Ask HN: What should Product Managers spend most of their time doing?

3 points by apthnz 8 years ago | 3 comments

I'm a new Product Manager at a FinTech and spend most of my time either writing process documents or putting together models in Excel. I feel more like a Business Analyst, but was wondering what PMs out there spend most of their time on? Or if you employ a PM, what is the most valuable work they do for you?

bitpush 8 years ago |

Varies a lot depending on the type of product you're on. If you have a B2B product, you're probably talking to the customer a lot, charting out plans with sales and marketing. On the other hand, if you have a B2C product you're looking at engagement numbers (which would hopefully in the order of thousands/millions), running experiments and doing surveys etc.

It also depends on what phase of the product lifecycle your feature is in. Early on, you're writing a lot of strategy docs putting together vision decks to convince people. During active development, you're keeping track on day-to-day activities, prioritizing features and putting out fires. You're also hopefully figuring out a GTM plan. If your product is already launched, you're thinking of v2, listening for feedback etc.

smt88 8 years ago |

My product people spend a large percentage of their time talking to customers. They're the customer surrogate in any meeting we have, which is a role they collaborate with salespeople to fill.

Is your product sold to external clients? Or is it internal?

apthnz 8 years ago | |

External - and that's really good info, I don't spend much time at all speaking with clients