Typical travel

Travel is a key part of a product managers job. Especially if you have worldwide responsibility for your product.

So why do we travel so much:

The biggest bucket is to meet with customers to

  • Understand how they use the product, which is normally different from how you envisioned it 🙂
  • Bounce of new product and feature ideas
  • Idea discovery

The other bucket is office visits for

  • Discussing and presenting product roadmaps
  • Politicking or gathering support for your ideas
  • Building relationships with folks with influence in the office

Final bucket is outward facing product management function that require you to travel to:

  • Train sales team
  • Ensure marketing messaging is consistent with product features
  • Meet with press, bloggers and influencers

 

As much as I enjoy traveling, here’s how travel can get taxing. I spent almost 16/52 weeks outside India last year. I’ve already traveled almost once a month in the first quarter of 2013. Here is my travel calendar for the last 15 months and the coming 3

Date Country Duration
Jan-12 US & UK & Ireland 2 weeks
Feb-12
Mar-12 NZ 2 weeks
Apr-12 US & Malaysia 3 week
May-12 UK & Germany 1 week
Jun-12 France & US 2 weeks
Jul-12
Aug-12 US 1 week
Sep-12 US & Netherlands 2 weeks
Oct-12
Nov-12
Dec-12 US 1 week
Jan-13 Japan 1 week
Feb-13
Mar-13 Thailand & Maldives 10 days
Apr-13 US 1 week
May-13 US 1 week
Jun-13 US 1 week

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