7 Tips to survive your first month as a Product Manager
Congratulations for landing your first gig as a product manager! Hurray right? Probably not, else you wouldn’t be here.
Fret now, here are 7 tips that will help you survive your first month as a product manager.
- Ask Questions and Listen
I cannot stress this point enough. A product manager sits at the intersection of business, technology and user experience to create products that are valuable, usable and feasible. This means you need to understand how each discipline functions and take on their perspectives in order to create a successful product.
In your first month, you will be expected to master tools, business processes and most importantly, people. If you still haven’t realise, the hardest thing about being a product manager is having to lead people without any direct authority. People are complicated, they come from different background, have different personality and worse (best) of all, they all want different things. I will cover more about this in the “Know thy People”
Now if you are lucky, there will be some form of documentation around. However, even with best effort, context will be needed for you to fully understand and quickly assimilate the information. Therefore you need to be adept at asking open questions that elicit more information.
Examples of open questions are
- Why do we use this?
- What else do we need to make this a success?
- How do you feel about this?
- Describe the circumstances in more detail.
There are many other kinds of question which you should be asking throughout your PM journey for different situations. However, that’s a topic for another day as your main focus is to soak up as much information as you can.
2. Take Notes
Unless you have perfect memory, it is important that you take notes and organise them in an easy way for future references. Even if you have perfect memory, it is still essential for you to write down your thoughts and ideas for strategic decision making.
For notes taking, i highly recommend using the Bullet Journal System. This system is perfect for product managers as it allow you to take down
- lingering questions best asked after meeting because you may lack context
- Ideas that you want to explore
- Tasks that requires tracking
For example, you can denote task that requires tracking with a simple “•” or “‘-” for ideas, facts thoughts and observations. At the end of the day, mark a “X” over tasks to indicate completeness or “>” for tasks schedule. Feel free to invent your own symbols but don’t go overboard. Keep it simple.
The goal here is to become the most well-informed person in the organization, so that you can provide context and information to teams for them to do their best work. Therefore, ask away, take tons of notes and don’t be afraid to go out of your way to over-communicate.
3. Know thy People
One of the hardest and most interesting aspect about product management is people. Most probably, you are going to meet so many that it’s going to be a struggle to remember everyone’s name.
“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”
Here are some tips by Dale Carnegie to help you make your first step towards building good rapport with everyone. Most likely, the people you work with are going to contribute to the success of your product in one way or another therefore it is crucial to start early.
Another way that i find useful in building rapport at this stage is to offer help to anyone who need it. By helping people, it will not only helps you build trust and goodwill, but also allow you to start making contribution to your organisation. That said, I strongly advise against being the “Mr. Nice Guy” who agrees to every request. As a PM, you should still strive to be as strategic with your time as possible.
Likewise, if you need help, just ask for it. It may be deemed as a weakness but do you know what is worst? Not asking and mess up really badly. Even by being vulnerable, you are still fostering collaboration which is one of the most important function of a PM. Therefore, don’t be afraid to ask for help, just don’t forget reciprocate and pay it forward.
4. Meetings
As a Product Manager, you are going to be invited to more meetings than you can imagine. In the initial phase, go to as many meeting as you can to meet people and soak up information. However, inevitably, it will come to a point where you have to to be selective. Make a point to know the agenda upfront and ensure that it is necessary for you to attend. If there’s no clear agenda, make the invitee define them. Of course, to make every meeting count, ensure that there is proper follow-up and actionable items to be completed instead of forgotten.
As for meeting that you are unable to attend, you can start building up your team to be empowered to make decision specific to their area of work. That is why you must over-communicate to provide context for situations like this. Remember, being everywhere is the best way to get you to nowhere.
Lastly, when you do have to schedule meetings, act on it immediately to ensure that your invitees have ample time to prepare or it. Countless deals and opportunities for collaboration have been missed because of tiny misstep like this. Therefore, act as if your life depends on it.
5. Organise your mailbox
Tons of emails are constantly going to stream into your mailbox. To prevent important meetings and urgent items from getting buried, create folders and set up rules to direct them to the proper folders. Flag out emails that requires your immediate attention and add them to a separate To-Do list. Never allow your mailbox to become a To-Do list tool. Regard it only as a source of information.
Recently, I have make it a point to achieve inbox 0 at the end of the day. I highly recommend it because it will train you to ruthlessly prioritise requests and improve your ability to assimilate informations. Work towards it, you will be thankful to yourself.
6. Allow yourself to make mistakes. It’s OK.
Even with the best intention and effort, you will inevitably make mistakes or rub someone the wrong way. I remember asking someone if I can do anything to help and was replied with a sarcastic, not in a funny way, “yeah, sure can you add more hours into a day?”. The key here is to never take things personally. Often times, you are not the source of their frustrations. I advise taking a step back in such circumstances to disengage and re-evaluate the situation.
As time heals all wound, most of the time it is better to just let it reconcile by itself. Be the better man and move on. However, if it persist, you may need to set boundaries and make sure they are clearly communicated. This is to ensure that you can still carry out your daily function.
Making mistakes one after another can get you pretty stressed out. I highly recommend you to schedule in some exercise in your daily life. Even better, ask your colleagues to join in and get to know them better outside of work.
7. Have fun. *wink
