To the Product Manager Who Does It All
4 Strategies for Dealing with Too Much Work
Teams shrink, work dries up, and money flows along the rivers of innovation and trends. Even a company’s flagship product will be sunset and the people who work for those teams will experience the change. One change you’ll experience in technology product management is that as teams down size due to work/budget constraints the team evolves into a demi-scrum team. Certain team members take on more than one role and a hydra-like 4 headed Asura is born.
Backend engineers start to work on front end development (which may not be so bad), QA starts coding API touch points, and the Product Manager becomes; the Scrum Master, the Business Systems Analysts, the Product Owner, the Marketing Team, the Designer, UX/UI Team, and-and-and.
In this article let’s look into 4 Strategies for Dealing with your extremely heavy workload.
Automation & Process are your friends
Unless you work for Atomic 212 or your organization uses tools like Slack and Flowdock for pushing and pulling communication you are likely still using email. Managing our email like a to-do list is the best possible method, especially if your organization encourages email deletion after a certain time period.
Automate the sorting of your email. Tag some senders as automatically important and other feeds as low. Auto sort your incoming email into folders. As a Product Manager I often get automatic updates on file processing success and failures, these go into their own folder which is reviewed during an email review time box and deleted accordingly.
I was allowing my email to be a holding place for things I thought I needed to keep track of, the only problem with that is it’s too easy to think you need to keep track of everything while keeping track of nothing.
I recently had to clear out my Gmail and Google Drive. I had love notes from my wife from more than 8 years ago. While nice, I could choose to Archive if I just wanted to keep them, but they were only taking up space. That is because I was allowing my email to be a holding place for things I thought I needed to keep track of, the only problem with that is it’s too easy to think you need to keep track of everything while keeping track of nothing.
Treat your email as a to-do list and delete emails you’ve completed. If there is more to do the Reply feature keeps track of the responses for you. Flag those items you need to work on and schedule a time to do so with your calendar so that you will not be disturbed — speaking of.
Beyond Time Boxing
Time boxing like the Pomodoro Technique for your everyday tasks is great! Take this a step further by thinking through your own personal flow. For instance, I’m very inquisitive and creative in the mornings and execute well at night. So I typically start my workday at 6–7AM with reviewing the market and my particular industry and think through what my learning means to my product line. I create a to-do list of things I want to do in relation to the creative juices flowing in the AM, but I won’t execute on that list until later in the day. Late at night before bed I check my email and schedule text and emails for people to reply to or take action on the next day. I’ve learned to not email Development Leaders in the late night hour as they would typically think to execute on those items right then. Scheduling the email for later or typing “NOT URGENT” in the subject line is a good move in this regard.
Consider your personal flow. If you’re less all over the place mentally pre and post lunch schedule meetings which require lots of focus or in which you’ll be presenting during those times of the day. Maybe afternoon meetings are for passive meetings in which you’ll learn or get take-aways for tomorrow’s execution.
Delegate with success in mind
We delegate from one of two places: fear or success. From a place of fear, we are hoping to keep our plate clear so that we can do what we do well in hopes of self-preservation.
When delegating from a desire to succeed you delegate your areas of weakness and strength equally. Taking the opportunity to mentor others in your strength and level set expectations in your areas of weakness. When you delegate from fear you end up keeping too much on your plate and if push ever came to shove you’d cause a loss to your firm or organization by not passing on as much knowledge as possible or worst, not be able to excel because you haven’t duplicated yourself and started taking on higher responsibilities.
When delegating from a desire to succeed you delegate your areas of weakness and strength equally
Can you imagine how that would feel? You’re completely qualified to move on to that dream position, but because your boss can’t see anyone doing your day to day you’re stuck. Handcuffed to a successful prison you’ve created.
Take Time Away
Reading fiction might as well be my therapy. I’ve also recently discovered I like swimming (though I’m not good at it). Guess what? I can’t take my cell phone into the pool. Find something (anything) to distract you daily from connections. We PM’s and PO’s have to connect a lot. We have to plug into work and people’s problems, and then come home and possibly plug into a family or other obligations…even the dog wants to be petted.
Do something that intentionally pulls you away from your work and preferably everything else. I once worked for a company which had an arduous workload, to say the least. I managed the backlogs for multiple products and teams all over the world. We did one thing really well though: no one disturbed your extended PTO unless it was a super emergency. Your PTO should not consist of work and checking emails. I have a habit of checking my work email every night and if someone texts me I respond whether it’s work or not, but I’ve been doing this for years and that doesn’t remove me from my life/ other moments of engagement. Whatever works for you should be your thing.
Bonus Tip: Prioritize
When I was an Associate Product Manager, prioritization was my key area of weakness. I hadn’t found my mental limit so I took on too much and I couldn’t prioritize to save my life. My poor manager was fielding all types of complaints about how everything was an emergency when someone was talking to me — sorry Win.
I’ve gotten better and one of the things he told me early on helped a lot. Imagine a conveyor belt (look at the image above): You have information/tasks consistently coming at you. Some big some small they can’t be all done at the same time and you only have a limited amount of people to delegate to. You need to appropriately sort those tasks by level of importance and information before delegating and taking them on. Some items may be important, but there is no supporting information so moving forward on it is a research task, while other items are well known and are of little to no importance. Other items are just good for informing you of status or something like that. Win is a published author, lawyer, and has been a product manager for many years so his advice was a lot more eloquently delivered than what I’ve laid out for you…pretty sure I didn’t do it justice, but you get the picture.
Long story short I had to slow down and digest the information coming my way and then decide what to do with it. Not everything is an emergency…even some emergencies are not true emergencies.
You can use the Eisenhower Matrix to box-in your to-do list items and then begin executing from there. I can’t tell you how to prioritize your work without a glimpse into your world, but I look at it as a consequence game: What item if not handled immediately will cause a bigger issue for me, and how soon and/or how will this translate to value for whatever the end goal is?
These are your 4 strategies for coping with your extremely heavy workload. Thanks so much for reading this article. What personal tips and tricks have you used for managing an ever-expanding workload?
Hi, I’m Sean; I’m passionate about CX and Products. Over the last decade, I’ve been privileged to lead product organizations at some of the most impactful companies in the world. Mainly in the healthcare space and most recently focused on an internal platform managing work for hundreds of clinicians and care for millions of patients. SeanLAdams.com is my little corner of the internet; stop by anytime.
