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Thread on personal knowledge management for product managers.
Product Managers process several terabytes of information on a weekly basis in the form of customer calls, Jira tickets, Slack messages, et al.
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Product Managers process several terabytes of information on a weekly basis in the form of customer calls, Jira tickets, Slack messages, et al.
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PM are also famously expected to multi-task (not multi-focus). Decision fatigue can get real and memory, long-form docs or comments in code can only help so much. Every pm needs a personal, private kms. More about this later. Here are eight docs that help me day to day:
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[1] Userguide - this is a readme file for others to better understand how to best engage, communicate and work with you. It helps them understand your preferred focus work hours and feedback style. @joulee speaks about these a lot across her content - https://lg.substack.com/p/the-looking-glass-a-user-guide-to
3/10">https://lg.substack.com/p/the-loo...
3/10">https://lg.substack.com/p/the-loo...
[2] Brag Doc - as we make progress we forget our wins. Having a record of wins not only help boost morale when we hit a low but also help w/ perf. review convos. I used to keep a running list of milestones but @n2parko shared a better structure - https://jvns.ca/blog/brag-documents/
4/10">https://jvns.ca/blog/brag...
4/10">https://jvns.ca/blog/brag...
[3] Hype Doc - this is a brag doc for your product eng team. This is similar in structure to the Brag Doc but focuses on the team as a whole and their achievements such as customer wins, +ive feedback from GTM, major ships
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[4] Weekly Plans - every Monday I send and email to the prod, pmm, design, eng folks I am directly working with on projects. It includes: plan for week, progress from prev. week and 1 takeaway from a book I am reading. @calvinfo wrote about it here- https://calv.info/the-secret-of-the-weekplan
6/10">https://calv.info/the-secre...
6/10">https://calv.info/the-secre...
[5] Customer Logs - as a pm you talk to customers all the time. It is much easier to maintain a single doc per customer so that you can add key bullets under a date for each meeting you have. This helps maintain context and trace if issue from a customer gets escalated
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[6] Product Gaps - backlogs are great and all but you really need a personal diary of things you see as gaps and want to improve in the product you own. I just maintain a live doc with dates as headings and bullets w/ new ideas, feature requests, ignored issues, et al
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[7] Ecosystem Updates - I love consumer privacy and every single thing Apple has been doing. I maintain an open, running log of all industry developments around topics that impacts my product area or ecosystem at large (CDP for Segment)
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[8] Metrics Updates - this a document you can share with your team weekly summarizing metrics, new customer asks and summaries from calls w/ customer from prev week. It helps provide everyone the same context around progress. Kudos @ntindbaek for introducing this to me
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What product docs do you maintain for yourself?
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