 Hello everyone. Thank you very much for attending the webinar about multi-tasking for product managers. I am Maria de la Bica and I am Lead Product Manager at TierMobility. Multiple times throughout my career I have found myself dealing with multiple tasks, always at the same time, or to switch focus multiple times per day. I'd like to share a methodology that I have witnessed to be the most helpful in such situations. Let's start with the definition of multi-tasking. This is actually about the performance of more than one task at the same time or shifting focus between tasks. Even if there are cases where we have to be multi-taskers, research has shown that our brain is not as great as we think of handling multiple tasks simultaneously, especially when they are tasks of high complexity. I am not here to promote multi-tasking, but rather to share a way of using it effectively. This is why I would like to highlight some of the dangers. It has been observed that the performance can be reduced due to the time our brain needs to switch focus from one task to another, or in the long run we might lose the ability to remain focused. Overall, our mental health can be negatively affected by increasing level of stress or feeling of anxiety because of multi-tasking. Having said all that, multi-tasking is not all about negative side effects, but it actually has multiple benefits of which we want to take advantage. Creativity, flexibility and adaptability are some to name. When we multi-task, the brain works harder to satisfy the increased needs for mental resources. This activation leads to quantity flexibility. After all, our ability of multi-tasking is also limited and we need a change of focus to get back to creative thinking. Last but not least, I would like to refer to the benefit of another critical skill that product managers really need. This is about time management. By combining tasks, for instance, we can shorten the time to completion and enables us to create more time for other things. Since we want to safely multi-task, it's important to identify the cases where this is needed. Some of these cases are when we are involved in more than one team. This can happen in our careers that for various reasons the teams are understaffed and sometimes product managers have to fulfill roles in more than one team. Another situation can be when we are involved in strategic decisions where we actually have to attend a lot of meetings, deep dive into different resources in order to understand and take related decisions. Something that also requires a very frequent change of focus. Another situation, and I think the most common one, can be when we work in fast-paced environments where everything happens fast, things are changing. We have to keep track of many different processes and we have to be up to speed for all the changes. Then we really need to boost our multitasking skills. Another situation is when we are working on non-project or product and we're about to start another. This is also very typical in product managers' life. When the product development team is focusing on the current development, we start to prepare the next topics to come. So in these situations we might be interrupted by questions for clarifications or for testing or for all-out plans or whatever can be related to the current product. While we also have to do a discovery, analysis, attend meetings, interview users, stakeholders for the upcoming topics. Actually, this is all about being a product manager. It might be a synonym at the end. Multitask equals product management. No, this was a joke. So some skills as PMs that we need to improve in order to ease multitasking are the following three. Prioritization, important to focus not only in backlog and roadmap priorities, but also to our personal schedule. Delegation, you can involve more people in the tasks in our to-do list, something that has multiple benefits, not only for us, but also for the company overall. And coaching, this is about helping the product development teams to understand the product principles and the product vision. Let's dive a bit deeper into each one of these three pillars. Prioritization, here I would divide this to two different buckets. One is our personal tasks list and the other is common backlog and roadmap prioritization. I would advise to go for a preparation for a homework for our next week so that we can organize our week with specific milestones that will help us to understand what tasks we are about to do and to estimate how much time we will need per task. For instance, next week I would like to prepare user service together with a product design team or to find some documentation. Here you can find useful the Pomodoro technique where you set a timer and where you want to accomplish something so that this can keep you a bit more focused. Another principle that you might find useful here in order to help your daily tasks prioritization is the 2080 or 8020 principle where here the focus is to complete the 20% of the tasks that result in 80% of the impact we can create on these days. Now that we have organized and prioritized our personal to-do list, we can focus on prioritizing the team's backlog and the roadmap. To have a prioritized backlog can really reduce distractions about clarifications and ease the planning. I think you have also found yourself in a situation where the team needs an extra ticket to work on or something extra to do because of various reasons. If your backlog is prioritizing rooms, you can just pick the next one in priority instead of having to organize meetings, spend time to find out the requirements or what's next and so on. Then, about roadmap prioritization especially, I would really advise to use some of the very popular frameworks and prioritization techniques and pick the one that is as objective as possible in order to avoid frequent frictions. My favorite one is the weighted score technique where you can actually take into consideration the business goals, feasibility and you require input from all stakeholders so that you can achieve the most objective result possible. Of course, there are plenty of them out there so this was just an example to name. The second pillar of this methodology is about delegation. This is not about getting rid of tasks of our to-do list because at the end we are accountable for the results of our tasks but this is about making these tasks a bit lighter. We can share the sub tasks, let's say, with other people in order to have more time to focus on different tasks. Here you might think like why to delegate. Of course, one reason is to reduce our workload. Another good reason which actually has multiple benefits is because this way we enable our colleagues to learn new things and to grow and also things get done faster because this is an actual work in parallel. Now how to decide what tasks and to whom to delegate. Here we have to sort the tasks and I recommend this simple method of urgency and importance where you can have this diagram and decide what tasks are important and what tasks are urgent and you can pick and delegate the tasks which are important but not urgent. If something is important and urgent you have to do it now. If it's not urgent but important you can decide what to do. If it's urgent and not important delegate and if it's not urgent and not important just get it out of your to-do list and finally how to find the right people to delegate. Here there are some decision factors that you can decide like you can take into consideration. This is the experience of people and especially when you think of a specific task you have to find the people with the right expertise or efficiency maybe someone is not so experienced but has proved him or herself about how efficient they are and maybe they are fast learners and they can accomplish tasks fast or in a time frame where it will not delay the task overall and last but not least also willingness is a good factor to decide. Now how to ensure the success of delegation. Here again we do not forget that if a task is out of the list we are accountable for this so the outcome is our responsibility. This is why we have to set the right processes to monitor the progress of the task that this other person will do. I would recommend here to have some maybe weekly check-ins or you will decide the right pace in order to see the progress to give the opportunity to this other person to ask you questions and once the task is accomplished you can finally have the feedback talk so that the other person also knows how this went and you can also receive feedback of how you was as a body to work with and this way we have achieved someone having learned a new skill being more involved in different tasks and actually feel more creative. The last pillar of this methodology is the coaching. Here you might think of product managers and coaching where it mostly refers to coach other product managers about state-of-the-art frameworks or to help them move forward with some of their work they have to do. I will abuse this term and use it a bit differently. By coaching here I mostly mean of actually help the team and the product development teams to be involved and understand how the whole product development life cycle happens. Not only the design and the development phase but also the discovery or also let them understand the product vision, include them in the product vision statement or the product principles. Here what I mean is that if you involve the product development team in the product vision statement this will help the team to understand what is relevant for product development in the long run the team will be inspired and creative and involvement will also boost the sense of ownership. Imagine a situation where again you have millions of things to do and there are some decisions to be made about the current development and implementation decisions or how the product should behave where typical product managers are also involved. If the team is aware of what the mission of the product is or what the audience or the target or the business goals of our products are it's easier for them to decide to take decisions without the product manager being involved because this is a process where we have built all together and we have learned from each other so that some decisions can be made without you spending time there. Another important factor here is to engage the team in product principles. The product principles will help the team to make decisions for the product development because this will be around the same goals around the same ideas of how we want to build a product. Also it will help the team to stay focused and this is also an exercise where it has to be done. It takes some time, it has to be done again altogether. It requires time, it requires you to invest time in working together with the team on decision making or involving them in such meetings like product vision statements or conversations about product principles but at the end it will have a great benefit not only of having less involvement from product managers in many situations but also helping the team to grow and to have new skills. The last item I would like to highlight here is trust. Of course we have to trust the team and by team I mean product managers, engineers, product designers we are all one team, we have to trust each other and we can make decisions without having the need of every time all of us being at the same room discussing every single detail. All this we achieve if we really train each other into making decisions about product development and that was it actually about a methodology of how you can efficiently multitask without putting yourself in danger to burn out. Thank you very much for attending.