Often times during interviews and social conversations I get asked by people what a day in the life of a Product Manager looks like. The first time someone asked me that I was actually taken aback on how difficult it was to answer that question. Any given Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is different from the day before and the Thursday will be very different. Perhaps it’s the very nature of being at a startup but the variability in the type of work is what personally excites me.
So how can I explain to someone what I do on a day to day basis??
My attempt was to describe my work in terms of percentage of my time spent doing different things like roadmap planning, prioritization, grooming stories or customer development. But this “percentage of time” framework doesn’t seem to accurately capture the “day to day” or longer term. Trying to use a framework inspired from this 90-day plan for engineers making transition to managers might describe more accurately what a Product Manager does, or atleast I do.
A Framework for PM Activities
| Cadence | Activities |
|---|---|
| Daily | Stand-ups, unblocking team, ad-hoc decisions, Slack/email |
| Weekly | Sprint planning, backlog grooming, stakeholder syncs, metrics review |
| Bi-weekly | Sprint retrospectives, demo prep, cross-team alignment |
| Monthly | Roadmap reviews, OKR check-ins, customer interviews |
| Quarterly | Strategic planning, roadmap presentations, goal setting |
| Ongoing | Customer development, competitive analysis, documentation |
I’m sure I’m missing putting down a few things that I do and there are others which I should be doing so if you can think of what else should be part of this framework, please leave a comment.