EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 14Managing Time

I've long said that, to get the critically important work of a product manager done, you need on the order of four solid hours a day.

If the person is a product designer or tech lead and is not able to spend most of the day doing actually creative work, then you have a larger problem. So, this is mainly an issue with product managers.

To be clear, I'm not talking about email or Slack or meetings. I mean quality time working on coming up with solutions to the difficult problems we're trying to solve—otherwise known as product discovery.

Still, that doesn't sound too bad, until you look at your calendar and realize that your only chance for those four hours is from 6:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m. at night (and hence the infamous 60‐hour workweek of so many product managers).

You've all seen the frenzied product manager that spends her time rushing from meeting to meeting, constantly complaining about not having any time to do “real product work.”

So, it's no surprise that one of the most common, and most important, coaching topics is helping a new product manager learn to manage her time.

When I start coaching on this problem, I begin by looking at how she is spending her time, and in the vast majority of cases, I find that the product manager is spending most of her day doing project management work, rather than product management work.

Now, they don't necessarily call it that, but I try to point out to them that's actually what's going on.

So, why is this? ...