To Be A Product Manager | Week 36

02-03

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

Welcome to Week 36 of

To Be A Product Manager

I actually forgot to write weekly journal last night. And after I had a wisdom tooth pulled out this morning, I went home and took a nap. Now waking up with a even more serious pain and fatigue, I don』t want to do anything.

But unconsciously I packed up my stuff and now I』m sitting in the office writing this weekly journal. Hope I can publish this journal soon and then finish the blog video editing.

This week I had a 1on1 conversation with my mentor at this startup, which helps me get a lot of clarity of product manager』s role and responsibilities at my current level. I』ll talk about this in the last section.

Meanwhile I finished my first original rap song. On Sep 21, I saw a guy document his learning process for freestyle rap, and I really thought is was a super cool idea and started to do one of my own.

I practice 30 min every day after I get home from office, then this month I also saw a guy get a job at GaryVee with a original rap resume. So I end up also thinking about write a rap to complete this 30-day challenge.

https://soundcloud.com/axlrosejetz/24-zake-zhang

What I accomplish

demo app updates and planning
algorithms comparsion
revise website copywriting and communication design

What I』m pondering

The conversation with my mentor is really helpful. Tencent has a document for leveling people at each stage. And for each stage, there』re 3 levels and every level also requires different main responsibilities. For example, recent graduate are required more on the execution and learning ability, while 1–2 year experience PM are required on creative solutions and business development.

He said I』m currently on the 2.1 level, my growing is faster than the most of PMs. Usually it takes 4–5 years to move to level 3.1 from level 2.1, but I hope I can reach 3.1 before 2020.

Then we also talked about the role I should be in now, which is pushing the product and team move forward. So the main responsibility for me is to communicate with everybody in this team, and make sure we are pushing to the same direction. It』s not execution and anymore.

You will feel you haven』t achieved anything during a week, but the development progress are depending on my efforts. As I said in the last week journal, I』m almost handling all the product lines at this startup, which give my mentor and CPO huge amount of time to do business development in other cities.

Feel good and amped for the rest of 2017!

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.