Week 1 >> Principles of UX/UI Design 

A Day in the life of a Meta product manager

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product managers don't tell designers or engineers to do this, we focus on bringing everyone together on a strategy that we believe in. So we are very collaborative and we really value what developers think, what engineers think because we are a team and we are trying to build this together. Hi my name is Jason, I am a product manager at meta. I work in the facebook, web app and web platform team. So my day is filled with I think three core things. The first one is reading, understanding what is happening with the product with the market, with leadership and with other teams, I have to sort of a really good idea of what is happening in order to lead to section number two which is thinking that happens in writing often and it's really crystallizing like product strategy, figuring out what the communication is trying to figure out what the plan is for the entire team or setting goals. The third part is collaboration which usually happens meeting other people. I will send information via a written document, but a lot of times it is getting in a room with an engineer working through a problem together and it's like figuring out, hey this is a product strategy, what does it take to build this, what does it actually take to make this happen in H one or this year and how do we bring it to life? What is the trade off? So those three things are, would usually take up, take up my time as a product manager. If you think about technical skills. Product managers actually have less technical skills and a lot of the people we work with. The main one that I use is analysis. I actually rely on the data scientists to pull and do a lot of the hard numbers but I have to digest and understand what it means. Collaboration is a core skill set because what we are doing is working with engineers to make the product come to life. So a lot of the soft skills include written communication and verbal communication. It's really can we bring our ideas and thinking and make other and help other people understand and come along for the ride. Product managers with engineers and all of our other stakeholders. We are building amazing products and that in itself is just really hard to do. So first we have to actually know what's a winning product and have a clear strategy making that happen. That is challenging and in the absolute best way and that's what makes this job really fulfilling. I work with product designers and engineers very heavily. They are two of my top stakeholders with product designers. I am really bringing the product strategy and creating a visual representation of what that looks like so far. To give an example let's say I have this concept and strategy that we really need navigation to be more persistent and so people can access some of the stuff. I will write that as a strategy. The product designers will then visualize it into an actual menu, What are the pixels? How big is it? What are the actual colors? Should we show notification or not? And they they've taken the product strategy and turned us into a visual item. We then together work with the engineer to build that menu, you know the menu, the desires that put and say it's like 80 or 100 pixels or whatever the heck it is, will actually could put that in the code. So the three of us will work very closely together to realize this product which occupies a very important role in the broader strategy. So some things that an engineer could focus on to become a very effective engineer. First you have to master the craft of being a good engineer, which is excellent coding and excellent execution. In addition to that collaboration is very important. The product designer, the product manager and engineer. We all are working together to build an amazing product. Communication goes a really long way when you're working in a team communication would really help us make sure we're moving together and as a result helps make sure we build a phenomenal product building things is incredibly fulfilling. There's nothing like that feeling when you launch something and people love it and you know that you built this and that's what you'll be able to do when you finish this course