Lessons I Learned as a Product Manager

4 lessons I learnt the hard way as a PM:
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1. I worked on countless releases that were rolled out on a Friday evening. My inbox on Saturday morning would always be a guacamole of bug alerts. Bye bye weekend.

Note to self: Plan your sprints to release mid-week to have time to firefight unforeseen breaks on production.

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2. I'd log into Analytics and notice some shocking traffic anomaly. I'm left rattling my mind about the releases/holidays we had during the timeframe.

"Darn it, I should have annotated the time series."

Note to self: Annotations on Analytics is a ritual meant to be done daily. When you slack on this, it comes to bite you at the times you needed them the most.
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3. I'd become ecstatic about a promising trend line, brag about it with my team and CEO only to find out that I had applied the wrong filters or timeframe.

Note to self: Triple check whether you're seeing the right data on dashboards. Also, stop bragging.

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4. I once proved to my team how effective our new sign up flow was on a day by counting the conversions.

The QA then asked whether I had factored out the office traffic as the team had a field day on testing on production.

Note to self: Data & bias have a never-ending love affair. Never underestimate their willpower to cuddle. + Beware of QAs.