A Day in the Life of a Product Manager at Levi Strauss & Co.
A product manager's day at Levi Strauss & Co. involves many meetings, including daily "stand-ups" with engineers to discuss project status and "meetings where they're doing conceptual ideation of something that is going to come in the future." Data analysis is key, as product managers use dashboards to identify and solve problems, juggling two to three projects simultaneously—those "live soon," already live, and future releases.
Project Management, Data Analysis, Communication, Problem-Solving, Teamwork
Advizer Information
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Job Title
Company
Undergrad
Grad Programs
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Kanika Kapoor
Product Manager
Levi Strauss & Co.
Punjab Technical University
UCLA Anderson school of management- MBA
Engineering - Electrical
Apparel, Beauty, Retail & Fashion
Product / Service / Software Development and Management
Took Out Loans, Immigrant
Video Highlights
1. A product manager's day often begins with stand-up meetings with engineers to discuss project status and roadblocks.
2. Product managers spend significant time in ideation sessions, planning future projects and features, and working with leadership to justify their vision based on data analysis.
3. They are problem solvers, constantly working on multiple projects in different stages—those launching soon, those already live, and those in the future planning stages—requiring strong organizational and time management skills.
Transcript
What does the day in the life of a product manager look like?
A typical product manager's day, in the pre-COVID world, probably started with going to work. If they worked very closely with an engineer, which any beginner product manager would do in their first five to 10 years, they would sit in on something called stand-ups.
Stand-ups are a 15 to 20-minute meeting with their engineers where they talk about the status of what they're building. They discuss what they did the day before, where they're at, and any blockers. This is likely the first meeting of the day.
After stand-ups, product managers go into ideation, into their own meetings about what else could be built besides what's currently in progress. They consider what the future looks like, having meetings for conceptualization and more ideation for things that will come later.
When not working with engineers on features in progress, they'll be having meetings. They have many meetings with UX designers or engineering managers to discuss their three to six-month vision. They also work with leadership, justifying what they want to build based on data and numbers.
Data analytics and numbers are a big part of a product manager's life. They'll look at dashboards, for example, to see if a part of the app isn't getting many users. They then start looking for reasons why it's not working and come up with ideas to fix that problem.
Product managers are problem-solvers. At any given time, they are working on two to three features or projects. They might be working on something that will be live soon, something that's already live, and something that will come out in the future.
So, that's a lot of meetings for them. Perhaps in their free time, they do a lot of documentation, on a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation, towards the end of their day.