Day in the Life of a Product Manager: Bavithra R

7.00am: Wake up, shower, meditate and make myself some breakfast. This is my sacred ritual that puts me in the best headspace for any challenges that the day might bring.?

8.30am: Start the working day. I’m a morning person and I like starting my days early. This is usually the time where I work on deep focus tasks like preparing for meetings, writing user stories or planning my team’s roadmap.?

10.00am: Morning catch up call with my team to say hi and check in on each other.

10.30am: Let the meetings begin! As a product manager, I get involved in quite a lot of meetings with various teams and/or departments. This is something that excites me as I get to put on different thinking hats. During these meetings I am usually gathering requirements for something we are planning to build, providing insights based on my understanding of the business strategy or aligning on the priorities with stakeholders. These meetings facilitate me when I am writing user stories for the software developers in my team and when planning the roadmap for my team.?

1.00pm: Lunchtime

2.00pm: I take this time to follow-up on any meeting points or discussions from earlier in the day.?

3.00pm: Team standup! The software developers, tech leads and designers in my team will join the standup everyday at this time.? During the standup, everyone provides updates on what they worked on, what they will be working on, and anything they might need clarity/support on. To end the standup we have the ritual of sharing a really lame/bad joke that makes everyone either laugh or roll their eyes real bad.

3.30pm: QA time. When software developers build a feature/item, they deploy it to a test environment. This is so that anyone who wants to test it, can do so in an environment that will not affect the live application. When QA’ing I test 3 things - the happy flow, unhappy flow and lastly I try to do funny things to try and break the system. This is so that we can stress the feature to identify any areas we may have overlooked to be fixed before pushing it to the live systems.?

4.30pm: I take this time to support my team on the tasks they are working on in terms of clarifying requirements or collaborating with them where possible.

5.30pm: End the working day and time to hit the gym!?