As a product manager, your schedule is limited, and you can’t drive your SaaS company’s success by doing everything on your own. According to Gallup, leaders who know how to delegate tasks to their team effectively drive 33% more revenue for their business.
But you can’t become an effective product manager without the right task management skills. It’s the secret key to better leading your team, making progress on product development, and freeing time to focus on the most important tasks within your role.
Luckily, with the right combination of tactics and tech, task management doesn't have to be a complicated process. Here’s how you can take your task management skills to the next level and become a better product leader for your team:
1. Document What Your Typical Day Looks Like
Improving your task management skills starts by taking a hard look at what you’re doing each day. By documenting what your typical daily schedule looks like, you’ll quickly notice the time-consuming tasks that you should avoid doing. From there, you can delegate those tasks to others instead.
As you start writing down your daily tasks, you might be surprised by what you find out. Here are examples of activities that shouldn’t be present in a product manager’s schedule:
- Working on code
- Attending every customer call
- Collecting user data
- Copywriting
These activities center around executive strategy, whereas a product manager’s job is to settle and facilitate strategy. You should be delegating these tasks to the correct department to avoid distracting yourself from your actual role.
2. Focus on Building the Most Valuable Features and Updates in the Roadmap
The goal of product management isn’t to get your team to build the most features: It’s to make sure you’re building the right features that will improve the customer's experience. Before delegating tasks to your product management team, it's vital to identify the most urgent features (and save the rest for later).
There are multiple methods that you can apply to determine which features your team should be building first. Here are some of the best feature prioritization tactics:
RICE Method
The RICE method is a scoring model used to prioritize features based on the following factors: reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Based on your score, you can determine what features you should focus on and delegate tasks to build them accordingly.
Kano Model
The Kano model weighs the importance of a feature based on how likely it is to satisfy your audience. To determine this, the model divides the benefits of a product feature into three categories:
- Basic features: Features that are necessary for your product to function correctly and remain competitive in the market.
- Performance features: Features that have a significant impact on customer satisfaction.
- Excitement features: Features that boost customer delight during their product experience.
MoSCoW Method
The MoSCoW method is a feature prioritization tactic that stands for must have, should have, could have, and will not have. It’s the simplest way to categorize future features out of the three we covered, so it's excellent for new product teams with a relatively small product backlog that's easy to prioritize.
3. Use Project Management Tools to Streamline Task Delegation
Task management often involves a lot of manual work, and keeping track of everything your team has to get done can be challenging. To make your life easier and save time, you can streamline the whole process with project management tools.
A project management tool stores all of your company tasks in one place, so you never miss any important details. It will also keep team members accountable through reminders and notifications of task deadlines. Some of the platforms we recommend for project management include:
This project management tool allows you to manage all of your tasks in one place through different forms, such as timelines, boards, and list views. It comes with integrations with more than 100 tools to get the most out of the platform and includes reporting to keep track of your team's progress.
With features such as email notifications, reminders, spreadsheets, and more, ClickUp comes with all the tools you need to manage tasks better and help your team meet its goals. To help you get started on the platform quickly, ClickUp comes with countless templates to choose from.
The highly customizable and user-friendly project management tool reduces the number of back-and-forth emails by storing all of your team’s tasks on different boards. Aside from project collaboration capabilities, Monday also comes with time-tracking and reporting features to improve task management.
4. Choose the Best People for Each Task
Delegating tasks can save you plenty of time and boost productivity as a product manager, but that doesn’t mean you should be assigning tasks to just anyone. Always make sure to choose the person with the right skills to handle each job.
Factors that go into delegating to the best people for a job include expertise, knowledge, and overall passion for their specific area. Don’t forget to consider their current workload to determine whether they have enough capacity.
Also, make sure to clearly explain to each assigned team member why they’re the right fit for the task. It’s a form of respect, serves as additional context, and helps them better understand how they can best do the job for you.
5. Provide Your Team With Adequate Resources and Training
To get more done, make sure to provide your team with all of the resources they need to gain more clarity on their tasks and be successful. That could include setting up workshops, micro-coaching, or encouraging employees to sign up for courses on platforms like Udemy to advance their skills.
It might be a bit of work up front, but it will boost your team’s productivity in the long run. You’ll not only be able to get more tasks done, but your team’s skills and expertise will grow in the process.
Training will be essential if you lack the perfect candidates for a specific task. Instead of finding and hiring someone else for the role, you can train existing team members to have the necessary skill to complete the job.
6. Schedule Regular Check-Up Meetings With Your Team
Part of effective task management is making sure your team is making progress. To ensure everyone is on the right track toward product goals, set up regular meetings to discuss progress with your team.
The main idea behind meetings is to align with your team members, give them all the support they need for success, and build a better work relationship. If they mention any obstacle they currently face, find out what you can do to help them.
However, make sure to keep all of your meetings as short and straight to the point as possible, and don’t meet more than twice a week. One of the worst things you can do for productivity is to make meetings longer than they need to be. Also, only invite people who need to be at each meeting to avoid wasted time and Zoom fatigue.
7. Show Your Appreciation
For your team members to do their best, they have to feel like their hard work is recognized and appreciated by their product manager. Don’t forget to show gratitude whenever your team is making progress and crushing your product goals — it’ll create a more collaborative environment and encourage everyone to do their best.
One of the best ways to show appreciation is to use employee engagement platforms in your organization, such as Achievers or Lattice. They allow you to show recognition to your team across different channels and improve the culture at your SaaS company.
To Get Started With Task Management, Start Small
Task management is not only critical to boosting productivity and ensuring that more gets done within your organization. It’s what product managers need to become better leaders and grow in their own careers.
Start by delegating a couple of tasks that are eating up your time, and measure the results after a month. For example, that could include asking the marketing team to handle reporting for you or having others hop on customer calls. Over time, task delegation will feel easier and more natural to you.
