One thing I did that massively boosted my PM days
This might be painfully obvious for some people. For me, it didn’t come naturally. As a product manager, my calendar was full of meetings. A typical week looked like this:
By 6pm, I felt exhausted yet couldn’t pin down what I had accomplished that day. If anything, I had accumulated debt: Slack messages and emails I haven’t responded to and action items from meetings that I now had to take.
As a PM, I mostly drive impact through other people, so meeting people is a part of the deal. But at some point a few months ago, I realised that I had been letting my days happened to me. I went from one meeting to another with little preparation. I responded to stimulus around me — a question from my manager, my CPO forwarded a negative NPS comment, somebody in my team asked what he needed to do to be promoted, somebody else in my team complained about the way we did Sprint Planning and Refinement, the Internal Comms person asked me to present an update in the next company meeting…
I managed each situation well, but I was still responding to what other people asked from me. I was reactive, not proactive.
My brain finally clicked. I needed to be proactive, as simple as that. I’m sharing here the practical things I did that made a huge difference. It will be ordered based on the most obvious to the least obvious — so if you think you’re already pretty good at this, scroll down and see if there’s still something you can take!
Begin with the end in mind
This line is a classic from The 7 Habits book that I read more than 10 years ago. I took some time to think about what I wanted to accomplish in the next few months. (Yes, only a few months, not years. I was being practical.)
I listed them down in a few bullet points. I then reflected what I needed to do to make it happened. One example below: I wanted to secure continuous investment (i.e. a few more quarters to iterate on the MVP) on the product I was working on.
I scheduled meetings, presentations, working sessions, and comms proactively. That way, I could avoid having to answer ad-hoc questions and requests around that piece of work.
But that also means that I needed to free up my calendar to do the above, which leads me to my second tip.
I said no to meeting invites
In my early career days, I loved being invited to different meetings and working groups. I took it as a sign that people valued my opinion and expertise. It’s probably true, which made me feel bad if I just rejected those invites.
I crafted this template to audit the invites I received. I replied to the meeting organisers:
Hey, I’m trying to ruthlessly prioritise the meetings/initiatives I’m joining to ensure fair attention to all the things I commit to. Would you mind sharing your view on:
- The purpose of the working group/meeting
- What I can bring to the table
- Who else can bring a similar thing to the table if I’m unable to join?
It has worked pretty well. Sometimes we ended up catching up on Slack — turned out the meeting organised only wanted my opinion on one thing, that I could answer by typing for 10 mins, and I could avoid going to a 30-min bigger meeting and listening to irrelevant items. Win.
Single-tasking
Avoiding going to irrelevant meetings also means that all my meetings are now fairly important. WFH had planted this bad habit of trying to multitask in meetings. I’d try to check my Slack, email, or even write a document or create a deck for my next meeting.
I very consciously try not to do that now. Single-tasking allows me to be fully engaged in the discussions — which brings me a good feeling of being productive or having accomplished something afterwards.
There’s also a bonus point. There are update meetings that I can’t avoid as a PM: Product/Tech All Hands, Company All Hands, Extended Leadership Meeting, etc. It’s really tempting to multitask in this kind of meeting. But single-tasking has allowed me to give meaningful feedback and questions to the presenter. Which, turned out, was noticed by my colleagues and the leadership team.
Proactively handle difficult conversations
Working in a product organisation means you’re surrounded by smart, opinionated people. Which also means that you’ll have people that disagree with you, and sometimes, their actions/words can ruin your carefully-planned day.
I had this issue with an engineer in my team. He just joined and he was adamant that the way we were working wasn’t, well, working. He’d messaged me a few times a week with ad-hoc feedback. The feedback was constructive, if I read it with an open mind in my free time. When I was busy and tired, however, my fight-or-flight instinct fired up and I became either defensive or aggressive.
What I did was setting up a weekly 1:1 with him for 4 weeks. He wanted to be heard, and I gave him the platform, which means that there was no more ad-hoc messages. I came to the weekly chat with an open mind, prepared to improve our ways of working.
He’s now one of my greatest assets. If I had taken the ‘easy’ short-term route and just avoided the conversations, he probably would have left, or would have brought up his displeasure to the engineering leadership, which would be detrimental for me.
Proactively communicate how you do things
I found that ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶s̶ people aren’t always great at listening. You explained the product roadmap, you talked about the user problem that we’re solving with this feature, but from time to time, you would still hear an engineer complained “I don’t know why we’re working on X!”
In the past, I would just respond reactively by repeating the motivation behind product X again. But now with a proactive lens, I thought I could manage this better.
I created a document outlining the way we do product, i.e. from a problem to a solution. I walked my team through this doc. I sent it to new joiners. It’s been quite effective and I’ve received good feedback like below.
To conclude
I stopped letting my days happened to me. I made conscious effort to take charge. It doesn’t mean that I’m less busy — my days are still full of meetings, but meaningful ones. I end my days knowing that I’ve made progress on important things that I’ve consciously chosen.
👋 Hi, I’m Debbie. I’ve been building products and solving customer problems in tech companies for over a decade. I write about how a PM can bring 10x value to their company, not just 10% improvement. That requires…
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