To Be A Product Manager | Week 61

This journal helps me improve 1% every day…

Welcome to Week 61 of

To Be A Product Manager

I’m sitting on the train to a total random place with a random thought. In the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working for 12 days straight, even though the work itself doesn’t provide me any sense of achievement and sort of “happiness”.

A lot of people are asking me, when you don’t have much to do at work, why are you spending your time in the office? Isn’t it better or even make you feel happier to hang out more and start doing the things you always want to try?

I think this is definitely a great idea. You get paid without doing a lot of hard work and pressure, simply following the working hours and no one really gives a fuck about what you do besides the stuff you supposed to finish. Enjoy your life in your 20s the same way people do in their 80s, you just have so many possibilities to outplay any of the old.

This is what I was thinking in the past couple days, and could be what I would tell a friend to do with the same situation. However when it is yourself stuck in this rut, I found myself see it another way.

I just simply cannot stand myself not achieving anything. I can still keep working on my side projects, taking photos, making short films, crafting my thoughts and doing podcast, but I’m feeling something just left off, it is just not right.

Last night, I went for some drinks with a girl I met through my blog. She asked,

What is your ultimate goal? Or who do you want to be ultimately?

I want to be myself with a doubt, but who are you? With some alchohol rushing through my head, my mind seems to work more efficient than the usual. I realized ultimately, I have no interest in being a product manager, you life cannot be defined by a position that we create overtime. It should be something related to our human existence, the fundamentals.

It might sound cliche or boring, but I did say,

I want to be a father, the best I can be.

Spending time with my own child and family is the best thing in this world I could ask for and think of right now. And all my efforts seem to make sense.

I document with words, audio, photos and videos, because I want to share with my child the world before his/her arrival.

I work hard and look for tough challenges, because I want to share with them my personal experiences so they know from the very beginning to work hard for themselves.

I want to grow as fast as I can, physically mentally and financially, until I’m total in control of my own life, giving them my time and embracing them in the best way possible.

I try to learn everything myself so I can be their teacher from 0–5, providing the best family education, which ignored by most of the parents.

I want to give them love in the way they are able to feel it, comfortable with, and pass on to others.

And I know it takes a long road, before being a great father, you need to learn to be a good product manager (my career wise), to be a good boyfriend and husband. And it all takes a lot of work, just as the way we are treating exams and work. You need to work on it every day to become better at it.

What I’m doing

Putting away all the dissatisfaction and complaints, I also started to accept and the facts and see what I can do with it. Each company will have its own problems, and I think it’s the employees’ responsibility to accept and adapt to different situation, finishing the work while improving themselves. The key problem left is,

Are these problems in the way of where you want to go?

If yes, you have to take actions right away, including looking for new opportunities and learn other companies carefully.

Apart from that, I started to get involved in developing demo with Unity3D engine and learn to do 3D sticker with Facebook AR Studio and SnapChat Lens Studio, with the video tutorials on Youtube and official websites, got some demo selected and discussed, but the low efficiency will kill those ideas, from my perspective.

During the company’s all hands on deck meeting, I remembered a guy from arts/painting department talking about the misunderstanding between them and product, marketing team. And I think the best way to solve this problem is to leverage the quality of ideas, and cut down the quantities. Every idea needs to be illustrate with a demo or at least a video, making every body come to an agreement on the ideal design, interaction and expecting outcomes.

This may help a bit to solve the current problem, but not fundamentally. And I don’t want to waste time on hearing or solving this kind of office unhealthy relationship in the next couple years.

You are who you are surrounding yourself with, and I cannot stay at this place for long.

Sorry, when my daily work doesn’t go well, I write more about self awareness and self exploration. Should I change my product journal series to “To Be A Fabulous Father”, let me know your thoughts haha. 😂

My name is Zake Zhang, a 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