SAM a Product Manager, often spends most of his time in tactical decision making. He rarely gets time to think about strategies. On an average day, this is how he spends his time:
7:00 AM - 8:30 AM
Conference calls, demos with customers at other parts of the world
8:30 AM - 9:30 AM
Drive to Office; Sam thinks about various Strategies on the drive. He thinks of documenting strategies once there at the office
9:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Once at the office, he gets lost in the emails and voice mails that are waiting for the Sam’s response and replying to Instant message pings from Sales/Marketing/Dev teams. He completely forgets about the strategies he thought to document on his drive to office.
12:00 PM – 12:15 PM Break for coffee
12:15 PM – 1:00 PM
Meeting with development manager – discuss about various bugs, performance issues
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch Break
2:00 PM – 4 PM
Few more emails, answer them. Prepare presentations; think about features, road maps, requirements management etc.
4:00 PM – 7 PM
Track development status, daily build status, calls with customers, more emails, more Instant messages and coordinates with Sales team.
7 PM – 8 PM
way back to home; Sam again thinks about strategies on the drive. But he forgets everything when turns to office the next day.
Even after 8, he continues his work from home replying emails, and does a bit of blogging.
We believe there are many such Sam’s, who’ve been facing the heat and cursing themselves for not allotting sufficient time in strategic decision making while developing the product. For technology companies, product managers need to focus more on the strategic inbound tasks than being distracted by too many tactical demands.
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