Product managers often have to cover a wide range of duties including product marketing, program management, and technical product ownership, but one thing that PMs are uniquely suited to own is strategy. Specifically, writing strategy that can guide difficult product decisions. Strategy docs should be full of quantitative and qualitative data gathered from customers and prospects, they should lay out a clear vision that requires no additional context, and they should be haiku-level concise, for rapid ingestion. This type of writing takes research, practice, and a lot of time.
Each of the PMs I manage owns a shared document that we use to prioritize their work. This way I can help them reserve enough time to write strategy. We always use a template consisting of three sections:
- Strategic priorities
- Tactical tasks
- Operational duties
In the strategic priorities section, I ask them to list, in order, their top 3-5 strategic priorities with next-action dates and completion estimates attached. These could be strategy papers, product launches, partnership agreements, or any other number of “needle moving” objectives. Strategic priorities should always be in service of hard decisions or a measurable key result for the business.
Tactical tasks are urgent, important, objectives that can typically be accomplished in under two weeks. PMs with high ownership know that sometimes the business needs something done quickly and as the person with a conjunction of technical and customer knowledge, they can accomplish the task fastest.
Operational duties are ongoing responsibilities such as reporting, meetings, and people management. These are tracked mainly to understand the amount of time they are taking up on an ongoing basis. PMs often end up with operational duties that should be handed on or scaled back over time. As a rule of thumb, PMs should spend less than 30% of their time on operational duties.
Success for product managers is best measured business outcomes that play out over years. In that time, it is the strategic priorities that will have the most impact.
We then review the shared prioritization doc together each 1:1. When used effectively, a priority review should only take 5-15 minutes, reserving the rest of the time for career development and support. Planning and insights from individual priority docs can feed business reporting, performance assessments, and promotion docs, significantly lowering the reporting load for both the manager and the PM.
Managing a whole team of PMs this way can make it very easy to report on all of the upcoming hard decisions and strategic objectives. Managers who ensure that their PMs have well prioritized, impactful, goals and the time to focus on them will keep PMs longer and maximize outcomes for the business.