10+ hours per week. That's how much time the average product manager spends on what I call "busy-work" – the soul-crushing cycle of manual data collection, report generation, and constant tool-switching that keeps us from doing what we actually got hired to do: build great products.
But here's the kicker: organisations lose up to 7% of annual revenue due to governance inefficiencies. Meanwhile, product managers spend less than 1/3 of their time on strategic work. That's not just lost time – that's lost money and opportunity.
The Productivity Killer Destroying PM Impact
Every PM knows this pain:
- Manual data collection across multiple sources (analytics, CRM, support tools, user feedback platforms)
- Creating recurring reports for trends, product progress, and usage metrics
- Constant tool-switching that creates cognitive load and breaks our flow state
We're drowning in data busywork while our products need strategic thinking, user research, and roadmap planning. And with new regulations requiring full lifecycle visibility, the administrative burden is only getting worse.
- Enabling scheduled policy reviews with automated reminders.
- Tracking aggregated performance metrics across your product portfolio, including delinquency rates, approval/rejection ratios, and write-off rates.
- Providing trend analysis to identify emerging patterns at the product level before they become compliance issues.
- Documenting review outcomes and policy adjustments with comprehensive audit trails.
The Hidden Regulatory Compliance Time Bomb: From 5 to 10 Hours of Pure Overhead
Here's what most organisations don't realise about their manual product governance processes. Each new product governance cycle requires a minimum of 5 hours and up to 10 hours of manual overhead across:
- Multiple interconnected manual processes requiring constant coordination and oversight
- Many steps - each demanding manual intervention, assessment, and quality control with compliance risks
- Manual coordination between stakeholders, departments, and approval levels creating bottlenecks
- At least 10+ handoff and as many as 20+ failure points across email chains, version control, approvals, and compliance tracking
This creates a significant resource drain on strategic initiatives and value-creating activities. Your best product minds are stuck in administrative quicksand.
The €10M Wake-Up Call: When Manual Processes Become Revenue Killers
At Skyjed, we've seen firsthand how this plays out. Take our recent case study with a Tier 1 Bank managing 2000+ lifecycle items across multiple manual systems:
The Challenge: Manual email-based approval processes, Excel spreadsheets with unclear version control, manual reporting and regulatory compliance bottlenecks.
The Results after 12 weeks:
- 2X ROI achieved
- 90% reduction in manual effort
- 98% accurate risk identification
- 50% reduction in time spent monitoring performance
- 90% reduction in time spent preparing reports
That's not just efficiency – that's transformation.
Your Time Back: The Automation Revolution PMs Have Been Waiting For
Instead of spending hours manually pulling data from different sources, Skyjed automatically aggregates your product data, generates AI-powered insights, creates automated health check reports, and delivers real-time risk RAG reporting so you can focus on what matters: making product decisions that drive growth.
Skyjed eliminates 50-80% of manual compliance overhead. Our automation handles the coordination, tracks compliance automatically, and eliminates those 20+ failure points that keep you up at night.
Our clients consistently see improved efficiency, reduced costs, increased revenues, and better delivery of strategic and customer outcomes.
Imagine reclaiming those 10+ hours per week. What could you accomplish with that time? More user interviews? Better competitive analysis? Actually thinking through that complex feature prioritization?
Nearly 60% of workers estimate they could save at least 6+ hours per week if the repetitive aspects of their jobs were automated. That's almost a full workday back in your hands every single week.
The Bottom Line: Your Strategic Brain Deserves Better
Product management is already complex enough without adding unnecessary operational overhead. The tools should work for us, not the other way around.
What's your biggest time drain as a PM? Drop it in the comments – I bet we're all fighting similar battles.
P.S. If you're tired of the manual data grind, check out what we're building at Skyjed. We're on a mission to eliminate manual oversight and administration overhead for product teams - saving you hours every week to focus on what actually drives growth.
Contact Skyjed today for a personalised demonstration.
About Skyjed
Watch our 30 second Skyjed Overview video here
Skyjed’s AI-powered end-to-end lifecycle and governance platform is mission control for lifecycle management and governance. Bringing together every data point across your portfolio and lifecycle into a single source of truth, it gives our clients a new perspective to make more strategic lifecycle decisions to launch, monitor, optimise, and win.
Our industry-leading platform has received numerous awards and recognition from clients and industry bodies, demonstrating our commitment to innovation and excellence.
