Actionable Daily/Weekly/Monthly Goals for Being a Good Product Manager

I wrote this post after reading Ben Horowitz's work. I'm really hoping to open this up into a wider discussion to continue to refine these ideas and see if resonates with fellow Product Managers out there. Would love feedback!

Really enjoyed the post. I was surprised when I was given the task of doing product management (along with my dev job) that the resources were extremely poor. Everything just says "talk to customers, listen to customers, etc. etc".

Though Chad also mentions those things, it isn't the top priority.

I came up with a solution that worked for our team which was seriously struggling with focusing on priorities (which is why they asked me to take product management from the CEO).

I came up with 5 questions that we'd answer in our planning meetings, which were supposed to happen every other week, but realistically was about once a month.

1) are we living up to our promises

2) are we able to demo the app effectively and get customers to imagine themselves using it and understanding what it can do for them

3) is anything holding back sales

4) what are our upcoming company milestones, and what does development need to do to accomplish these

5) is there anything else we'd personally like to see or play with.

The first question was measuring us against our mission statement. This will be different for every company, but I found it to be an amazing question because we had a security focus as part of our key values and yet we had a fairly large security hole in our product. This being the first question meant that our promise to our customers was our priority.

The second question about demoing was pretty self explanatory. It wasn't just 'demo' could people come to our website and understand what we do and why they need it. It was the pre-sales and if a feature was missing that would help people see what we could do for them, that is where this got picked up.

Then came the actual sale. This included the ability for a customer to complete a sale, but also feature requests that customers may have brought up where the missing feature was preventing us from gaining a customer. Note: this is different from a feature which is preventing a customer from understanding how our product would help them.

Some may find it strange that we prioritized demo over sale, but we were focusing on customer acquisition growth, not sales growth at the time.

The business goals was a bit non-obvious. For instance we had an important meeting where we needed to show a certain capability to an investor. This wasn't a customer, and was de-prioritized over sales, but these sorts of things need to be captured. This question also catches things like upcoming conferences where we may need a special marketing page, etc. etc.

Anything else. This is 'play time', and to be honest we rarely had any time to put things in this bucket. We normally looked at the list of things to do and went "we've got weeks of work that take priority over anything else we want to do, so customer take priority".

Once we had our tasks from each of the questions, we would do a quick prioritization plan on them, but with the general understanding that the order of the questions had already done the majority of priority planning for us.

I think we had some success with this model, but keen to hear what others have tried as I've just stepped into a new role as PM/Dev.