#ProductDiaries is a documented series of my experience as a product manager — what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and what I’m changing.
What I did:
3/5 weekday mornings, we have a team standup where everyone (including design and product management) updates what they’re working on on our standup board and verbally relays that to the group on the call. Our dev of the week (dev on call) runs the standup calling our names in the order they appear on the board. We can also ask questions / for context on anything others are working on.
Why I did it:
This a good opportunity to know how developers working on projects I’ve spec’d are progressing as well as keep up with delays or issues. Once a project launches, I’ll know to then go monitor the cohorting of the experiment and set up analysis for results which I will then later share with the team and the product org in an experiment readout.
What I would do better:
I first learned of standup when I was in a software engineering bootcamp. I found it valuable to keep me accountable since we were all working through the same curriculum and I could hear how others were moving along while having the space to ask for help where I’m stuck.
In the context of working as a product manager however, I struggle to find the value of showing up every morning only to say I’m still drafting the same document I was drafting at the last standup; it seems like a more valuable space for engineering than for product. Accordingly, like yesterday, I am sometimes the only product person (across product management and design) who shows up.
It’s helpful for me when a developer says they’re running into an issue with something but given that I also have weekly project syncs with engineering and design for each project, standup seems to serve less value.
I think that I need to ask our dev team what value they get out of product and design participating in standup.
