Cycle crm for product management

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the cool thing about being a product manager is that every single day is different while there are a common set of things that I may be doing week to week the actual project or feature that I'm working on always changes throughout the year which means I'm rarely doing or thinking about the same thing over and over again at a very high level a PM is responsible for defining and executing a product strategy that helps the company achieve their vision and really aims to solve user problems so there are two key pieces here defining and executing defining means really coming up with the strategy and roadmap that will help your company achieve their vision and executing means really building the features on that roadmap and delivering value to your users in this video I'm going to primarily focus on the execution portion of a product manager's day-to-day because this is what a PM is typically doing throughout the year so the way that I'm going to dive into what a PM does day to day to execute is to really break things down by independent time versus meetings across the four main stages of the product development process discover Define develop and deliver the PM's job is to lead the team through these four stages of development to ship impactful features when I say independent time I'm referring to the time spent outside of meetings where a PM is either heads down focusing on something or collaborating with others over slack meetings on the other hand take up a huge portion of a product manager's day I would say on average PM spend about four hours per day in meetings sometimes it'll be lower sometimes more sometimes you may even be in back to back meetings the entire day okay so now let's go into the four phases phase one is discover this is the phase where we really try to understand a user's problem at a very deep level this step is very foundational to building a great solution because if you try to build a solution that's based off of a problem that isn't exactly correct or one that a user isn't really experiencing then your solution will really fall short in terms of independent time the PM will start by writing out the problem and hypothesis but they want the team to really look into we'll start to do competitive research to see what other competitors are doing well or poorly and we're going to be looking at competitors that are directly in our space as well as indirect competitors who may have a tangential product that we can learn from we also might spend time writing up questions that will later ask in user interviews we may look through customer support tickets or feedback that we've been collecting to see if there's any common patterns or trends that our users are writing in about and we'll also look into the data to see if there's anything that we have internally with the data that we've been tracking to provide insights about the problem that our users are experiencing once we've shared these product briefs people from around your team will start commenting on them and it's your responsibility as the product manager to comment back and refine this document over time so that everyone becomes aligned in terms of meetings for this phase the PM will typically schedule a kickoff meeting with their team and other stakeholders to make sure everyone is aligned in what they're trying to solve the PM will also probably schedule some interviews with users so they can talk face to face with users to better understand the problems they may be experiencing at a deep level and finally they'll probably schedule some one-on-ones with the designer on their team and their tech leads so that they can start to share these learnings about the problems that they're trying to address next up is Define in the definition phase it's really the PM's role to refine the problem and start to scope the solution what this means is synthesizing all the data that we gathered in the first stage and creating a clear picture of what the problem the user is experiencing and in terms of starting to scope the solution we need to understand like what size is the solution going to be are we going to build a mobile app from scratch to address the problem or can we simply create a new feature or update an existing teacher to address that problem so for independent time the PM is going to be really going through those competitive flows that they gathered they're going to be looking at Trends in the data and synthesizing all the user interviews they did to see if there were any common Trends or patterns that appeared they'll also start to define success which means once we actually launch this solution how can we make sure that it's really addressing the core problem this story can be presented in a document or a presentation it's really just important that the PM shares out all this information in one place so that anyone really looking into the project could have a good understanding of what the exact problem is in terms of meetings the biggest one here is going to be a learning summary and design kickoff meeting this is a place for everyone on your team to come together to as a group review everything that you learned during the first two phases ask questions that help everyone get aligned and in the end everyone's gonna walk out of that meeting knowing exactly what problem we're trying to address and all the data that points to that problem being one that's necessary to solve next up is develop during this phase the PM will work with their team the designer the engineers to really come up with a couple different types of solutions and test them out with users this is very iterative process so as you come up with new learnings you may go back and refine this solution until you get to something really solid for independent time PMS will do a variety of different things during this phase they will primarily be focused on writing out product requirements and user stories that aim to solve the problem that the user is experiencing based on what we found in phase one and two in terms of meetings the PM will meet with the designer to go over all these product requirements and user stories so that that Designer knows what to actually design a solution based off of again this is really iterative so you'll have many meetings and Communications with your designer and Tech lead to make sure that the solution is really addressing the core problem you'll also want to make sure during this process that you are sharing everything with the tech lead to make sure that what the designer is working on is actually feasible to build with the team once the team has one or a couple different designs that they feel confident in they'll actually create prototypes to send to users so the PMA help set up these prototypes create surveys or interview questions that they can ask the users to find out if those Solutions are actually good or not PMS May interview users directly with these prototypes then synthesize all the learnings from it and go back to the drawing board if necessary with the designer to iterate on that solution until it's really solid ultimately the team will align on a solution that they really want to test out with users and then it's the role of the PM to make sure all of that work is created in tickets for the engineers to work off of these tickets are usually very very detailed because they want to cover all the different possible cases and scenarios that a user could be in and making sure that these tickets are detailed will prevent unforeseen roadblocks from popping up later in the development cycle during the development process the PM and the designer will be the main points of contacts for the engineers if they have any questions about how something should work or if they need to address something that came up during the development process that wasn't originally accounted for in the design in the end the team will have a new or updated feature ready to launch the PM will then go and help test the future to make sure it's actually functioning properly they'll make sure analytics are integrated into the feature so that when it's launched they can measure how it's performing and finally they'll make sure that customer support is really set up for Success when this is launched so if users have questions they're knowledgeable and able to answer the questions finally we have the deliver phase in delivery the team is really confident after testing one or a couple different versions of the solution and they're ready to roll this out to a hundred percent of users it's really important that this is carefully planned and coordinated it so that the rollout goes well for independent time the PM will work to create dashboards to track the success of their feature launch once they do launch they'll be monitoring this really closely to see if it's going well or not going well if it's not they may decide to roll back the feature or just work to iterate on the solution with the designer and their Tech feed they'll also set up mechanisms to collect and review feedback from users directly about their feature and finally they'll write documentation so that if someone has a question about how that new product or feature Works they can find the answer to it in terms of meetings for this phase the PM will schedule a rollout meeting with their team and other stakeholders to ensure that the rollout actually goes well they also may make a meeting to go over the data and insights that they actually learned from the feature launch itself so that mostly covers the four phases of the product development process one thing to note is the PM can kind of act as a catch-all during this process which means that if there's something it needs to get done that someone on their team like the designer or Tech leader Engineers can't do the piano is either gonna have to do that themselves or find someone who can do it for the launch now if we take a step back PMS are very rarely working on just one project at a time they're typically juggling multiple different projects and each one of those are going to be at a different stage in the Double Diamond process and on top of that they need to make sure that the features that their product area owns are working properly they're fixing bugs and they're supporting other teams in their initiatives so in terms of meetings outside of the four stages PMS will typically be in a lot of reoccurring meetings one example is the daily stand-up with your engineers where everyone will go around and say what they did yesterday what they're going to do today and any blockers that they may be experiencing for the features that they're working on you may also have weekly one-on-ones with the tech lead on your team the designer your manager and maybe other business stakeholders from around the company every two weeks you'll also have a backlog grooming session where you're going through the Open tickets for your team team and deciding if they have enough information in them and what the priority is for them if they're low priority and can be handled in a couple weeks or months or if they're high priority and need to be fixed immediately or in the next couple of days this meeting helps prepare for Sprint planning which again happens every two weeks and this is the final meeting that helps determine exactly what is going to be worked on with the engineers the following two weeks you may also have ad hoc meetings which are more spontaneous in nature and meant to really address an urgent issue or thing that has come up the big takeaway here is that PMS really do have a lot of meetings and are juggling a lot of different things at once so if you either don't like a lot of meetings or you don't like to multitask and do a million different things the product management career track may not be the best for you one of the biggest challenges as a PM is making sure that at any given time you're doing the highest impact work as mentioned in this video there could be a lot of projects happening at once and a number of different things that you could be doing for each one of the those projects and with such a limited amount of independent time available to you every day you need to make sure that you're working on the most important things to keep all those projects moving forward at an efficient Pace my tip here is every morning you should come up with the five most important things that you could be doing to push your projects forward and only go on to the next item in your list once you've completed the item before it so there really is a lot to the product manager job may seem overwhelming from this video of all the different things that a PM could and should be doing but once you get the hang of it it really is a rewarding career simply completing the tasks I mentioned in this video though won't make you a successful piano to learn more about that check out one of my latest videos and if you do have questions about anything at all that I mentioned in this video please comment below and I'll get back to you thank you for watching [Music]