Balancing Product Management and a Newsletter
Using the Newsletter as a Training Ground for Improving Skills
It started with a challenge from a product manager that writes a newsletter …
The question is how to handle a newsletter while being a full-time product manager. Like many jobs today, a product manager needs to dedicate 45+ hours a week to their job. Plus time to think about relationship building, customer conversations, and prioritizing investments. On top of this, product managers need to continuously learn new technologies, leadership techniques, and best practices.
On the other hand, you risk burnout and health issues if you overdo your daily job and squeeze out family, friends, and leisure time.
My way of handling the time conflict between a full-time job and a newsletter is to run the newsletter like a product. This way I use the newsletter as a training vehicle for improving my product management skills.
The Newsletter Process
My major process steps to generate a weekly newsletter are:
Read about product management, leadership, and technology
Reflect on the events of the week
Practice communication skills
Find someone to help
Measure the results
Plan the next week
Repeat
Here is more detail on the process steps:
This process goes in the background. When I have small chunks of time I have something ready to go.
Newsletter as a Product
The product effort wraps around this weekly process. While the process is fairly mechanical, I need to think about how to make the newsletter product available to current and new readers. The product efforts consist of:
Roles in the product: marketing, developing, managing
Investment levels: time on execution vs planning vs researching
Direction: overall goals and prioritization
These product efforts have given a new purpose to learning product leadership skills! There are many opportunities to learn skills by researching and observing others. In my regular product management role, I have minimal opportunity to consider marketing challenges and investment levels. In a similar manner, my strategic efforts take years to play out.
On the flip side, I'm expected to continuously improve my product leadership skills. This newsletter provides many learning opportunities:
Communication skills
Strategic thinking
Marketing
Analytics
Leadership
All of these are the usual improvement areas for a product manager.
Conclusion
Handling the newsletter as a product gives a broader product experience with faster feedback. Also, the newsletter process is a great way to work out the challenging events and dramas of being a product manager.
Interesting links:
Digital marketing for product managers Overview of the many ways for marketers to reach their audience. This article covers topics such as Search Engine Marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Digital Marketers can teach product managers a lot!
Product Management on Reddit Great place to drop in and see what other product managers are doing.
It's always inspiring and helpful to understand the publication process of other writers. Specially if they have full time job as a PM! Thanks for these tips, Amy.
Love this Amy! One of the things I haven’t cracked the nut related to this yet is...what’s the best way to get feedback on what’s working and what to tweak and iterate on. Hoping to test some things soon. Keep up the great work!