As a product manager, you face a variety of critical tasks every day—from planning the product roadmap to supporting sales reps to gathering and analyzing client feedback.
How can you manage these competing tasks effectively? And how can you execute them while keeping your work-life balance intact?
We’ll tackle these questions head on by walking you through 3 effective time-management strategies.
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1. Adopt the Pomodoro Technique
Your ability to manage and complete tasks on time hinges on your ability to focus throughout the day.
To help maximize your focus, you can adopt the proven productivity approach, the Pomodoro Technique.
The technique typically involves working for 25 minutes and then taking a 5 minute break (taken together, this makes up one pomodoro). You’d then repeat this process 3 times before taking a longer break (typically between 15-20 minutes), after which, you’d start all over again.
There’s a variety of ways to go about implementing the Pomodoro Technique, such as using a physical or online timer. But the best choice might be to use a chatbot that can work in a business communications platform, as it’s convenient to use and it ensures that your pomodoros don’t overlap with meetings.
Here’s more on how it can work, assuming you use Slack* as your business communications platform.
* You can also use this chatbot on Teams or Facebook Workplace.
1. You access a chatbot (in this case, Pomodoro Bot) within your business communications platform.
2. You click “Start Pomodoro timer”, which prompts you to select the specific length of time you’d like to use for each pomodoro.
As previously mentioned, if you have a scheduled meeting that overlaps with the length of time selected, the chatbot will let you know and it won’t start the timer.
3. Once submitted, the productivity chatbot initiates the timer, leading you to begin your first pomodoro.
Note: The chatbot will alert you whenever you need to take a break or resume working.
2. Schedule weekly meetings with yourself
You can prevent engineers, designers, and other teams from taking up all your time by consistently scheduling meetings with yourself.
More specifically, you can block out a couple hour-long blocks of time in your calendar every week to focus on tasks that can be done independently, require focus, and that bring you closer to the customer. This can include the following and much more:
- Creating slides that summarizes key findings from recent qualitative and quantitative client interviews, along with recommended next steps
- Researching the market to better understanding the competitive landscape
- Listening to call recordings between customer success managers and clients via a platform like Gong
Given the collaborative nature of your role, it may prove challenging to stick with these weekly meetings. But if you can commit to protecting them, you’ll not only be more productive, but your colleagues will also learn to engage with you at other points in time.
Related: 3 reasons why you should adopt an embedded iPaaS
3. Embrace embedded integrations
Your customers likely use more than 100 SaaS apps, along with various legacy systems, to manage their business processes.
As they look for ways to effectively pair your app with the rest of their extensive tech stack, they’ll inevitably search for integration opportunities.
You can meet your customer’s product integration asks proactively and avoid the extensive time and resources required in building them natively by embedding integrations that are built and managed by a third-party iPaaS provider.
Embedded iPaaS solutions offer a way to easily scale integrations and also offer automations in your platform. For example, if your product is a CRM, you can use an embedded integration provider to offer users a pre-built connection with an electronic signature platform, like DocuSign. Using the connection, your customers can easily create, view, and send electronic agreements within your CRM.
Related: Should you build integrations in-house or buy them? Here’s a chart that can help you decide
Learn how Workato’s Embedded Platform offers significant time savings and product growth
Workato, the leader in integration-led automation, offers an embedded integration solution that addresses the above and much more. You can use it to:
- Deliver an integration solution that fits seamlessly with your product
- Build product integrations at scale with more than 400 SaaS apps available in a low-code UI
- Offer intelligent, templated workflow automations that can be customized to fit your customer’s unique needs
To learn more about using Workato to build embedded integrations, you can schedule a demo with one of our automation experts!
