From reactive to proactive

How Product Managers can get beyond putting out fires

Imagine this: it’s another day at the office. The past few months have been a whirlwind, just like the ones before, but the weekend is just around the corner. It’s a rare quiet day, and thanks to sacrificing your day off, you finally feel like you’ve extinguished all the fires that were threatening to consume your work.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, then great! If only we could all be so lucky. Or is it luck at all?

As Product Managers, we often deal with urgent tasks requiring our immediate attention. Depending on where you work, this could be near the end of a planning session, right before a sprint, or the start of a new quarter. In a struggling company, this could be a daily occurrence.

When you finally get a break, it's not always obvious what to work on next. This isn’t all your fault; this job can sometimes take a lot out of you. Every one of us can do more to improve how our organization prepares, and we can start working further ahead to avoid getting into these situations in the future. It takes time, no doubt, but whenever you can, it pays to invest the time from these small breaks wisely by making your job easier.

Here are some of my tried-and-tested methods for reclaiming your time. Once you've managed to clear a few tasks from your to-do list, you’ll find yourself with more breathing room to focus on enhancing your productivity and, for once, getting ahead of your work.

1. Plan next week: Get ahead of the work and block out time on your calendar before it fills up with meetings.

2. Write down your key objectives: Knowing your priorities will help you filter out what’s important and what’s not. Are all these fires critical, or can some of these things wait?

3. Review each of your projects: We often have many projects on the go; there’s likely something on the back burner that could use your attention, and if it doesn’t get it now, it will turn into another fire.

4. Delegate and empower: Even if you’re not a director, there are likely things you’re doing that are better suited to engineering, marketing, or another team member.

5. Backlog grooming or cycle planning: Start planning your next sprint or cycle now. Lay the groundwork for the rest of the team so they’re not waiting on you. This gives you more time to work on some of the more time-consuming initiatives later.

6. Educational content: Create a slide deck for a lunch and learn, teaching others about your product or processes, create fact sheets for the sales team, etc. This can help reduce the number of questions you might get asked daily.

More time-consuming but equally as important are the more involved things you can do to retake control of your time. You can work on these things after you free up some time with the quick wins above. Leverage tools like Zapier, GPT, BigQuery, and Google Workspace where you can to:

1. Automate something time-consuming: Is there a weekly or monthly report, presentation, or task you must complete often? How can GPT or Gemini help? Can you pull your data into Looker Studio and automate a report?

2. Review and update templates: Does your PRD need a new section for testing so that it’s not overlooked? There are things you can do at this stage to prevent future fires.

3. Improve communication processes and channels: Consistency in when and where information is available will improve collaboration, prevent unnecessary questions, and help keep things on track.

4. Improve monitoring and analytics: Like the smoke alarms in your home, monitoring and good analytics can help alert you to fires before they grow out of control.

5. Read and update documentation: This is especially helpful if there are new people joining your company. This is an opportunity to help shape them and their understanding of how your department operates. You can prevent a lot of fires this way.

6. Conduct regular retrospectives: If you’re constantly putting out fires, you and your team(s) must review how things are going. Where could things be improved? What is engineering lacking? What led to these issues in the first place?

7. Review and update processes: Whether it’s a process that’s not working or one that could be improved, it’s worth reviewing, updating, and re-sharing this information.

Having to put out fires shouldn’t turn your day from good to bad. After all, we do need firefighters. If that’s part of your job, then doing some of the above things will help ensure you’re not working on things that could have been avoided (think fire safety) and allow you to focus your attention where it’s needed.

My most drastic success story with this was early in my career when I worked not in Product Management, but at a local college as the studio manager for their Photography program. I eliminated 50% of my job with a booking system, an automated printing system, and a cheap fix that eliminated 95% of our repairs. Most of what was left was hands-on demonstrations, helping students one-on-one with their projects (which typically meant firefighting with them), and continuing improvements/enhanced services. This was great because that’s the part of the job I loved the most and where I could have the most impact.

What’s your firefighting story? Can you take control of the situation and start preventing unnecessary fires?