To Be A Product Manager | Week 24

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

Welcome to Week 24 of

To Be A Product Manager

There’re plenty of things that need to be done this week, and I can say I made a good choice on Monday. This is how I setup my work days:

Monday: Meetings and updates with each team, testing and giving feedback

Tuesday: Finishing up the testing, and diving into the most important task

Wednesday: Keep working on that, don’t get too much distracted by others

Thursday: Receiving feedback for the past 2-day work and improve it, also start testing and giving other people feedback

Friday: Wrap-up meetings, demo updates and review

So in this way, you have almost 2 days that you can focus on things that matters the most and practice your focus mode, then also you also 2 days for multitasking and get shit done. Both of the brain modes are important for us.

I also went to a local Startup Grind event, they invited head of product at Uber Chris Saad to Shenzhen, who is actually having his vacation in HK. After 2 hours waiting, he finally arrived, and I managed to ask him some questions after his sharing.

1. How do you comes up with new ideas and how do you decide what to build?

2. How do explain product management for a 5-year-old kid?

He said it’s easy to come up with ideas, everybody has good ideas, but it’s actually hard to decide what to build. And he always come back to the users and customers, based on the data and statistics, you will always get a satisfying results.

I asked the second question, because I find myself have difficulties explaining my job to someone who are not in the industry and never hear about product management. Chris said product manager is like a film director, which I cannot agree more. But he also said,

Product manager finds things that are not perfect in this world and improves them.

What I accomplish

• CMS update
• live streaming with black magic cameras
• demo test and SOP
• H5 product planning
• Daydream controller learning
• Operations strategy discussion

What I’m pondering

As I started doing research about Daydream platform and controller development, I feel that what I know about Unity and C# language is far not enough for product design, or even some simple mockups.

This might not be what a product manager should care about, but this is what I’m passionate about and consider switching to a product design for VR world in the future, so I’m still thinking about whether I should sign up for VR online course on Udacity, which cost $200 for each 6-month semester.

I tired to find VR development tutorials on youtube and other platform, they are helpful and not systematic enough for me to grasp the language and software.

I will go through a Unity development course, then decide if I should sign up for the VR development course.

My name is Zake Zhang, a VR product manager based in Shenzhen, China. I write weekly product journal and reflection.

Thanks for reading and let’s keep on hacking!

Warm Regards,

Zake

be so good they can’t ignore you.