To Be A Product Manager | Day 55

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

Welcome to Day 55 of

To Be A Product Manager

Today is a big day for me. I joined this startup 3 months ago, and there’re actually many things that make our company stand out from the rest. Although we only have 35 people now in Shenzhen office, we still run a systematic management, which means we have weekly sync up, mentoring system and you need to do a presentation to really join this company.

Today, the stage is mine. To be honest, I don’t spend much time preparing for this presentation, because I have written 54 product journals in the past 3 months, documenting what I learn and experience every day. It won’t be a big deal for me.

BTW, I’m a finalist of national public speaking contest. And this time you are facing small group of people, and using your native language, there’s nothing needs to worry about.

However, I did feel a little pressure last night and stay up late practicing for this presentation… 😑

Goals

• Presentation
• Website visual design

Challenges

Like I said, pressure comes to me only right before the presentation. I would say I’m some way a perfectionist, I want to be perfect as much as I could. But what makes me nervous is that, if my presentation is valuable for other colleagues’ time and energy.

So I presented in front of 5 colleagues, our CTO, VP of product, project manager and HRD and a HR. If my presentation is about 15min talk and 15min Q&A, that adds up could be 180 mins. It would not be worth to do it if this process is not helpful for me and other colleagues.

Fortunately, I nailed it. 😎 I was still practicing this morning with my mind map, forgetting a lot of details while rehearsing. But once I was there and in front of people, I feel good.

I was confident and well prepared (at least other believe so), and made some simple jokes along with my speech to entertain people in the room. And the speech went pretty smoothly.

It ends up nobody are interested asking challenging questions during Q&A, there’s only 1 question from our CTO. And I gathered a lot of really valuable feedback from other perspectives.

Happy weekends guys! I’ll see you next Monday.

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

be so good they can’t ignore you.