To Be A Product Manager | Week 40

01-29

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

Welcome to Week 40 of

To Be A Product Manager

To start with my 40th weekly product journal, I』m going to attach this video here. As I talked a lot in the past 2 weeks, I posted this video last Saturday night, and surprisingly got over 12,000 views here.

And what』s even unexpected is that, on Wednesday morning, when I was about to enter the swimming pool gate, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, 「hey man, I』ve watched your video on acfun, a day as a product manager, I』m also a product manager…」

Those small random things together make your life a way much interesting.

On Monday, when we are having weekly meeting, product director pointed out that the communication between different teams are not ideal, they are always arguing with each other on features and user experience, and if you dug deeper about this problem, it all goes to the product manager.

Product manager should not only prioritize, but also always over communicate with different teams, making sure everyone are on the same page and work towards the same goal.

As I mentioned before, currently I』m taking responsibility for all the product lines, and my mentor and product director are spending more time on business cooperations.

Although I』m pretty tied up every day, I have a feeling of not achieving anything every time when I sit down on Friday night and write this journal.

So I always want to make sure that I actually do stuff every week. The development team might not have time to work on our GearVR demo currently, and I volunteered to try improving 3D environment and playback in Unity. This thing may keep me even busy, but eventually I miss the most important thing as a product manager, over communication.

So the rest of November, I won』t try other things during my working hours, but manage all the products and make sure people are working happily with each other.

What I accomplish

mobile website launching
CMS, html VR player product planning
demo testing

What I』m pondering

I asked myself a simple question this week:

Am I happy doing what I do?

This is a really difficult question to give a yes or no answer. However, I asked myself another question:

What makes me happy while doing it?

And I write down things I enjoy doing very quickly,

1. writing and blogging
2. filmmaking and video editing
3. tech devices (phones, laptops, drones, VR/AR)

Although I picked product management as my first formal job, there』re still a lot of experiences waiting for me to try and learn. So why not go all in fighting to be the guy you want to be, and do things you want to do. Why not trying to be a self-employed filmmaker, writer and tech enthusiast.

What I can do right now, is to shoot and edit as many videos as I can, write as many words as I can and learn as much as I can about new technology.

Life cannot be decided by a single job opportunity, the more is yet to come.

My name is Zake Zhang, a VR product manager based in Shenzhen, China. I write weekly product journal and reflection.

Thanks for reading and let』s keep on hacking!

Warm Regards,

Zake

be so good they can』t ignore you.