The product manager’s work diary

When I started working at VMware right out of business school, I was determined to learn from my career mistakes in the past and use my newfound knowledge to do things the right way.

As a 21-year old fresh out of undergrad, I threw myself into the wild, wild west of tech startups in India. And trust me when I say the startup scene in India was in its infancy at the time compared to Silicon Valley. College taught me many things, but what it didn’t teach me was how to succeed in the workplace.

Something I learnt the hard way, after three years of making the same mistakes over and over again was to always document my work. Let me explain.

Why should you document your work day?

• When I was applying for an MBA program, I was about a year and a half into my job as a software engineer. Learning how to code on the job was such a stressful experience, my brain somehow redacted those memories. I had such a hard time recollecting all the projects I worked on, the timelines, and my achievements
• After I realized I wanted to switch from engineering to product management, I took on a lot of PM-type tasks in my attempt to ease the transition. But of course, when the time came to interview for product manager roles, I couldn’t remember any of the unbidden PM work I had done

How can you document your work day?

My solution to this problem is to document every single day of work. It kinda looks like this.

• I use OneNote and it works well for me, but really any notes app should work. I group my notes by day, month, and year
• I will usually fill out my notes for the day once or twice a day (middle of my work day and/or the end of it)
• Structurally, I spend most of my day in meetings so I will typically use my Outlook calendar to section my notes (Meeting 1, 2, 3 etc. but more aptly named of course)
• For each meeting, I record the situation being discussed and the outcome of the meeting. I also like to write down action items so I can check them off my list when I do them, as well as highlight sections that I might want to reference later
• For the minuscule part of my day not spent in meetings where I get actual work done, I just write down what I did (typically these include creating epics in JIRA, replying to emails, reviewing mocks, writing product requirements)
• I don’t spend more than 15 minutes of my day to do this (and if I did, it wouldn’t be worth it)

What are the benefits?

Apart from the obvious benefits of tracking my work, this has helped me

• Be a lot more accountable. Sending out meeting notes after a meeting isn’t common practice, so it helps to document all of my action items so I can make sure I follow through. This has helped me earn the trust of my team – I usually do what I say I will do
• Account for where I’m spending my time. If I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time working on something that isn’t a priority, I know it’s time to reevaluate
• I know when I want to ask for a raise or a promotion, I can go back in time to see all the projects I’ve worked on, and all the features I shipped
• More importantly though, there’s a lot of minutiae that I do as a product manager that goes under the radar. But without someone doing this work, no product would succeed. This includes things like replying to product queries on Slack, creating and monitoring telemetry reports, lining up blog content pre-launch, and the list goes on. A lot of this never gets captured in emails or discussed in 1-on-1s, so tangibly writing it down helps maintain a record for the future
• I love the personal satisfaction of looking back and seeing how much I’ve grown and accomplished over the years

Final takeaways

I highly encourage anyone starting out in product management to document their day. It is hard, especially for early to mid-career product managers to claim credit for anything given the nature of this role. This is a simple tool to quantify your contributions credibly if you ever need to.