A week in the life of a product manager

No one day of a product manager is the same. This is what I usually tell people who ask me what I do. This of course can be true for many professions, but working in this role has taken the meaning of this sentence to a whole new level.

This means that when I am mentoring aspiring product managers, or coaching people on product ways of working, it’s difficult to tell them exactly what it is a product manager does, step-by-step. This doesn’t mean that the responsibilities of the role are ill-defined, it just means that they are very comprehensive — we do a little bit of everything to ensure that we are creating a product that meets both user and business needs. Product management is the intersection between business, technology and user experience, and in Marty Cagan’s words, the the job of the product manager is to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible, yet works for the business.

This can take on many shapes and forms depending on the industry you work in, the role of product in your organisation and the maturity of your product. This is what makes this role so interesting for me — not only can one day look different to another, but product manager careers can also vary greatly. For me, this diversity of experiences and perspectives is what makes great products.

For some context, I work in a private member’s club for creative people. Although we are in the hospitality industry, I’d say that our audience and members are very different from what you’d typically think. Furthermore, I am currently working on a product tasked with understanding what it would mean to create meaningful digital connections between our members — a conversation that wouldn’t normally permeate hospitality discussions. Nevertheless, this is what a (4-day) week in September looked like for me and my remote team (due to lockdown) of developers, designers and data engineers working on a mobile app.

Monday

I start the day looking at our analytics on Firebase and Redash. Last week we released a new feature so I’m keen to observe the uptake and how people are using it. Throughout the week I’ll take a look at our data, but each Monday I do a more in-depth analysis of our product metrics. In my team, we pay special attention to engagement markers: for the Noticeboard (a place on the app members can post and reply to all members), we’re taking a deeper look into the first time vs repeat posters and visitors as we’re interested in ways we can encourage the habit of coming back to the app to engage with fellow members. We’re slowly starting to see some trends, which is exciting because we’ll be able to dig deeper into how we can improve members’ experience of our product.

After I caught up on Slack messages and emails, I checked in with the team. At 10 am we’ll be kick-starting the week with a hack day. The purpose of this session is to give the team the opportunity to explore different ideas — blue sky thinking, some research about our users, an itch that is begging to be scratched… anything. We like to keep it broad and place only one boundary: the idea must align with the purpose of our product. The day starts with a pitching session to present ideas and decide what everyone wants to work on, and at the end of the day we come together to demo our work. There is a lot of preparation that goes into this day, but I’ll keep it for another post!

I decided to do some desk research this time. I wanted to explore what the future of communities could look like and what tools people will be using to connect amongst themselves. Community is at the heart of what we do so it is important that we can anticipate trends and interactions, as well as (and more importantly) thinking about the impact of our technology on people and society.

After the demo where I got to see all the amazing work the team got up to, I ended the day in a meeting with other mobile app product managers. We are exploring how we can create a forum for product managers to talk about our mobile app and the ideas we want to explore, our work in progress and the things that will be released. As we all work on different membership types, we want to ensure we’re creating a consistent experience and that we’re not duplicating effort… we’re slowly getting there!

Tuesday

After doing the usual catching up on my messages, I had two separate sessions to discuss some work that is being built. I first caught up with the iOS developers to talk about the transition effect when a member swipes up to view a profile and its trade off with the hierarchy of the information we display on the profile drawer. In the second session, I discussed ways to make it easier for members to access the noticeboard.

After the team’s stand-up we walked through the user journey of a new prototype we’re building. The UX and UI designer used the outcomes from our team’s workshops to create some prototypes. With rough wireframes we were able to discuss feasibility, but we’ll have to spike some of the implementation work and choose a 3rd party provider for a portion of the user journey.

After mulling over the our desired outcomes, wireframes and the logistics that would be required to make the idea a reality, I started to rethink some parts of the journey and realised it was time to pivot.

As the main reason we want to build this prototype is to get as much learning as possible with the least amount of effort, I was sure there were simpler ways of doing this. I then caught up with the team to discuss how we can stay true to our core purpose whilst providing our users with a valuable experience. After some discussion as to how we could validate our hypotheses through a simpler journey, I got started on user story mapping that we’d finish as a team the following day.

All this pivot chat left me with very little time to continue with the research I was working on, but I managed to squeeze some more reading and writing at the end of the day.

Wednesday

The day started preparing for a walkthrough of the new proposed user journey with the team. Once we got together to go through it after stand-up, we discussed any questions, risks and unknowns. We used virtual post-its to plot down any tasks we’d need to do and the next steps for each one of us. We decided to delve deeper into two parts of the journey, so I put in a separate session with the team for that over the next week.

After lunch I caught up with the CTO. We discussed a range of things, from mental health, the effect of lockdown on teams and future-thinking about the product. As the product I am working on is embarking on bigger and better things, I got some great advice about bringing people on the journey and the value of seeking diverse viewpoints in the process of setting the product’s foundations.

Later, I helped with testing some of our work. I tested the profile drawer work that we had looked into yesterday as well as testing our “conversation starters”, which is a feature on our video calls to help people break the ice, especially if they find it difficult to initiate conversations with strangers. Although Sam is no stranger, I found out that Brad Pitt would play him in the film of his life!

After spending the afternoon preparing for some team workshops, I ended the day with a couple of emails. We’re getting ready to send a worldwide survey to non-members to test appetite for our overall proposition. This research will be really important to understand how our journey will progress, so I’m really excited to get this out!

Thursday

The day started off with a cross-team meeting about some proposed changes to the mobile app home screen. This was followed by some quick “slack sessions” (as some of us are still working from home) with different colleagues to refine our solution.

Following our team stand-up, we had a workshop on how to approach the build of direct messaging into the app. This was an initial session to think about the must/should/nice-to-haves from both a user and technical point of view. We’ll then use the requirements to initiate conversations around how we’ll go about building it.

I then had a session with the UX and UI designers to discuss how we use filtering for certain features and how we intend to revisit this in light of the new work we’re doing. After lots of juicy discussions, we came to an initial proposed solution we’ll mock up to test with our members. Phew!

I met with the Head of Product as we’re conducting interviews with several key business stakeholders for the new mobile app strategy we’re working on. Today we talked to the Group IT Director who took us through her team’s vision, goals for next year and how the product team can help achieve them. I’ve created a table on Miro to easily summarise the outputs from the interviews to help us when outlining the strategy.

Before our fortnightly product demo, I reviewed an interview script for a focus group we’ll be doing with members. This is intended to supplement the survey we’re sending out to non-members and will help us to identify the similarities and differences between the different audiences. The goal of this research is to understand what members are trying to achieve as a result of connecting with each other — this will help guide our proposition in the upcoming months.

From improving how members invite guests to the Houses, revamping our bedroom booking journey and some A/B testing experiments, the demo was full of interesting work; it’s always great to see what other team are up to. My team showcased our explorations during our hack day, the pivot we had earlier in the week, and the Noticeboard web interface we created for staff so that they could easily reply to posts while at work.

Before the last meeting of the day, I wrote the release notes for the app store as we prepared to submit a new iOS version of our app. If approved, members will see our new work on Monday — exciting!

At the end of the day, I had a the first meeting of the newly appointed Diversity and Inclusion steering committee which I am a part of. The company has recently signed a diversity pledge, and from next week we will be participating in C-suite meetings to give feedback, consult and hold leadership accountable proposed changes.

After work, I jumped on a call with my mentee through Black Valley, an initiative that aim is to improve social mobility and the accessibility of working in the tech industry for the black community. In this session we explored different product and design roles in Tech, and setting small tasks to learn what each does through practice.

Friday

Although I don’t work on Fridays, the hustle doesn’t stop! I finally managed to finish the desk research I started on Monday 😅

I also participated in a Google user research session and caught up with Sam (Tech Lead at Soho House) to talk all things digital, communities and some ideas we want to explore 👀🔮

As mentioned, no day looks the same — as you’ll have figured from this account. I hope this gives you some insight into the role, and the only guarantee I can give is that the following week will look really different!