Last 30 days in a Product Manager role

One way or another, you arrived to this moment. How do you handle it, top things? Read on.

Before we jump to what you have to do for your closure steps, please be aware that each Product Manager should practice (at all times):

Discipline - Be aware that your personality changes throughout life. Practicing discipline just makes it better. Yes, wake up early, do that yoga class or meditation before you get all brained up. Have clear rules of how you work and include exceptional slots, have one no meetings day and master your calendar management like a pro. Do good scheduling and management for People, Product, Processes, Tools. There are plenty of techniques out there, test, find the best that suits you and start using them.

Saying no to ignorance - You should not deliberately ignore or disregard important information or facts. Be they feedback from your own team, customers, trends of emerging technologies and their future impact on your backlog and market dynamics, collaborative knowledge or simply signing up to that course that covers a subject you feel you master (you might be surprised to see different facets of something you already master, think at it like watching Die Hard the 45th time on Christmas Eve and spotting each time a different angle or nuance). Practice less judgement and more education, you’ll find out a progressive discovery of your own ignorance the more you are exposed to. Also, be considerate, treat people as you’d want to be treated, go for that 10k run if you feel it’ll express your support to a cause, trim your hair and donate it if you feel it will bring someone hope, send that product love letter if you really liked a product that much and ... you get the point.:)

Saying no to overconfidence - You can never know too much and you are not the smartest in the room (hopefully your team is!). The more you know or are exposed to, the humble you should feel. I’ve learnt that the bigger the plate / role / responsibilities, the humbler and grateful you become because you hold the mother-ship and like every mom, your child is in the spotlight (not you!) and your child is the one that gets your most attention and your best knowledge, love and resources. That child is your product and your team. And my advice to you, practice modesty, always. The lights should not be on you, ever. A job well done is when everyone in your team is cheered, that’s when you can go home and do that celebratory drink because you did a great job. Yes, this is a job of self-motivation and self-appreciation, try not to expect to receive it from others & be modest, focus on serving the cause more than serving you.

Staying away from noise - Fake news, noise, they all defocus and use valuable time. Learn to treat your time with the same importance you treat your basic needs. Silent that group that defocuses you when you should be concentrated (WhatsApp has a 8h or 1h silent group option, use it; Slack has good group management too, use it); stay away from that person that consumes your energy in too much dose and reconnect when you are done for the day or when you have a small break; don’t get engaged in titles talks instead get engaged into knowledge driven talks; don’t complain just seize the positives and what you can grow on, in the end remember each downside is an opportunity to grow or build upon it, you might find yourself building a competitive advantage for yourself or your product or your team skills.

Now that we covered the ground basis, let’s walk through the last 30 days in a Product Manager role before making a transition to another project or to a different role.

1. Do 360s and exit interviews. Collect as much feedback as possible to learn and understand your current achievements, how you helped your team and what and where do you position in your team’s view. Feedback is your best helper. You should theoretically conduct feedback session once a quarter or even more often, if you haven’t now it’s a good time to do an all time round of feedback. You will find things you didn’t expect (the positive of immense recognition and gratitude for your work, the negatives of not considering your team’s voice enough or not teaching them to build up their business vision - all feedback is good feedback!). Encourage your team to not hold back, the more feedback, the better your ‘how did I do’ sessions. Understanding how your mission was perceived by others is key in building the better you. So, here’s how i collected 360 or feedback. My approach: I use TinyPulse Perform and send the 360 requests to the ones I want to collect feedback from. + Schedule time with the Board Management, Developers, Designers and most of the team I interact with and found myself collecting a lot of useful information either over a cup of coffee or through a Slack or Zoom call (distributed teams power all the way!).
2. Look and identify how did your product KPIs do over time. Include all sides metrics: financials, infrastructure, features, innovation versus maintenance, customer support and that fantastic NPS (I always experience great satisfaction seeing growth in that in-app NPS from -50 to +40). Combining all these should help you understand the performance and work backwards to identify strengths and weaknesses, add up market insight and you’re onto something good. Want to feel even better, dig into that vanity metrics and hold on to them.:) They help at rough times, it’s like looking at that picture of your child playing funny faces and having a good time.
3. Release cycles and Iterations retrospectives. Do this for both you and for the one that will be taking over to continue your legacy. It will give a good sense of what went wrong, good statistics into man-hours and set of improvements. While I did this I also did a separate R&D sheet to plan ahead for when we might need this if we plan to file in for R&D funds reclaim. Think and act on a bigger picture. You will be gone, you had one of the biggest liant role in the project you’ve been, it is hard enough to have you gone so you may well help them when you won’t be here too, anticipate needs. My own learnings from TargetProcess - the agile project management platform I used for product development: Go for the visual reports (customized or use their templates), they are powerful and give nearly real-time status and you can share them with your team in similar way as to GoogleDocs. Use the People Capacity analysis and calculate each user's total effort to-do vs. available allocated work hours (so useful!). By all means opt to see the Lead and Cycle Time Distribution, you’ll see probability to release a bug fix in certain days or completing a user story might have that 70% chance you are looking for to get it done in 15 days, plus all the cycle time distribution for user stories and bugs is so important & forecasting using data analysis is your ally, hence use it!
4. Do a sum up of the tools you used. Keep it in mind, or note it down somewhere, what worked or not for you and your team and why. You might find yourself in the situation where in the future something that didn’t work for you and your team will actually be a good candidate again as the needs might change.
5. Give thanks. Make sure you spend the time to let that one, that you appreciate, know. It’s a simple thing yet so powerful and important. Everyone helped you get where you are, so say thanks.
6. Last but not least, Clean up your machine and do a list of accounts that need be put off to rest. All this adminy work is equally important.

After you’re done with all of the above, schedule time to assimilate all these. This is story 2.0, how you assimilate.

• Mind mapping - if you’re that big fan of visualizing information this is your go to way to assimilate information. It’s hierarchical and shows relationship among pieces of the whole, quite a powerful graphic technique to harness the full range of that cortical skills.
• Wiki way - GoogleDrive makes this a valid, easy option. GitHub is not bad either. It involves a lot of writing, structuring and it’s no wonder that one of the most popular how-to websites it’s wikiHow. Wikicode, wikitext, whatever is your best format for you.
• Write about it, publish it or not, your choice.
• Share learning with peers or mentors and get their feedback again
• Set up new goals - personally love this part. Always feels like Spring to me. And if you don’t know already, I absolutely heart Spring. And like Dorothy says: “Somewhere over the rainbow, Skies are blue. And the dreams that you dare to dream, really do come true.”
• Draw that line and get the takeaway and on-board to that new adventure that you jumped to. Close that chapter, start anew. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

Godspeed, peeps!