To Be A Product Manager | Week 65
This journal helps me improve 1% every day…
Welcome to Week 65 of
To Be A Product Manager
This week I spent the first 3 days as a short business trip in Taipei, and another 2 days in Shenzhen HQ. As I’ve spent more time with colleagues, chatting, eating and working together, I’m picking up more and more sense of belonging.
This is what I don’t have at Bytedance during the short 2-month stay. The product team seem to be separated by other departments and the only people you can talk to, are people sitting around you.
I find it to be really important at work, if people can have that sense of belonging at office, what’t the point of asking people to work at one place? You could all work from home and never talk to each other.
Last week I updated Gallery app for OnePlus devices on Google Play Store, also I was following the flagship smartphone cameras image quality blind test I posted a week ago in OnePlus forum, which attracted 1,000 people joined the test.
Surprisingly OnePlus 6 gets the first place in overall ranking. (We put it side by side with iPhoneX, Google Pixel2 XL and Samsung S9+) Before joining OnePlus, I always believe that my Pixel2 has the best image quality on the market right now, but without manual adjustments, in some scenes iPhoneX and OnePlus 6 do stand out.
We are aware that OnePlus definitely does not have the resources like Apple and Google, but what we’re trying to do here is that, collecting people’s feedback and preferences about image quality and post rendering, so we could focus on give customers what they want to see, not just the professional DxO marks.
A phone could have awesome DxO mark, while the image quality is a piece of shit.
The marks are for references, you have to see for yourself for getting a camera that really suits your taste.
The meetings are still not efficient and time consuming, I think management leaders definitely share a huge responsibility here.
They are very busy, I could easily tell, but they are also letting these meaningless meetings happen, because sometimes when the company is growing bigger, more people and teams are involved in a single meeting, and most of time, the meeting itself is only important for 4–6 people who are directly related.
Say if you are asking 10 people for a 3-hour long meeting, and it only has something to do with 3 of them once at a time, you are wasting another 6 people * 3h, that’s 18 working hours!
I don’t think I would have enough power to change the whole environment, but at least I’m trying to set an example. When I have something to say or present during the meeting, I usually start with a detail time schedule, for example,
(Topics, output and purpose)
In this meeting, we are / I am going to talk about …, and we are hoping to get a final results on …, so that we can …(Timetable)
I’m going to use 5 mins to do …, then 15 mins to do …, finally 10 mins for … The whole meeting will no longer take us more than 30 mins, sounds good? Now let’s started.
This is the most efficient way I’ve discovered so far and I learned this from my professional world class mentors at Watson University. Shout out for Watson 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
