Quantcast
Channel: The Productologist » Time Management
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 8

Twitter: Product Management Friend or Foe?

0
0

I’ve used Twitter off and on for the past year or so, engaging with other Product Managers and Product Marketers about PM topics and also with community members within my industry.

I like the brevity of the tweet. Share a link to a page or article without the pontification of a blog post (irony?). Solicit for informal feedback. Stay on top of current events.

There are other uses, too, like following celebrities (I won’t judge), getting discounts for products and services, monitoring air and road traffic. All in 140 character, bite-sized chunks.

The problem I have is the volume and time committment. Reading and/or responding to any one tweet takes only a little bit of time, but if you have a significant number of follows (or your follows are verbose), you can easily burn an hour or more at a time.

I use TweetDeck on my computer and Tiny Twitter on my mobile to help me stay on top of threads, but even with TweetDeck’s filtering and organizing, it still is a lot of information overload. And I am not sure how much value I get from Twitter (or how much value others are getting from my tweets).

A month or so, I was asked a question about how to keep up with Twitter. My response was, “Don’t.”

Twitter, like many other tools, is useful, but can be a time-suck (NOTE: I’m not pickimg on Twitter here. There are plenty of other time-sucks, such as roadmaps, prospect/client presentations, balancing the feature backlog, meetings, just to name a few; all are useful in small doses, but so easy to waste time on).

Over the past few weeks, I have been curtailing the time I spend on Twitter. It has become more like my Google Alerts folder. I skim the folder, looking for nuggets of information about my product, competitive products and companies, and notable topics for my industry, but I don’t read every alert or link within every alert, and if they get old, I just delete them.

No hard feelings. No guilt about missing out on something.

Technology has given us the feeling that we can have everything accessible to us at any time and that we have to always be “on,” but that creates an environment where we are using more and more energy to sift through the noise than to actually do anything with the signal, if and when we find it.

Don’t abandon Twitter. It’s a good tool and one that has its place in the Product Manager’s toolbox. Just take stock of how you use it and how much. What else could you do with that time?


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 8

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images