How Product Management has improved my daily life
Can Product Management Methodologies apply to our own improvement can help us grow faster and better?
Since I started studying the principles and secrets of Product Management 6 months ago, I also found myself being more productive and focused on my daily life.
It could seem that there is no connection between the two elements, it was just a wonderful coincidence.
As I deep dive into my studies and my personal life I started to recognize a pattern: I was applying the Agile Theme-Epic-Story Development Framework.
Ok, let me explain.
What is the Theme-Epic-Story Development Framework?
In the Agile Framework, the Theme-Epic-Story represents one of the ways for structuring a big project. You might also have heard of this concept as User Stories.
As you fellow enthusiast of the Product word knows, this framework allows you to start from a big goal/vision and divided it into smaller elements to create a concrete execution plan to reach a goal.
(I know using the concept of User Story might seem far-fetched in a personal context, but bear with me).
Where every element means:
- Themes are large focus areas that span the organization.
- Epics are large bodies of work that can be broken down into several smaller tasks (called stories). An epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific user tasks based on the needs of the end-users. Merely a term used to help simplify discussions Scrum Teams have. Gives structure to the communications.
- Stories, also called “user stories,” are short requirements or requests written from the perspective of an end-user. A user story is an informal, general explanation of a software feature written from the perspective of the end-user or customer. It is the smallest piece of development that can be developed, tested & released independently, and bring value to the user.
- Tasks are the sub-divisions of Stories. In other words, they are smaller segments of work contributing to the construction of the Story.
How to apply this concept to your personal life:
First of all, for my personal life I have changed a bit the meaning of every concept:
- Theme: The goal, objective I want to achieve in the long period.
- Epics: the area I can work on to achieve the goal/goals.
- Stories: the single elements that allow me to create something concrete in a specific area of the Epic.
- Task: the numerable action I set myself to do to achieve my goal.
Before knowing these concepts, my life was a bit messy, with a lot of ideas and way less organization. I would lie if I told you that I did not have any structure or prioritization skills at all.
What I have learned (and still am learning) about Products and how to create and maintain them has helped me a lot.
So now, let’s dive into some practical examples
I will start by choosing my theme.
This can be one or more, based on how much effort you think it can take you to achieve.
In the example, I choose two: one connected to personal health and the other to the career.
So we can see how the themes are:
- Be Healthy,
- Find a Product Management job.
Now we can pass to the Epics.
Sometimes this passage requires a bit of brainstorming, or some days of work: not always the first idea is the perfect one!
Let’s now choose what area we can improve or work on to reach the goal of Find a Product Management job.
What we have are three different Epics/areas to work with:
- Networking: amplify or improve our community.
- Portfolio: create a bigger portfolio and revise the current projects we have in it.
- Interview: for a new job, we definitely need to have some interviews with recruiters and succeed in them to get an offer.
As you can see, these require a big bunch of work to be completed. They are not easy to achieve in just one day, but a way easier approach is to divide them into smaller Stories.
In this case, we have found two big stories we can work on in order to make some changes to our current situation.
They are way more detailed than the Epics, this allows us to know better what actions might be required to accomplish them.
Our Stories are:
- Start engaging with my Linkedin Community;
- Expand my Linkedin community.
So these are still quite big elements, but it easier to see what steps we need to take to achieve each Story. So we can directly move to writing out Tasks.
The beauty at this point is that we do not need anything complex, just simple actions that we can complete every day.
If you find that a task requires maybe a week to be completed, that is not a Task anymore but is better to consider it a Story and find smaller achievable action points to break it down into new tasks.
Here are some examples:
As you can see the tasks we have found are simple, easy, and practical:
- Comment on LinkedIn under posts we like, we can do it even multiple times a day, o choose a specific time to allocate to this activity.
- Share articles, photos, or anything connected to what you like.
- Create new connections, by simply engaging with the response you will receive on your post and reply.
In this context, you can also choose to add to your connection a certain number of people per day/week.
If we summarize this is what our map will look like, this is what we have:
Keep in mind that you can always iterate, modify and improve everything you have chosen, you are creating this to improve yourself, not to make you feel bad or stressed!
Now that you have seen how I have done for my career, you can imagine how every part of our life is and can be analyzed through the glasses of Product Management.
