Day, week, month, quarter and year in the life of.. a PM

So what do Product managers do on a day to day basis? The answer is, well, it depends, on the stage of the product, the size of the company, the organizational structure, and many more factors. But you'll notice a pattern in weekly, quarterly and yearly things that great PMs do, and all PMs should aspire to do. This post is meant to be your cheat sheet and a reference guide on how to be an efficient and effective PM.

To be a great PM, you must:

1. Know your product, market and competition

2. Define and socialize a clear established vision and strategy on where your product is headed

3. Rally the support and cross functional teams around the goals to get you closer to the defined vision

Daily

This is the most nebulous bucket, and varies significantly day to day, and also varies depending upon product stage, company size, organization structure etc. Regardless, here's a few things you'd find yourself doing daily as a PM:

1. Written communication: This manifests as emails, chat and write-ups in the form of docs, slides, sheets etc. This includes responding to pending emails and chats from your peers, clarifications to engineering, UX and UXR on ongoing projects details, planning with leadership for upcoming projects and priorities, and communicating with external parties such as vendors, customers and partners.

2. Meetings: Daily stand ups for ongoing projects typically with engineering and UX

3. Metrics: Track and measure your most important metric

Weekly:

1. 1:1 sync with Engineering lead, UX lead, PM peers, direct managers. This helps you deepen your professional relationships, build trust and understand each other's drivers, motivations and fears better - which ultimately helps you be a better team. So take the time and invest.

2. Metric check: Track and measure your most important weekly metrics. This includes your north star metrics and other leading and lagging indicators.

3. Customer pulse: Stay in tune with the customer sentiments by familiarizing yourself with top 10 support issues. This will tell you if there's any new fires created by recent changes, and also give you a sense of the trending top issues week over week. Talk to a customer to understand what's working for them, and how you can make their lives better.

Monthly and Quarterly:

1. Business Review with leadership: This is your opportunity to spotlight on the great work that your team has delivered, metrics that have been moved, progress that has been made, and also to shed light on the challenges and blockers that you need leadership's assistance with. Not to say that you need to wait a month to raise blockers, but its helpful to have a forum in place to discuss these. This can also be used to welcome new team members, as well as an opportunity for leadership to pass down any recent updates.

Semi-annually / Annually:

1. Goal setting: This is an organizational wide opportunity to set objective and key results (OKRs) that are indicative of progress towards the said objectives. These OKRs will be referenced

2. Update Vision, Strategy and Goals: On a 6 monthly and 12 monthly basis, depending upon the industry your product is a part of, there's typically sufficient changes in the market trends and competitive updates that necessitate an update of your vision, strategy and goals. This might include creating new OKRs, and also might map to updating existing OKRs to reflect the needed changes.

So, there you have it. Day, week, month, quarter and year, in the life of a product manager. Leave me a comment and tell me what else you include in your life as a PM.