Issue #5 | How to prioritize "your" work better as a Product Manager?

Best technique I came across to prioritize our own tasks to provide highest Impact and value to our customers and the product.

Hello to all my amazing subscribers 😃🙋‍♂️ Apologies for the mess in the previous e-mail that you received. Good example of how things can go wrong 😅

This edition of newsletter brings you the topic of prioritization of your own tasks as a PM

Prioritizing which problems to solve for customers or feature to build is one of the core part of your role and your success as a PM is defined by those key decisions you make every time for your product.

But when it comes to prioritizing your own tasks, how should a Product Manager approach this?

Work of PMs can get really messy with an outcome close to zero if the PM is not prioritizing his/her own task effectively. You will be fire-fighting most of the times if you are not consciously making those decisions.

I was struggling with this since the start of my work as a PM as it was a new role for me. After the initial days when you are well settled into your team and start working on your product, you find yourself surrounded with lots of tasks, projects or ideas to work on.

You can easily get lost in the midst of all these things, thinking everything is super urgent and needs to be done right away. Next thing you know you find yourself into this ‘Urgency Trap’ and in the end you finish up with incomplete tasks, completed work with no real value and unnecessary task that you really didnt have to do.

‘Urgency Trap’ is not just superficially term used here. In multiple separate experiments conducted to determine how people decide what to work on when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance, researchers observed an interesting pattern.

Our attention is drawn to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that are less urgent even when the less urgent task offers greater rewards. That explains why we are so bad at time and task management.

Now, don’t worry its not all doom and gloom, I have got you guys covered. This whole mess can be solved with this great technique that i came across during my work, which is called Eisenhower Matrix, aka Urgency-Importance Matrix.

Effective prioritization is a hallmark of great PMs. If you want to achieve more, you should be able to tell the difference between what is “urgent” and “important. This is where Eisenhower Matrix can be a super effective.

Now that we have understood why we need this, lets delve right into how to use this technique to achieve the high impact outcomes.

Eisenhower Matrix is a 2X2 matrix (four quadrants) with Urgent and Important on the x and y axis respectively.

• Urgent and Important: Tasks or projects with looming deadlines with a severe effect or consequences on your product or team if not completed as soon as possible.
  Logically, there should be as minimum tasks/projects in this category as possible since the tasks/projects that are super important shouldn’t come to the point of urgency barring few exceptions.

• Important, but NOT Urgent: Tasks or projects that can provide impact or value to our customers or product but doesn’t need to be done right away. Majority of your tasks should lie in this category ideally. It’s best to schedule your work so you’re always ahead of problems, rather than reacting to the latest emergency.

• Urgent, but NOT Important: Tasks in this categories are basically those which we describe as distractions from our work. These tasks are urgent which gives us the impression that they are important, however in the end they provide next to no value to our customers and the product. We need to be very mindful about these tasks are.
  For eg. Meeting invitations with Urgent mark on it without any agenda included in the note falls into this category

• Not Important and Not Urgent: This is where you place time-wasting activities that don’t create literally any impact. They don’t help you build a better product or help your team grow. We need to stay away from these tasks. PERIOD!

Now that we have figured out what these terms means, let’s look into what to do with the tasks that falls into these categories,

Source: todoist

Engaging your energy on the right tasks at the right time is very important and this prioritization technique is all about being mindful of what you are doing with your time and the impact it is going to have in the end as we can all do the dance of being busy but in the end if it doesnt create any value, its just waste of time, isn’t it?

The beautiful part of this technique is not being restricted to Product Management role, or any job role or work for that matter. You can use this technique to organize your activities at home as well. It gives you a direction of where you need to invest your time and energy.

I hope you guys enjoyed reading this and found something interesting that you can apply in your work or life. I really enjoyed writing this article, hopefully it was reflected in the writing. If you had fun reading it and learned something then kindly like this article and share it to your friends or someone who might find it useful. That would be awesome, Really! 😁

Other interesting stuff that i wrote which you might useful, do check them out 🤓

7 Things you must do in the first 6 months of your transition to an early PM role

Awesome Problem Prioritization Framework that can do wonders for your Product-Market Fit