Product Management: A 5-Year Journey of Tasks, Trends, and Time Management
It’s time to dive back into the ever-evolving world of Product Management. After meticulously charting my journey for the past couple of years, I’m ready to share the latest chapter.
It’s not just about ticking off tasks or steering through endless meetings (though they do consume a hefty 50% of my time!). This time, it’s about the underlying patterns, the shifts in priorities, and the realization that sometimes, less is more.
Curious about my methods and setup? Revisit my earlier analysis here. 📊
Stay tuned for:
- A detailed breakdown of my work in 2022 and 2023
- Critical insights from 5 years on the PM frontline
Ready for the ride? Let’s dive in!
Career & Growth milestones
Before we dive into the details, let’s set the stage with a couple of milestones in my journey:
- May 2022 marked a bold leap as I joined Hack The Box as a Staff Product Manager, working alongside the team of the B2B Enterprise platform. This move has left a distinct footprint in the analysis you’re about to see.
- In 2023, I spiced up my daily scheduling with a dash of Deep Work inspiration. Introducing task tags like
SMALL-TASK,MEDIUM-TASK, andBIG-TASKto gauge my time investment better. It’s not just about tagging; it’s about strategically zooming in on what matters each day.
With these tweaks and a treasure trove of data from my completed tasks, let’s unravel the story of these two transformative years.
Analysis of 2022
In 2022, 1575 tasks were completed over 232 days — excluding holidays, weekends, vacations, and a free week between switching companies. This brings an average of 7 tasks completed per day.
As shared above, in mid-Q2 I switched companies, so the work tasks breakdown has a quite different pattern than in 2021. Some highlights:
- Hack The Box is a bigger organization than Transifex — the previous company I worked for — having more departments and wider collaboration needs from the Product team. Specifically, there are two more teams: one team building the content for cybersecurity experts to train on, called Content, and a Community team managing one of the biggest cybersecurity communities worldwide. In 2022, the product team started engaging with Content, thus 1.7% of tasks are related to that department.
- The Product team in Hack The Box is more engaged with the engineering teams, thus Engineering tasks are a big part of the work.
- Personal Development is a big part of the work and involves, one-on-one’s with team members to understand the business and grow together, learning the new platform, reading around Cyber Security, and experimenting with different ways to expose information (e.g. analysis and writing this post).
- Customer-centricity is a big part of Hack The Box too and you can see that reflected in the time spent with Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales.
- Product and Design are a single team in Hack The Box. Specifically in 2022, we had some interactions as a team around alignment, designing new parts, and benchmarking the platform resulting in 10.7% of my tasks relating to Design.
- 2022 has been a year of hiring for Hack The Box — me being an example — so I spent some time in interviews and evaluation of candidates. This is reflected in the 3.3% of time spent with the People department.
In terms of personal goal-setting and safeguarding my time in 2022, I achieved this rather well:
- Out of 199 days in which I set a daily goal to hit, I fully achieved that approximately 69% of the days, while partially achieved it 20% of the time. Partially achieved means, that I didn’t manage to complete the goal within the day but for sure I started working on it.
- In terms of “Saying No”, I lean towards support and assistance in ad-hoc requests. Out of 201 where I measured my NO/YES ratio, I leaned in to help 33 days where that was needed and said No only once. Still, overall, I stayed uninterrupted for 167 days.
Analysis of 2023
2023 has been a great year for Hack The Box and me. A lot of things happened in 2023 including a business trip to the US, a company retreat, and our team’s 2 days Hackathon.
In 2023, 1620 tasks were completed in 221 working days. This means that on average I completed approximately 7 tasks a day.
This year’s breakdown has one major change. Working alongside the Engineering team has grown substantially compared to last year! This was a deliberate effort to lean more toward the team and assist as our team’s engineering was grown in members and skillset. In 2023, we established some processes that assist our day-to-day as well as our long-term goals (estimation sessions, improvement actions after retrospectives, improved review sessions, and decision empowerment).
Some other highlights are:
- The decreased dedicated time spent on design-only work. Any design work is highly embedded in our daily interactions and activities — especially with the team. Still, we had some focused work on Discovery during the second half of the year.
- An increase in interactions with Customer Success, Sales, and Content teams to strengthen our alignment and value to our end users.
- A significant decrease in pure Product work, mostly due to the lean toward the Engineering team.
- Finally, in 2023 I was engaged in fewer sessions with the People team in hiring.
In terms of personal goals set and safeguarding my time, 2023 has some mixed results:
- Out of the 195 days with a personal goal set, 64% I fully achieved the set goal, while 22% of the time I partially did so. Considering the extra focus on collaboration with other teams and the effort to work closer with engineering, this percentage is still pretty high!
- On the safeguarding side, I performed *poorly by prioritizing colleagues’ work over my task in the 61 days I’ve been asked to, while I said no 3 times.
*poorly, is not a good way to describe leaning in to assist. Specifically for the Product Manager’s role, assistance and unblocking other people is part of the work! Check this post's conclusion for a full take.
Closing the analysis for 2023, by sharing the breakdown of tasks related to how much time I estimated for each task. A BIG-TASK would require more than 1 hour of focus time to be completed, meaning that deep mental effort is needed. On the contrary, a SMALL-TASK should be straightforward to complete with little mental effort.
As expected, the majority of tasks fall into the SMALL-TASK category involving straightforward work. Some samples of small tasks are:
- Team daily standup call
- Update a presentation for a company-wide status call
- Gather metrics for a feature performance
- A timeboxed session on competition analysis
Ideally, I would like to strike a balance of less than 50% for SMALL-TASKS and above 50% for larger tasks that require more focus and deeper research.
Conclusion After analyzing half a decade of documented PM work
As PMs, we like to use data to support our claims. Having such a vast pool of data from my Getting Things Done system it would be a waste to keep it on a year-over-year insights only.
Triggered by this post as well as the previous one here are some key takeaways.
PM work follows company needs
Product Managers are required to have a great span of involvement and knowledge so that they can lean in and adapt to the company’s and business needs. This relation is reflected in the tasks breakdown per department across all years, seen below.
- The impact of our development framework towards delivery is very obvious in PM tasks. When engineers own delivery, PM adapts to engage less with related tasks. When PM is investing in Engineering efforts, the relevant tasks increase.
- PM work spans across company departments. Regardless of the yearly graph you are looking at, there are many colors stacked, meaning that PM tasks are spread across departments to promote alignment and collaboration. Post 2021 — after joining Hack The Box — the role and collaboration expanded to include the Content and Community teams that are specific to the company.
- Personal development and growth are a (big) part of the equation. Cultivating own skills and building relations through brainstorming, syncing, and collaborations to create stuff together drive both personal and company goals.
Since PM work is central to development and collaboration across departments and also adapts to current company needs, you can get a sense of the company's DNA evolution through the years by checking the colored graphs above. e.g. 2020 has been a pivotal year on how engineering works for Transifex, in 2021 the collaboration with the Sales team expanded, and in 2023 leaning toward Engineering is very obvious.
How much time does a PM devote to meetings?
As Product Managers — or any role with the word “manager” in it — we say that a lot of our time is spent on meetings. Using the system in place, I measured tasks that were straight out meetings for these past 5 years.
The verdict is in, YES meetings take up approximately half of a Product Manager’s time! Especially in 2023 and 2021, where goals for better alignment and collaboration were set the impact of more meetings is visible.
NON-PM Related: Importance of setting a single daily goal
Since the implementation of the “One Thing” logic on my daily to-do, I can say for sure that this works! Setting a goal and working on that goal first had a big impact on how I approach my to-do tasks. As the daily goal is usually a smaller part of a bigger goal — not achievable within a day — making sure to focus and complete that task has an accumulative effect.
In the above graph, you can see a slight relation between safeguarding your time to do your daily goal and the amount of ad-hoc work you do for colleagues. When grouping the data at a yearly level, the relation is not that clearly — or repeatably — inferred. This time is my personal experience that validates the difficulty of focusing on a daily task when a lot of ad-hoc requests are coming your way.
Will try to showcase the relation in a better breakdown in a future post, maybe group by month to see if the claim stands true: “Saying more No’s assists you in doing more focused work”
Plateau of “productivity”
Checking the number of tasks completed per year, there is a visible plateau on how much work can be completed within a year by a person — or at least “this person” myself. Since 2021, the number of tasks more or less stays the same. On a bright note, it’s also obvious that in 2021 I had a boost in my rate of completing work!
Considering that in 2022 I also completed approximately 7 tasks a day, I must have reached a maximum “productivity” in terms of tasks at this point and I should consider:
- Updating my daily planning, by enhancing/changing my current Getting Things Done implementation.
- Introducing some safeguards to assist me in working on the most impactful tasks. e.g. “Saying more No’s”, Delegating work
- Taking a radically different approach than Getting Things Done adopting a different system. That’s under the assumption that the current system has reached its limits.
Documenting the PM journey as it unfolds is quite intriguing! Please share comments and suggestions if you see something useful or a way to help me move forward! Closing with a wish — new year’s goal: Hope next year I’ll have some important updates to share about PM work tasks!
Until next time! 👋
