Meet our product managers and ask them anything next week at an AMA!
Our teams work on designing and delivering easier-to-use products (services) for the public. Product managers are critical to the success of any delivery team, and boy, do we love ours!
But what exactly is a product manager, anyway?
Meet Bryan, Courtney, Clémentine, Dan, and Stevie-Ray, product managers here at CDS:
Rapidfire: in one sentence, what does a product manager do?
Dan: We help the team focus on what's most important (the people, the public servants, working software) and how to get there (strategy, sprints, "agile").
Wow. Not a small task. What does your day-to-day look like to get all of that done?
Bryan:Usually, my day-to-day is consumed by reactive tasks like responding to emails, slack messages, and other one-off things. On the recurring level, I have different tasks that I relegate to different times in the sprint.
Some of those could include:
a couple of days of preparing the backlog for the next sprint planning
preparing for the retrospective, organizing, and completing the action items that come from that
researching existing solutions and figuring out how we stack up
conducting research to understand the users' needs and make sure we are still aligned with them
making sure our roadmap and personas are up to date with any new information we come across as we build and collect more data
What advice would you give people who are currently doing this kind of work, or want to do this kind of work?
Clémentine: Communicate honestly, react with humility, remain curious. Don’t pretend to know it all because it is not possible and recognizing what we don’t know is really important for the job. Take every opportunity to learn very seriously.
The Public Policy Forum (PPF) released its report “APIs in Government” to raise awareness and encourage the increased adoption of APIs across government. The report shares a case study of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan)'s EnerGuide API and Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)'s Netfile.
