Adrian Lester - Digital Product Manager at CompoZed Labs (Allstate NI)
I’ve worked for Allstate for over 14 years, here’s what a day looks like in my role as a Digital Product Manager in our CompoZed Lab, Allstate’s hub for Agile Development.
9am - Stand ups
I get into the office around 8:50, just in time to grab a tea before the office stand up. This is a short meeting to introduce any visitors or new people, ask for help with something and share anything interesting we've come across.
I go straight into a team stand up after the office stand up. We're a small team comprising of one pair of developers and one pair of PMs. We're working on one part of a product. Another team based elsewhere is also working on this product. We're making steady progress and nobody has obstacles to their work, so we're good.
10am - IPM
There are some stories to be updated and tweaked after a pre-Iteration Planning Meeting (IPM) meeting yesterday with a developer. The pre-IPM helps ensure the developers have a similar understanding of what a story (task) is about and gives them more time to consider what extra information they may need to enable them to deliver the story.
The meeting is very productive. I love that stories are conversation starters, and negotiable. I'm pushed by developers who can cover angles I missed. It helps me gain a new understanding from the technical perspective. We identify a few stories to add, and amend a few others. We also uncovered the need for a research chore prior to working on a new feature requiring a new back end integration.
11am - Workshop prep
I take a few minutes before a meeting, so I check Trello to see what tasks I have under way. I check email, hoping for some important answers, but they haven't arrived yet so I'll have to follow up later. I still haven't finished a task around time recording, which plays into invoicing, so it's important to do. Then it's off to a meeting to discuss workshops for training and evaluating potential new Product Managers.
12pm - User Stories
Finally some real work! Drafting some more user stories. I've previously written some small stories to establish integrations with back end systems. Now I need to more stories to add in additional user features. My first story used a hard coded address, now I'm drafting stories to find a real address and feed that in the product.
1pm - Lunch
It's lunchtime, and it's my chance to catch up with some friends
2pm - PM & Designer meeting
It's time to catch up with the designer and PM of the other team working on the product. The designer conducted some user feedback sessions last week on our portion of the product. I've lots of questions, primarily around how best to work with a designer and gain the product vision when I'm joining a product already in flight and based remote. I'm excited to see how this will pan out. The PMs share what each team worked on last week and what is planned for this week. Our product is dependent upon another system which has indicated its delivery dates have slipped, so we have to pivot in order to deliver within the new constraints we just received.
3pm - Assumptions and Risks
I've Assumptions and Risks captured on whiteboard. One important aspect of the PM role is to confirm if assumptions are valid (or not) and mitigate risks. I take a lot of time to evaluate these and note updates based on the new information I just received.
4pm - Review the backlog
The impact of the pivot to our team is mainly to reprioritise the user stories that the developers will work on. We have a few weeks of work planned out and the change is to work two weeks out. I make a mental note to mention this at tomorrow's team stand up.
The other PM brings up a great idea about metrics we could use to measure the usage of the tool and whether or not it is enabling users to achieve their goal. We talk this through and plan for drafting stories to implement this right after our current backlog is delivered.
5:30pm - Home Time
It's been a good day with lots of variety. I feel good about what we're going to deliver this week. Time for home. I won't even log in and check emails tonight :)\
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