To Be A Product Manager | Day 53

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

3 min readApr 5, 2017

Welcome to Day 53 of

To Be A Product Manager

Welcome back to To Be A Product Manager Day 53! After a short traditional Chinese holiday, I feel amplified and happy to get back to work today.

I hosted a Korean journalist who comes from Shanghai and speaks perfect Mandarin. We had some deep conversations about life and work, and both of us feel lucky and inspired by the other. Read her article about me here.

With some new friends I made from couchsurfing, for the first time I also traveled in Shenzhen, and got to know more about the city. I took some pictures for them and we also had a great time together. (food especially)

What’s more, I didn’t stop working on VR. With an example from Pavlov (VR Counter Strike game), I made a video in Chinese about VR content, and explain what should be the real VR content.

However I didn’t finish my monthly review, and this week I’m busy with an important presentation, so you probably won’t see it until next week.

Goals

Learn livestream back system document
SDK feature list
Presentation preparation

What’s good

In the morning after a weekly check-in meeting, I was lost for a while because it seems like I don’t have new tasks to do for the rest of days this week. But then my mentor gave me a lot of small tasks that require research and communication, which got me running.

I feel better and better later today because of some really nice conversations.

1. SDK features discussion

Because I am the one who did the research and create this list, I talked at the most of time and collected feedback and suggestions from my mentor and product director.

I was happy that I had some conversations with engineering team and made some changes to the original version. Tomorrow we will discuss this list with engineering team and put into development.

2. Website design discussion

This idea of this discussion comes from a conversation with my mentor last week. He suggests that I should share the updated product design and visual effect with whole product team on time.

With that, he means before group discussion, I should make sure everyone have a general idea of current design, and we can start the meeting with what we have right now.

3. Dinner talk with colleague

I usually have dinner myself and watch some videos on Youtube like the daily show or tech interviews. Today I had a conversation with my colleague from operations team.

I stayed there for awhile after the dinner, because he’s asking really valuable questions like:

How do you make difficult decisions or choices?
What does your morning routine look like and how do you keep that?
Have you ever felt being challenged by something more important than your daily goals?

My answer to the last question is kind of funny, I said, “that’s a really good question, I never thought about that… but I guess no, maybe it is because I don’t have… don’t have a girlfriend?” 🙃

My name is Zake Zhang, a newbie VR product manager based in Shenzhen, China. I’m thinking what if I write daily product journal for 1,000 days?

Thanks for reading and let’s keep on hacking!

Warm Regards,

Zake