In the previous post, I described a product manager as a CEO of a startup, which might create the impression that our days are packed with actions. In fact, if you do an internet search on “a day in the life of a product manager”, you will get plenty of articles on exactly that, product managers in action, working with their teams to roll out features and test out the market.
Let me share with you a different perspective. Let’s talk about the not-so-sexy stuff that have to happen before the actions can kick in.
When I first became a product manager, I was tasked with evaluating if my company could have a profitable product that prevents the elderly from falling down, i.e. market research 101.
For a while, I spent all of my waking hours doing 3 things: online research, talking to the engineering team and vendors, and feeling lost.
First of all, what exactly is the problem that we are trying to solve? Is the elderly falling down a bad thing? How bad? Where do they fall down? Who suffers when an elderly falls? Why focus on just the elderly?
Assume the elderly falling down is a serious issue. What has been done to address this? Are they effective? If not, why? How do I get access to caregivers, healthcare providers, and the elderly to hear their views?
Having no prior knowledge on this subject, I spent hours every day reading articles and research papers to educate myself, and to find quantifiable statistics proving that there is such a problem, and it is huge. I pored over even more reading materials in order to understand the pros and cons of existing commercial solutions as well as the latest research works.
It was easy to get lost in a sea of information without being able to make sense of them.
At the same time, the engineering team that I worked with proposed video analytics to be a viable approach, an area which I was absolutely unfamiliar with. Again, I spent many hours each day learning from the team the basics of video analytics, video streaming, storage, network, servers, chipsets, circuit board, etc. (I was quite lucky to have helpful colleagues who did not mind my one million and one questions.)
The purpose of me trying to understand all these is to answer the following questions. Does the proposed solution have the potential to address the problem more effectively than the competitors’? And if yes, how do we prove it? It did not end there. The truth is, falls can be managed and reduced to an increasingly large extent with advancements in technology. The challenge is whether it can be done so at a low enough cost. No amount of secondary research was sufficient to shed light on this as it required in-depth knowledge of mass-producing a hardware product.
If you had been there, you would have seen me follow the few engineers in the company who had worked in manufacturing around to pick their brains. You would also have seen me talk to contract manufacturers (factories who manufacture your products for you) pretending that I knew what I was talking about, but in fact, was just trying to learn as much as I could. All was in the spirit of market research. There you have it. A not-so-glamorous day in the life of a new product manager trying to find a worthwhile problem to solve. There were days when I felt like I hadn’t achieved anything because there weren’t concrete tasks that I could cross off my list. My “tasks” were only completed when I had the answers to the myriad of questions mentioned above. It could be tedious and pointless work if one lost track of the reason why.
With that being said, it does not mean I didn’t have my share of actions. Follow me to the next post to experience the “high” in a day in the life of a new product manager.
