-fidelity wireframes in Figma and Miro that I can use to communicate the user experience I envision for a feature or experiment
Communicating feedback and reviewing designs - funnelling feedback on design prototypes from users to the design team
If you have a design team, it’s important to agree on the scope of your responsibility as a PM.
If you’re too involved in every detail when it comes to design it can disempower your design team and diminish your trust in each other.
It’s a tough balance to get right, especially if you’re passionate about the creative side, so have an open and healthy discussion about it.
Operational / BAU
Product Management is a high touch role, so the majority of your work involves facilitating discussions within and across teams and ensuring the team is working towards feature execution.
The work I tend to do in this area mainly involves:
Facilitating and participating in meetings
Sprint rituals - stand-ups, sprint planning and sprint retrospectives
Product and growth meetings - discussing product strategy, reviewing funnel metrics etc.
Design meetings - user research debriefs, design reviews etc.
Responding to messages and questions on slack
Preparing work for upcoming sprints and managing the team’s backlog of tasks
Feature testing before release
As a PM you will be in a lot of meetings, so my biggest tip here would be to review the meetings you’re part of on a regular basis to determine whether they’re necessary and whether you’re getting value from these meetings.
Sometimes you can facilitate discussions without needing a meeting and save valuable time doing so, which you can use for higher impact activities like working on strategy, research or design.
💡 All tasks aren’t created equally
I wanted to conclude by tying this all together through a framework I recently came across from the amazing Shreyas Doshi for evaluating the activities you’re doing as a PM called the LNO Effectiveness Framework.
The basis principle is to try and spend more time on leverage tasks (which give you a 10x return), compared to neutral (1x return) and overhead (<1x return) tasks.
That’s it! Hope you found this edition valuable.
If you took away something useful please do share it with a fellow PM!