How Covid-19 taught us Product Management 101

Obviously, this pandemic has been devastating for millions of people around the globe. I’m aware of my very privileged situation, working in a tech job easily done from my comfy home, with a booster shot currently doing its best to build up some immunity for me. I‘m very fortunate that my life, loved ones or job haven’t been in jeopardy. So here I am, randomly trying to poke some fun at Product Management as taught by Covid…

It’s been almost two years – two friggin’ years! – since many of us were sent to work from home. Since we stopped hanging out with friends. Since things stopped being fun. And what do we have to show for it, aside from a large collection of banana bread recipes and some brand-new social anxieties?

Well, we all got a crash course in Product Management.

Hear me out…

Lesson #1: Prioritization

We’ve learned to prioritize like our life depended on it, because it suddenly did. With none of the internet’s shiny prioritization frameworks for PMs to help us out, we’ve had to come up with our own way to prioritize who we socialize with. My own formula reads something like this, p being the person I consider meeting:

(subjective importance of p to me + general carefulness of p - amount of people p regularly interacts with) * social distance-factor of suggested activity/100

= Lisa’s willingness to meet p in %

Massive bonus points awarded for a positive vaccination status of p!

It really all comes down to “is meeting this particular person worth the risk?”. Speaking of which…

Lesson #2: Risk Assessment & Mitigation

Everything is a risk these days. Leaving the house, going to the grocery store, having drinks, pretending to have fun at your office holiday party, breathing the same air as random strangers (what, you say I’m exaggerating? DID I MENTION THE SOCIAL ANXIETIES THIS CAUSES).

We’ve become rather skilled at weighing the risks and doing thorough cost-benefit analyses of what used to be pretty basic day-to-day activities.

Lesson #3: Stakeholder management

Suddenly, more than ever, we need to iron out the details with friends and family. That one topic you and your friend just couldn’t agree on, that you always politely ignored? With Covid, you don’t get to do that. You’re forced to confront your differences and hash it out if you want to keep that person in your life.

Maybe it’s that one uncle who maintains it’s “just a flu” or that colleague who “has a strong immune system and doesn’t need the vaccine”. Or the friend who’s offended when you don’t want to hug but wave awkwardly from afar.

Since early 2020, we’ve learned to navigate the choppy waters of clashing viewpoints and different needs in respectful ways. Welcome to stakeholder management!

Lesson #4: Religiously checking the data

What‘s today‘s incidence again? Uh-huh. What’s the trend, though? Yay, numbers are down, we can go have dinner!

Like any decent Product Manager does for their product, we’ve incorporated checking the numbers into our daily routine and have collectively gotten pretty good at adjusting our behavior accordingly.

Lesson #5: Planning

Even if we are willing to take certain risks, if we say: screw it, we’re young, we’re healthy, and we deserve to stand on a street corner giving out free hugs to strangers, damnit, we still have to make a plan. If I want to see Grandma next Wednesday, when do I have to start isolating? Have I bought enough pasta and toilet paper in case I need to quarantine? If I take a risk today, what does that mean for my next 14 days?

Thanks to Covid’s incubation period, we basically plan our social lives in two-week sprints. Sound familiar?

Lesson #6: Adapting to Moving Targets

I remember the day I got my second vaccine shot, the elation I felt at the thought of finally being done with this! Surprise: I wasn‘t. It wasn‘t long before it was announced you‘d better get a booster shot… so I did. And I was relieved, again. And they announced that the damn thing mutated and they may need to come up with an adjusted vaccine. And — you see where I’m going with this.

All the time as a PM, you need to stay flexible and adapt to moving targets. That win you’re celebrating today may be irrelevant tomorrow when a competitor has blindsided you with an amazing new release. That feature you were planning may have to wait because a major new bug doesn’t care about your roadmap. The important thing is to keep cool and adjust your plan to your new situation.

Not going to sugarcoat it, even for those of us in more privileged positions, this pandemic sucks, it still goes on and we will be dealing with the fallout on so many different levels for a long, long time. But we‘re all going to come out of this as better Product Managers, I promise.

This post was first published on January 11, 2022, on Medium.