Getting started with product management - The What of the task management

Following up with the previous post on when to pick an item, this post focusses on what items to pick.?

The idea is to draft it as generic as possible and not just for product managers.

Before diving into the topic, just wanted to share a short narrative on time vs experience graph which lays a foundation on what we are going to talk next.

It starts with the basic premise that any work or experience we undergo starts to look like fun and we are progressing well with the knowns but eventually all your knowns actually expands your horizon to show of how much of unknowns are yet there.

All your knowns actually expands your horizon to show of how much of unknowns are yet there

As in the graph, the first milestone is a happy start and as you keep exploring you will understand that there are unknowns and you are just becoming aware of unknowns and realise it wasn’t what you thought it was, but with clear goal and consistency you start to go north in graph is the fundamental structure of the graph illustrated above.

Coming to the what again, we often get overwhelmed right between the origin point and the downslide where you get to become aware of unknowns around it.

Goal vs. Action

Think of this, you pick an idea to work as a simple enhancement like unifying all editors across Zoho products which sounds simple as all prerequisites are already available and all we need to do is just plug-and-play things.

But the moment you start go deeper you realise the way client is handled between your product and editor could be different, the way the backend is provisioned could be different from your’s and the editor, and even the UX might sometimes be “odd” to your product design vs the editors.

From outside, all it had was to integrate two different “internal” systems which is actually the goal, but as you go deeper you are faced with unknowns which exactly are the challenges or the actions or the to-do’s to work on.

The list could comprise of to-do’s like gap analysis, technical documentation, functional use cases handled or features supported, places to handle, client handling, server side handling, mobile handling, APIs, UX analysis, and so on.

The exact spot where goal is transformed into plan or action or to-do’s.

Picking from Now, Next, and Later

Assuming in ur previous example, we have 50 things as part of our to-do which is segmented based on now, next, and later (Suggestive read: Previous post), just pick the ones from the Now part as it is going to be most crucial of all.

The Now by itself might sometimes be overwhelming for myriad reasons like priorities, resources, knowledge, etc.

To bring this to better understanding take all your Now list and put it across a simple 2x2 matrix to better understand what really matters.

It is a simple setup of juggling two variables — Impact and the effort.

Impact:?

Studied or observed based on the value it adds to the user which in most cases are positive KPIs or OKRs.

Effort:?

Simplest time and resource notion that is required to finish a given piece of work/task.

When you put your combinations, you get four of them as,

High Impact — Low Effort

High Impact — High Effort

Low Impact — High Effort

Low Impact — Low Effort

To further add pointers to the combinations,

The Sweet spot: High Impact — Low Effort

These are the one’s we need to focus at the most and keep this bucket engaged and deferring any of them from this bucket should be watched as a red flag.

For example, adopting the editor as native as possible with least or no modifications.

Study more: High Impact — High Effort

These are often items or tasks that require deeper engineering and learning curve to adopters.

For instance, supporting merge fields of services like CRM, Desk, etc as part of the editor is of course would be a standard expectation when adopting them into our product but accommodating it within the editor’s scope by itself is an high effort as well.

Proceed with caution: Low Impact — High Effort

If you encounter an item from this quadrant, be cautious on what you’re investing into as they may be an engaging engineering item to some but actually brings in lesser returns than the efforts.

Take the case of supporting handwriting recognition in the editor you are trying to integrate where anything you draw transforms into a character.?

It is of course a great addition for tablet or mobile users but requires considerable high effort to build and maintain.

Free-time tasks: Low Impact — Low Effort

Items that can very well be shared to the training grounds and incrementally bettering the editor integration inch-by-inch.

On conclusion, task management is not to be taken lightly as they are the ones that channelise your goals into actions and then into tangible deliverables.?

Be it product management or any profile for that matter, invest wisely on how you’re setting up your tasks.