Saving time is a challenge for everyone, and based on my experience as a product manager, even doubly so. Constantly being interrupted, sales and executives injecting requests into our roadmap, hundreds of emails a day and never enough time to talk to customers.

Brian did a great job with some tips on saving time during this webinar. If you didn't have a chance to join us, we've made both the slides and the recorded webinar available.

FeaturePlan is designed to help product managers get a handle on all their different activities, and across the entire ecosystem working with engineering, sales, marketing, etc…

Curious to find out how? Contact us for a live demo and start saving time today!

There were a few questions that we didn’t have time to answer during the webinar that I want to follow up with here.

Q. Isn't staying out of email threads (and saving time) devaluing your opinion and wasting the time of the rest of your staff?

A. Depends on how issues are resolved. Many times if the boss answers an email, it stops others from contributing, yes, but it also tends to require the boss to always answer an email to get a resolution. Compare this to the many email threads to resolve themselves, creating much more self-sufficient team members.

Q. How do you prioritize tasks that will definitely take more than one day to achieve (eg. developing collateral, presentations, business cases, etc…)

A. This applies to product management as well as others, like marketing. A great example is bucketing the items, and allocating a fixed amount of time each day to handle the larger term projects. This way you know you will be able to tackle a certain amount of hours a day on the longer term projects, while being on top of the hot items for the day. If you have a number of projects that will take more than one day to achieve, then try to interweave two or three projects over a period of time (and prioritize projects as groups).

Q. What's your recommendation for handling "enhancement" requests that are not based on market research etc., but rather VIP status.

A. Always have market data, and a product roadmap. Show what tradeoffs will happen if you do what the VIP was requesting. Hard to do with word and excel, very easy to do with a software like FeaturePlan, hence the reason so many people buy a product management software to handle it. VIP’s become very manageable when shown the impact and options on the table. Always provide a solution, never just complain about a problem.

What are your thoughts?