Slice of Life: B2B Product Managers
Contrary to popular belief, product management comes in many different flavors. As an example, business-to-consumer (B2C) products are vastly different from business-to-business (B2B) products, scaling an existing product is vastly different from launching a new product, and working in a startup is vastly different from working in a large company.
To help provide insight into one kind of product management, I’d like to share a slice of life from one of my B2B PM roles. The key theme to keep in mind is that in B2B, we have to simultaneously serve two distinct customer segments:
End users who use the product in their day-to-day jobs
Decision-makers who determine which features to purchase and whether they’re interested in renewing their contracts with us.
Of course, the exciting thing about product management is that every single day is different! The slice of life I’m providing below is just one example of what a B2B product manager’s schedule and responsibilities are. For context, this slice of life came from my time working in real estate tech at a mid-stage company that was later acquired by a larger company.
7:30 AM: I wake up and pour myself a cup of coffee, then I do some light physical exercise and write in my journal to get myself into the right mindset for the day.
8:00 AM: I head out to catch my bus. While I’m on the bus, I read First Round Review articles that discuss how other people build successful products.
8:30 AM: I arrive at the office. I grab breakfast, review my goals for the day, and check to see if any of our metric dashboards are showing any hiccups. I see that our overall engagement metrics are steady and that one of our UX experiments is yielding promising initial results.
9:00 AM: We have a new client onboarding today, so I review the onboarding flow before joining the meeting remotely. I introduce myself as the product manager who will continue to make investments on their behalf based on their feedback and pain points. This personal intro is important because we want our customers to understand that there are real people behind our product who are actively taking care of their needs and priorities.
9:45 AM: After the onboarding meeting, I debrief with customer success reps to gather any additional observations and suggestions for improving the onboarding process. This feedback helps us further strengthen our overall customer experience and gives me insight into how to better position my products.
10:00 AM: I have a group of engineers, designers, and QA analysts who are colocated (i.e. they work from the same office that I do), and I have a separate group of engineers who work in China and India. I run a stand-up meeting alongside my colocated engineers, designers, and QA analysts. I reiterate the goals for the sprint, then we review each person’s progress and any new blockers that have come up. These stand-ups help keep everyone aligned and focused.
10:15 AM: I check Slack for any urgent notifications or messages, and I check my email inbox to see what’s come in since yesterday night. I follow Inbox Zero principles to keep my inbox organized and to make sure I don’t drop the ball on any tasks. I put my open action items into Trello so that I know what’s left to do for the day.
10:30 AM: We have a product org sprint review scheduled later in the day to discuss any dependencies and ensure alignment with business priorities. I review tickets where I depend on other PMs, and I share progress on tickets where other PMs depend on me and my team.
11:00 AM: I shadow a sales call with a potential new customer, listening silently to understand their pain points, their goals, and their concerns. I document these learnings to consolidate and share with stakeholders later.
11:30 AM: I gather data from Google Analytics and SQL on product usage and analyze our metric dashboards to prepare for our monthly stakeholder meeting in a couple of days. These insights provide a comprehensive overview of how we're performing and guide our future growth strategies.
12:00 PM: It's lunchtime! I make sure to step away from my desk and have lunch in the cafeteria. While I’m an introvert, I know it’s important to have conversations with colleagues from different departments so that we can share ideas, insights, and suggestions. On busier days, I might be eating at my desk, but thankfully today isn’t that hectic.
1:00 PM: We conduct the product sprint review with other product managers. We discuss product org goals for the sprint, provide insights into the next sprint, and address any dependencies. We come out of this meeting with alignment and clear priorities.
2:00 PM: My designer and I work on user experience flows for upcoming features. We want to stay ahead from a design perspective to ensure a smooth user experience. Our goal isn’t to create flashy features; instead, our goal is to ensure that our solution seamlessly fits in with our customers’ existing processes and makes it easy for them to adopt our product.
3:00 PM: I take a 15-minute walk to clear my mind and recharge. It helps me stay focused and productive throughout the day.
3:15 PM: My manager pings me to ask about a recent customer escalation. Our customers had the wrong expectations about our product due to some miscommunication between our sales team and our product team. I share our retrospective document on how we resolved this customer issue between sales and product, and I highlight the remaining action items to take to ensure this kind of problem doesn’t happen again in the future.
3:30 PM: One of my engineers has scheduled a jam session with me, where we sit down to run through their proposed implementation of a particularly complex workflow. She walks me through each step of the workflow and calls out areas that require significant effort. We jointly agree that we should probably remove microanimations: these are delightful, but they require more than one month of work. I reach out to my design counterpart to get their thoughts, and they confirm that we should kick this work into the backlog. I update the product spec to document this decision.
4:30 PM: I review my day, assess if I met my goals, and log feedback for myself into a Google Sheet. I check my calendar for the next day, plan my goals for tomorrow, and block off focused time where needed. Tomorrow, I’m going to travel to one of my customers’ offices to dig deep into their current workflows and tech stack, and my goal is to identify how to best integrate one of our new features into their workflow.
5:00 PM: It's time to head home, though my day isn’t quite done yet. I still have a quarterly review meeting with my remote engineers in India and China, and that’s going to happen at 9 PM tonight. I catch the bus and respond to personal texts.
5:30 PM: I get home and take a shower.
6:00 PM: I nap for an hour.
7:00 PM: My wife and I make dinner, and we watch TV together.
8:30 PM: I review our product’s quarterly goals and my rationale for setting these goals. I do a quick test run of my presentation materials, and I check that my home setup is ready to go for the upcoming meeting.
9:00 PM: I hop onto a Microsoft Teams call with my India and China counterparts, and I share my screen while I talk through our performance in the last quarter, our goals for the next quarter, how our work fits into the company’s overall strategy, and insights from customers. I answer questions about real estate in the United States to provide some more background for my devs. We then do a quick stand-up to share progress and blockers, and I call out specific tickets where my colocated team has unblocked progress for my remote team.
10:00 PM: Whew, that’s a wrap! I go on a night time stroll in our neighborhood park with my wife, and we decompress with jokes and stories about our day.
10:30 PM: I turn in for the night.
So there you have it - a day in the life from the perspective of a B2B product manager!
The fun part about product management is that each day brings new challenges and opportunities to serve our customers and drive the success of our products.
I hope this slice of life gives you clearer insight into what product management might look like in practice. If you’re curious to learn more about day-to-day product management, check out our Monthly PM Masterclasses for insights on key PM topics.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this article possible.
