A Productive Business Trip to Beijing (as a Product Marketer)
About this video
Jeff vlogs a productive business trip to Beijing, which he describes as his first business trip of 2021 as a product marketing manager. He spends an hour or so packing, arranging packing cubes by work clothes, casual wear, gym wear, underwear, and video gear. He plans each day using a trip planner page in Notion, with things to pack on the right and colleagues to see and personal plans on the left, and spends 10 to 20 minutes visualizing the places he needs to be each day. The main purpose is a two-day offline event for external clients and partners, but he also schedules face-to-face catch-ups with internal cross-functional colleagues in Beijing, saying small things like this make marketing campaigns run smoother. On the way to the airport he listens to ‘The Motivation Myth’ by Jeff Haden, taking notes in a to-do list app on his phone and later transferring them to his book notes page in Notion, highlighting the idea of emphasizing the routine and systems used to reach a goal rather than the end goal itself. In Beijing he focuses on final preparations for the event, crediting his colleague May with planning it from scratch. Its objective is to improve clients’ creative capabilities, with creative experts and sales team members as guest speakers and mobile app developers as the target audience. He breaks the product marketing team’s event responsibilities into three categories: uncovering user insights to shape the event narrative, overall event management and execution, and post-event analysis and follow-up. He also explains organizing a planning sheet that can take 10 tabs or more in Google Sheets into four sections — key information tabs, pre-event preparation, post-event analysis from surveys and feedback, and working tabs for attendance and engagement metrics — before the audience splits into breakout groups for creative presentations and speaker feedback.
Key takeaways
- Pack with packing cubes organized by work clothes, casual wear, gym wear, underwear, and video gear, and plan each day in a Notion trip planner
- Spend 10 to 20 minutes visualizing the places you need to be each day before traveling
- Use business trips to schedule face-to-face catch-ups with cross-functional colleagues, even when not required, to make campaigns run smoother
- Product marketing event work splits into three categories: uncover user insights to shape the narrative, manage and execute the event, and do post-event analysis and follow-up
- Organize a large Google Sheets planning document into four sections: key information, pre-event preparation, post-event analysis, and working tabs for attendance and engagement
Episode details: published March 30, 2021 · 7:07 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Jeff Su’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.
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