A typical day in the life of a product manager

Evgeny is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

Whenever I talk to folks who haven’t yet worked with product managers (PMs), someone asks about a typical day in my professional life. The truth is, there’s no such thing: product management is just too diverse to be reduced to a simple set of daily activities.

In most organizations, product managers deal with the complexity and chaos of new product development. Instead of a predefined set of daily duties, each of us has a set of principles and processes we apply to manage the chaos.

On a basic level, the way we work depends on the type of company, the product we’re building, team composition, and the product’s lifecycle stage. Because of this, I believe that product management is the most exciting job in tech.

In this post, I will attempt to describe a typical day in my professional life as a product manager at TradeGecko.

The setting

At TradeGecko, we subscribe to a classic Silicon Valley view on product management. If you’ve read Marty Cagan’s book Inspired, you can make an informed guess about how our team operates.

Firstly, PMs at the company strive to sit in the center of the UX-business-technology Venn diagram, marrying technical understanding, business acumen, and user centricity.

Each of us works with the feature development team, which typically consists of a product designer and three to four engineers (one of whom is an engineering lead). We also work closely with peers from supporting teams, such as product marketing and analytics, who help us service the product beyond actual software delivery.

An important part is that the PMs own more than just the product definition, delivery, and research: we’re also in charge of maintaining the working relationships within the team and establishing cohesion between engineers. We’re the ones planning and running retrospectives, helping the team members work out conflicts, and even organizing team dinners.

Process-wise, development teams at TradeGecko typically run in two-week sprints. Each sprint ends on Friday, when half the day is dedicated to sprint rituals: retrospectives and planning. This post talks about a typical Thursday (i.e. the day before the sprint ends), which tends to be one of the more interesting days.

A day in the life

9 am: Skype calls

A typical Thursday would start at 9 am with a 30- to 45-minute call. It can be a customer interview call or a catch-up call with one of the product marketing or customer success team members based out of our North American HQ in Toronto.

Copious amounts of coffee are consumed during the call in a bid to prepare for the upcoming meetings. 🙂 After wrapping up the call, I sit down to plan my day around the highest priority items and team commitments.

So, what does this all mean?