Making Time for Work That Matters

I recently wrote a post on my personal blog called “Making Time for Things That Matter.” As I was thinking about what to write here, I thought it would be kind of fun to write a sister post to above mentioned entry. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a sister post, but here you go:

Do you feel like you’d like to advance in the field of Product Management but that you’re all caught up in the tactical day-to-day grid with little time to spare for strategic fun? You’re not alone. I would say most product managers feel like this at one time or another. When this happens, it’s time to figure out if you are working on the things that matter.

Here are some ideas for figuring out if you are spending time on the wrong activities:

• Start tracking how much time you spend in meetings, especially meetings that would function just fine without you. I go through my list of standing meetings quarterly to make sure they still make sense. Get out of the ones that don’t matter.
• Similarly, evaluate how much time you spend on email. Email is one of the biggest time suckers ever. There are ways to cut down. Read this post for some email management tips.
• Are you the production support process impersonated? If so, not good. Work with your support manager to come up with a simple process that will work for everybody, get issues resolved more quickly, and make customers happy. Make sure the development team is on board and understands that they need to set some time aside for production support (unless you’re lucky enough to have a separate team for this).
• Speaking of development, are you perhaps spending more time managing developers than talking to customers and potentials? Again, not good. You are supposed to be the expert on the market and its problems, not on the latest agile development process. Have a chat with the dev manager and explain that in order for you to do your job, he or she is going to have to do his/hers. I know this can be scary, but it’s the only way for you to become the market expert that you were meant to be.
• Are you the Demo Boy or Demo Girl (to use Steve Johnson’s terminology) at your company? If so, there are a few different ways to deal with that. 1) Lobby for a sales engineer (or sales support). 2) Train the sales people to do their own demos. 3) Tell them there won’t be any new product releases this year if you have to do demos every week. Now, I do recommend that you tag along on sales calls every now and then for a variety of good reasons. However, it should be because it’s useful to you and your work.

Still can’t find time to do it all? Of course not. You never will. The point of this post is to encourage you to spend more time on work that matters and less time on work that doesn’t (at least not for your job description). It will not be 100% perfect, but it will enable you to go out there and be a great product manager, and hopefully get you to the next level (if that’s what you want!).