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description: "Ezra walks us through his day as a Product Manager at The Daily Beast."
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description: "Discover what a Product Manager really does at a digital media company. Follow Ezra as he walks us through his day as a PM at The Daily Beast, play-by-play."
I’m a 27 year old guy who lives in Brooklyn and has been working as a Product Manager for about 4 years. I currently work at [The Daily Beast](https://www.thedailybeast.com), an independent, political tabloid. I’m responsible for developing new features to improve reader experience by coordinating between engineering, design, business, and editorial teams to bring them to launch.
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I’m a 27 year old guy who lives in Brooklyn and has been working as a **Product Manager for about 4 years**. I currently work at _[The Daily Beast](https://www.thedailybeast.com)_, an independent, political tabloid.
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We are a team of 200 people (although most are in the newsroom – our product/eng team has 10 people) and we have have 1.2M paid + unpaid subscribers, see ~600k users/day, and publish over 400 pieces per week on average. I’m responsible for developing new features to improve reader experience by coordinating between engineering, design, business, and editorial teams to bring them to launch.
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I love what I do!
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## About me
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I was born and raised in central Connecticut, then came to NYC almost 10 years ago to attend college at NYU. At that time, I was studying Music Business with the intention of working in the music industry. By the end of college, I had started working for a UGC video startup helping them license & categorize their music library. While there, I became really interested in the development process and pivoted into product management.
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I was born and raised in central Connecticut, then came to NYC almost 10 years ago to attend college at NYU. At that time, I was studying **Music Business** with the intention of working in the music industry. By the end of college, I had started working for a UGC video startup helping them license & categorize their music library. While there, I became really interested in the development process and pivoted into [product management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_management).
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That startup ended up getting acquired by [VSCO](https://www.vsco.co) and I was unfortunately laid-off in the process. While I was looking for my next product role, I managed a couple of the [GrowNYC](https://www.grownyc.org) farmer’s market locations in Brooklyn. About a year after that, I landed my job at the Daily Beast where I've been for a little over 3 years.
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That startup ended up getting acquired by [VSCO](https://www.vsco.co) and I was unfortunately laid-off in the process. While I was looking for my next product role, I managed a couple of the [GrowNYC](https://www.grownyc.org) farmer’s market locations in Brooklyn. About a year after that, I landed my job at _The Daily Beast_ where I've been for a little over 3 years.
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## What's the best part of working as a PM?
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For me, the best part of working as a PM is that every day is different and there is always something new to learn. Depending on which part of the product lifecycle I’m in, I could be working on vastly different types of tasks, which keeps the job interesting. Each time I take on a new project, there is so much to learn from understanding different user problems and figuring out potential technical solutions. Learning is cool! 😎
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For me, the best part of working as a PM is that **every day is different and there is always something new to learn**. Depending on which part of the product lifecycle I’m in, I could be working on vastly different types of tasks, which keeps the job interesting. Each time I take on a new project, there is so much to learn from understanding different user problems and figuring out potential technical solutions. Learning is cool! 😎
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## Favorite thing that you worked on at The Daily Beast?
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My favorite thing I've worked on is probably **Commenting**, which just launched last month.
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This project involved coordination between 2 third-party vendors:
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1.[OpenWeb](https://www.openweb.com) which is our comments / moderation provider, and
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2.[Zephr](https://www.zuora.com/products/zephr) which is our user-authentication / subscription provider.
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The trickiest part was designing the user-flow / data-flow in such a way that when a user signs up to comment, their user profile is automatically linked between these two parties in the background, while the user sees a single account and seamless experience on the front-end. It's been really exciting to watch it come to life and see the transformation of our site from passive to active.
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Since our launch in mid-August, we've already received ~15k comments.
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## A Day in the Life
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**Office days:** I get up, get ready, and head to the office. I commute from Brooklyn to our office in Chelsea, which takes about 45 minutes. I like to listen to [Lenny’s Product Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/2dR1MUZEHCOnz1LVfNac0j) during this time. He interviews successful people in various product roles from a variety of different companies. The convos are always really interesting (whether you’re in product or not) and I find it to be a good way to get into the work headspace. I highly recommend this!
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The Daily Beast's office building and my desk ^
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### 10AM to 1PM
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For the first half of the day, I’m typically focused on comms between teams. When I first sign on, I check through my unread messages and check on our topline metrics to get a sense of the day’s needs. Maybe there’s an engineer that needs clarification on a spec I wrote, maybe there’s been a dip in traffic following a recent release, or maybe someone from leadership is asking for a status update on the launch timeline for a new feature. I take inventory of all these things to plan out my day.
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For the first half of the day, I’m typically focused on **comms** between teams.
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When I first sign on, **I check through my unread messages** (I'm an [inbox-zero](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/inbox_zero) guy! I generally do have 2-5 "unread" emails and slacks that I have read, but need to keep the reminder on to reply) and check on our topline metrics to get a sense of the day’s needs.
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At 10:30 I join our daily standup with the engineering team to get an understanding of what all of the engineers are working on. This is where I can flag high priority tickets or bug reports. It's also where I can help unblock the engineering team, if say, they’re waiting on feedback from another team (this often comes up with ads related work, which is QA’d by our ad operations team).
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Maybe there’s an engineer that needs clarification on a spec I wrote, maybe there’s been a dip in traffic following a recent release, or maybe someone from leadership is asking for a status update on the launch timeline for a new feature. I take inventory of all these things to plan out my day.
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At 10:30 I join our **daily standup** with the engineering team to get an understanding of what all of the engineers are working on. This is where I can flag high priority tickets or bug reports in [ClickUp](https://clickup.com) (16 today, not too bad for us!). It's also where I can help unblock the engineering team, if say, they’re waiting on feedback from another team (this often comes up with ads related work, which is [QA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_assurance)’d by our ad operations team).
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After standup, I follow up on my morning messages and anything that came up during standup. I think of this as my "unblocking time” where I try to clear up any confusion between teams and make sure everyone has what they need for the day.
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### Lunch
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**WFH days:** Not too interesting. I usually just make something simple like a sandwich or a smoothie.
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**Office days:** Our office is right by Chelsea Market AND Market 57 – two food halls with a bunch of options. This is probably my favorite part of going in.
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My go-to spots are Very Fresh Noodles or Los Tacos No. 1. The lines can be long sometimes but it’s worth it. 10/10.
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**Office days:** Our office is right by Chelsea Market AND Market 57 – two food halls with a bunch of options. This is probably my favorite part of going in. My go-to spots are [Very Fresh Noodles](https://www.veryfreshnoodles.com) or [Los Tacos No. 1](https://www.lostacos1.com). The lines can be long sometimes but it’s worth it. 10/10.
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### 2PM to 4PM
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This tends to be the window where a lot of my meetings are scheduled. These could be check-ins with stakeholder teams to provide updates on their tickets, or prioritization / planning meetings for upcoming work, or sometimes check-ins with vendors like our CMS or commenting service providers.
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This tends to be the window where a lot of my **meetings** are scheduled. These could be check-ins with stakeholder teams to provide updates on their tickets, or prioritization / planning meetings for upcoming work, or sometimes check-ins with vendors like our CMS or commenting service providers.
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### 4PM to 6PM
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The late afternoon is typically my heads down time to work on a variety of different things. Because the role of the PM is to manage the development of new features through Ideation, Development, Release, and Iteration, the tasks I work on vary widely depending on where I am in that cycle.
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The late afternoon is typically my **heads down time** to work on a variety of different things. Because the role of the PM is to manage the development of new features through Ideation, Development, Release, and Iteration, the tasks I work on vary widely depending on where I am in that cycle.
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This is a rough idea of what that might look like:
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- Ideation: analyzing data & looking through customer support tickets to identify different areas of opportunity, OR conducting competitive research to identify new trends in the market
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- Development: drawing up a product spec or prototype to review with the engineering team, OR QAing work that has been completed / providing feedback to engineers
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- Release: reviewing the project KPI’s & site health pretty closely, as well as providing updates to the wider team
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- Iteration: looking at analytics & user-segments to identify areas of improvement. This is mostly done in Google Analytics, but we also use [Tableau](https://www.tableau.com) and [Parse.ly](https://www.parse.ly)
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-**Ideation:** analyzing data & looking through customer support tickets to identify different areas of opportunity, OR conducting competitive research to identify new trends in the market
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-**Development:** drawing up a product spec or prototype to review with the engineering team, OR QAing work that has been completed / providing feedback to engineers
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-**Release:** reviewing the project KPI’s & site health pretty closely, as well as providing updates to the wider team
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-**Iteration:** looking at analytics & user-segments to identify areas of improvement. This is mostly done in Google Analytics, but we also use [Tableau](https://www.tableau.com) and [Parse.ly](https://www.parse.ly)
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### 6PM
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**WFH days:** This is when I take out my dog, Cosmo. I live across from Prospect Park, so I love to take him for a long walk there. It’s a great way to wind down from the work day.
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**WFH days:** This is when I **take out my dog, Cosmo**. I live across from Prospect Park, so I love to take him for a long walk there. It’s a great way to wind down from the work day.
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This is when I’ll have dinner and either watch a movie with my girlfriend or play my Nintendo switch (shoutout to [No Man’s Sky](https://www.nomanssky.com) – a cool space exploration game I started last week). 🎮
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I also take out Cosmo for one more short walk before bed.
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That’s all folks!
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I also take out Cosmo for one more short walk before bed. 💤
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## Love it. Last question: Any advice on breaking into PM?
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Breaking into the PM role is tough, especially in a competitive job market like we're seeing now. Historically, the advice has been to build something yourself and with the advancements in AI prototyping tools, I would say this is more relevant than ever.
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With one prompt to a tool like [Lovable](https://lovable.dev), [v0](https://v0.app), or [Replit](https://replit.com), you can generate a fully functional website or app. It can be overwhelming starting from scratch, so try re-creating a product you already use and adding a new feature to it. This will help you develop product-sense and communication skills around product requirements.
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You can also learn some basic web dev such as [HTML](https://www.codedex.io/html), [CSS](https://www.codedex.io/css), and [JS](https://www.codedex.io/javascript) on Codédex. 😊
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That’s all folks! Hope you enjoyed my A Day in the Life!
<ahref="https://www.thedailybeast.com"style={{ all: "unset" }}target="_blank"andrel="noopener noreferrer"><Buttonvariant="yellow">Check out The Daily Beast</Button></a>
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On Wednesday, October 8th at 3 pm EST, join us for a GitHub Copilot workshop in our Discord, led by our good friend **Pj Metz**, Program Manager @ GitHub.
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On Tuesday, October 14thth at 3 pm EST, join us for a GitHub Copilot workshop in our Discord, led by our good friend **Pj Metz**, Program Manager @ GitHub.
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It’s the perfect chance to see Copilot in action and ask questions. Mark your calendars!
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**If you’ve never been to a hackathon but you’ve always wanted to, here’s a guide to help you get into the zone!** It’s perfect for beginners, folks not familiar coding but want to get into the industry and learn how to make cool stuff, and people who are tired of CS and math classes and want to do something more real-world applicable.
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## Why go?
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## What the heck is a hackathon?
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A **hackathon** is a free, usually weekend-long event where people team up to brainstorm, build, and showcase tech projects. It’s part competition, part collaboration, and a great way to learn new skills, meet peers, and experiment with ideas.
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