New product, new surprise
Last December I changed roles.
I went from Internal PM for a Manufacturing Integrations product to Internal PM for a Sales CRM.
I figured the business domain would be the hard part. Switching from supply chain to sales is a big shift. But the PM side? That I had covered.
I came in with a plan.
Meet engineering. Run through my onboarding checklist. Talk to users. Assess the roadmap. Get into sprints.
What I got was much messier than that.
The CRM had never been properly PM managed. Or IT managed.
What I inherited: an old, heavily customized system, barely documented, a near black box, plus a pile of urgent compliance issues and server problems.
No sprints. No backlog.
Just an ad-hoc relationship between the business and a vendor, meeting whenever something needed fixing.
So I didn't come in blazing. I couldn't.
Instead, I'm working through it one step at a time. Clearing urgent issues. Targeting full compliance by year end. Slowly standardizing how we deliver.
Not glamorous. But real.
How I protect focus in a meeting-heavy week
My environment is meeting-heavy. Status updates, design discussions, stakeholder check-ins, new-org onboarding.
So I time-block hard, especially mornings.
→ 9:00 to 9:30 Emails and messages
→ 9:35 to 12:00 Focus block (protected)
→ 12:00 to 1:00 Lunch
→ 1:00 to 1:30 Emails and messages
→ 1:30 to 5:30 Meetings, design sessions, user conversations, networking
→ 5:30 to 6:00 Emails and messages
If something is urgent, people can call me. Otherwise it waits for its timeslot.
Goal of the week, and where time actually went
Every Monday I set a few goals that tie directly to my product strategy.
Last week:
→ Complete technical diagrams and review with an architect, directly contributes to our compliance target
→ Push the new analytics feature to 60% done, removes manual work and unlocks insights we haven't been able to see yet
→ Start scoping the features coming in the next two months, both are directly tied to productivity gains and cost avoidance
→ Leave some buffer for operational issues, because there's always something
Every focus block goes to one of those three.
In practice, operational fires sometimes eat the buffer. And then some.
Three things from last week, unfiltered
The nightmare
I don't have proper operations support. So some of it falls on me.
This week I spent at least 3 hours updating Azure servers across all environments. Chrome, Microsoft patches, Visual Studio updates.
Would you have guessed that's part of a PM's week?
Neither would I.
It stays on my plate until I find a way to route it somewhere else. For now: I do what needs doing.
The surprise
I'm working through a mandatory compliance feature that looked simple on paper.
Two weeks of prep, no downtime. That was my read before I talked to engineering.
After that conversation? Dependencies I hadn't seen. User impacts. A much bigger scope.
I'm now back at the PRD template, outlining risks, rebuilding the estimate from scratch.
Classic reminder: never scope without talking to the team first.
The win
I've been building an analytics dashboard in Power BI from scratch.
No analytics resource. Tight budget. A vendor that doesn't specialize in this.
This week I finished most of the core calculations. When the numbers matched the old reports, I felt genuinely proud.
A month ago I knew nothing about this product's data. Sales figures, visit metrics, inventory levels, display performance.
Now I'm building the reporting layer.
Small win. Real one.
