Is #prodmgmt for "everyone"? Can "anyone" become good at #productmanagement? Are there challenges / hardships or is it similar to other roles in adapting to the workflows, process & culture?
Over one of my recent introductory sessions I was dealing with people who wanted to break into product and observed how they carried vague notions about what constitutes product management (hereinafter referred to as “PM”) and how it perhaps might have evolved by taking a cue out of general management itself.
Also, some of the questions that I got asked were:
Do you remember your first break into PM?
What is it that got you there? What were the motivations?
How easy / tough was it when you joined in dealing with the expectations?
Did you ever go wrong during your job?
Did this choice help you shape your career?
If anything, breaking into a new job as a PM could be about learning to withstand acute pressure initially and observing keenly, scoping the nuances & gaps in being able to carve a niche through what you bring to the table via your skills to blend in initially, while quickly upskilling / making fine adjustments over them so as to help influence teams in understanding, aligning to the vision & motivate them to deliver to their potential.
It’s not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you may get hit and keep moving forward.
- Rocky Balboa
If one would have to extend the above quote to PM in a similar vein it would look something like this:
“As much as you stay up & move forward while getting hit hard, it’s also about how accurate you can be while having to deal with truckloads of ambiguity & bailing everyone out.”
Talking of PM material, courses, frameworks, dos’ & don’ts, they are all available in aplenty. But those certifications may not be enough for you to run the show as there is a deeply-nuanced & pragmatic angle which could revolve around the scope of a pain points, needs, a deeper understanding of the market, users, problems and that never remains a constant. So, when the principles have been defined and written, there is a dogma that dictates you to be imaginative, empathetic, flexible and follow your nerve.
“The diamonds that standout and shine the brightest are the ones that have taken the most cuts.”
So, a PM’s role is that of high visibility & high agency. And, it doesn’t really matter what your background is, you may still have it in you to become great at product management.
2.0 The Pros & the Cons
Have you ever heard of an instance wherein a trait that acts as a strength over a particular area could turn into a terrible weakness needing immediate attention and mending on priority?
Well! This is quite possible with your transitioning into PM.
More importantly, you would want to know what could / should you do once you find out that some of those coveted traits you possess from your previous jobs are now a weakness.
Here is a list of some of the common traits we’d go over in this exercise here:
I’ve learnt it the hard way that one needs to be totally aware of the negatives / disadvantages first before getting overtly ambitious and attracted to the juicy prospects and taking the plunge. So, I’d like to cover the disadvantages first.
2.1 Disadvantage(s)
In as much as there is such an aura about bagging a role in PM, the craft sometimes could carry a few nuances that one needs to be warned about very early.
2.1.1. Boxing / Typecasting
When I say “boxing” I mean 📦 and not 🥊! It could also be referred to as typecasting and could be very dangerous for anyone’s career.
As a PM suppose you join an organization where you are required to take care of all the basic PM work alongside contributing actively and working closely with the tech teams in defining “HOW to build” as well, when over a normally scenario PMs tend to stop at defining just the “WHAT to build”.
This may happen due to reasons like it being a start-up who are in their early days with very few people on the team or your experience that you highlighted during the interview in say databases for instance. Supposing you spend a good 2-3 yrs. building a couple of products alongside some 10+ feature additions in frequent intervals, it’s very easy for you to get boxed / typecast into “PM a who is good with Database / backend” and before you know you become the go to expert in database / backend related problems all across the hall.
When there is absolutely nothing wrong with that given the purview of your current job, it’s harmful in a way that gets you to believe what PM is all about in totality taking a cue out of the role you are playing.
Besides, it kind of takes you away from what PM really constitutes.
And it may hurt your work life balance as well as you’d end up saying “yes” working sans any sort of boundaries / demarcation. Also, for some it may take ages to understand what’s happening and come to terms and to realize it.
How do you deal with that?
by reading about PM in general
by reading perspectives about PM from others
by learning to say “NO” nicely
by keeping in touch / interacting directly with other PMs through social media
by understanding growth paths of PM from where you currently stand
learning about various skills required to be a great PM & working on them personally (if the scope is absent for it professionally)
finding mentors who you think are suitable and who you feel they have experience over various phases of the PLC and have grown up the ladder and can understand your perspective
volunteering & taking initiatives aligned with developing PM / Leadership skills over and above the work that’s often prescribed to you
Source - https://twitter.com/BgpInv
2.1.2 Overlaps
This is probably a befitting example of how a strength at one place could turn into a weakness at the other.
Surprisingly the transition from
any creative fields and technology where one is required to be completely hands-on
to product management where one is required to delegate
when is widely considered as the default move and a very natural phenomenon over scaling of roles & responsibilities, in reality it isn’t.
Supposing you spent a good decade in software architecture before wherein you took care of defining all of it right from Front-end, Middleware, Process Flow, Back-end, Database Design et. al. When you transition from there into product the demand would be to up your game and start thinking from various other angles like problem space, solutions, fitment, user’s emotions & motivation, pain, underserved needs, markets, adoption, growth and no longer would it work if you got stuck to thinking from a software architecture, HLD, LLD & Database design perspective.
So, you’d begin to feel the whole need to unlearn & quickly relearn a must do and it could get really overwhelming as well.
How do you deal with that?
Realization - You may have to quickly realize that you have had a huge stint with some “x” and that may be one of your greatest strength as well. But that is a thing of the past. Today, you're at a different place and it is a different role you’re required to play and you’d better start learning quickly and up your game.
Empathize - It is not that as if the skill you earned is going to be wasted. If anything, you could empathize deeply and help out people with crucial pointers, feeding them with just the right amount of information so that they could take it up from there.
Alignment - Using your prowess in a certain area from your previous stint, if anything you should be able to align the SEM & intern help him align his team better with what’s required of all of you.
2.2 The Advantages
There could be a horde of transferable skills that you could bring from your previous jobs as you step into PM.
Some of them would be: -
2.2.1 Communication
This is a basic requirement as of today across the hierarchy right from the entry levels to the higher-ups. And it isn't just limited to being able to converse in a language fluently.
It means being able to convey various things to various team members succinctly & effectively.
NOTE: It is all the more crucial today with large groups of people working from home.
2.2.2 Ownership Initiatives
It helps a great deal to have had some prior experience in taking ownership and contributing actively either individually / via a team and much as driving / overseeing the last mile execution.
One of the greatest traits anyone can bring to the table being fresh into PM is to be able to understand the meaning of the share of ownership he has been entitled to and to be able to motivate teams to execute based on the plans that has been charted out.
2.2.3 Decision Making
The act of making the right decisions are always crucial irrespective of where you’re placed in the corporate ladder.
Dabbling with a lot of ambiguous situations and having to take calls is the order of the day when it comes to PM and if one has partaken interest in / actively contributed towards anything in the entire decision-making process right from research, data mining, data analysis, deriving insights the value that one can add is tremendous.
2.2.4 People & Team Management
Never can one discount this as ultimately one has to work with and around people whatever be the position / platform / job / organization. In fact, it is dubbed as one of the most necessary & essential skills required to survive at the corporates.
A prior stint with people management at any level would have already taught you enough about how the importance owning & carrying those skills as much as also understanding anti-patterns and ways to avoid them totally.
The only change here would be, you’d have to influence without any authority though, as you may not have anyone reporting to you on paper.
2.2.5 Zoom-in / Zoom-out
Being able to collaborate effectively is a common trait that's a part of any job description.
With tons of teams going the Agile way to build things and incrementally add value to the users, there is a need to be able to collaborate seamlessly, closely working with all the team members.
So, it is quite possible and goes without saying that one may need to possess the skill to be able to converse with their teams in spelling out the requirements of tasks / deliverables as much as one would also need to effectively participate and address queries from internal & external stakeholders.
Being able to say the same thing in different ways becomes a chief necessity.
For instance:
An SEM while addressing DEVs might say:
"the button click needs to pop up confirmation details with a suitable message post validating a selected set of form fields against the values in the databases the details of which can be found in the SPECs"
as opposed to him talking to the Sr. PM and saying:
"we're onto building that feature which would allow the users to double-check and confirm his particulars / requirements before committing his booking by which we aim to bring down the discrepancies by 10% over this silo"
2.2.6 Technology
Prior to getting into PM if one has spent some time in hardcore Tech the general perception of the world outside is, "Wow, he'd be a best fit for the role".
But, I’d hate to break it to you.
That's far from the truth really.
One of the most valuable traits of a PM is delegation & restraint. And as you transition into PM carrying years of experience of building tech products you'd see that the tendency is to get into micro-level detailing of spelling out everything for the teams in question from architecture, design, databases, code, process flow et. al.
The only place where a background from Tech has helped someone with a PM stint is when the role is that of a Platform PM where one is required to build tools and associated platforms meant to be used by the IT teams / Tech teams.
2.2.7 Sales
PMs are known to have ownership of the outcomes / success of the product.
When the success criteria may be different for different products a commonality is that of a lot of the targeted users adopting the product into their lives seamlessly.
So, prior experience in sales and dabbling with the related funnels in incrementally moving them stage-wise from a set of leads to making cold calls, follow-ups leading to conversion & actual sale closure could be a lot helpful as you'd have first-hand information of all adoption, behavioral, attitudinal patterns from the market.
Also, the understanding of various customer segments and their needs, buying capacity, price sensitivity, affordability could all be worth its weight in gold here.
2.2.8 Marketing
One of the main angles to a product is in building awareness about it. Without the knowledge of a product being present amongst the masses, you cannot expect sales to hit the volumes you / your organization has targeted.
It’s the job of marketing to build that awareness aiding the understanding of the product, that's normally achieved through the pitches over many a medium.
It doesn't stop there & could run into multiple iterations / meetings over brochures, product showcases, demos, trials until such time that the capability of the product doesn't come across cleanly to the target market.
In PM once you're done with building products you'd need to work closely & interface with the marketing teams regularly over building such content & also positioning the product. Someone with a prior stint in marketing could be a certain value-add to the PM team.
2.2.9 Advertising / copywriting
Think about a time as to how you leant of a new product that was yet to be launched / just launched recently. You might have seen some advert of it somewhere in print medium (magazine, newspaper, pamphlets, brochures) or the digital medium (TV ads, Internet pop up ads, direct e-mails).
And, how many punch-lines / jingles have stayed with you over a period of time in spite of you not greatly attached to the product / sparingly used it / never used it?
That’s the magic of advertising and those people who write all that brilliant stuff are called copywriters.
If you’ve been a copywriter or contributed to any sort of build / design activity directly in advertising, it may be helpful for you as a PM to coordinate with those teams & their respective members.
Fair warning: One may have to quickly zoom-out from looking at the situation through those tinted glasses of a copywriter and embrace the bigger picture often demanded out of PMs.
2.2.10 Customer support
Products are built for customers chiefly and would be inexistent if not for the people who adopt them and that is not always that the journey from a user clicking on an Ad and expressing interest to signing up to becoming a regular paying customer is a smooth sail.
With almost all the time spent talking to customers, listening to their problems, understanding them in detail, proposing solutions sometimes related to the core of the product and sometimes in taking care of the customer by offering him a solution that may require some last mile patch-up does indeed go a long way in building an understanding of the needs & pain points.
In building user personas, one has to generalize stuff that could help the bucketing of a user-type and then think of what his pain areas would be, there could be none other than someone from the support team to understand this part better.
PM requires you to interface with the Support team from time to time to get an understanding of any specific problems that your users are facing and reporting and more often than not starting from here is considered better as it provides you with a practical picture of the troubles and also their respective magnitude over the demographics.
3.0 CORE Skills
When there are tons of resources available on the NET for those of you who are keen on breaking into that first PM role, most of them focus on the technical skills required and in as much as they are all important, one would equally require a whole bunch of personal / inter-personal skills as well.
Some of those are: -
3.1 Empathy
Without empathy you’d be able to only get as far as some problem and fitting it with a ready solution which in most cases may be nothing more than a workaround in the sense of providing an immediate cure. But, there will be no way you / your team would be able to understand if it actually was the problem the user was facing. Without the understanding of the emotions, motivations behind why the user is asking for a feature to be built, you wouldn’t be able to solve any problem.
Even worse is when the user would get back to you within days quoting that the solution you provided no longer works.
Exercising empathy, no doubt helps you with the understanding of the problem space better, it also helps you gain those brownie points when you leave the user with these thoughts post your call / meeting:
He completely understood where I was is coming from
He also was able to understand what I was going through
I’m now confident that he would now be able to provide me whatever is needed to overcome my problems
PRO TIP: No better and easier way to build a customer relationship and maintain it.
3.2 Emotional Intelligence
PMs usually are supposed to be working with many teams and members with the inherent need to influence them over various tasks. And one would find that a very tough task to crack sans emotional intelligence. Moreover, being able to connect with teams personally, recognize their efforts, understand their problems if any in an aim to make their work environments better, motivate them to push beyond what their perceived limits fall within the purview of effective relationship management and all these hinges upon EI at a very basic level.
3.3 Laser sharp focus
A PM’s regular job is fraught with a lot of planning and that is never bound to happen if you throw yourself inside a locked room. If anything, it may be over a lot of interaction, planning, brainstorming in taking those ideas from the raw form to iteratively improving them and turning them into workable designs over wireframes, mock-ups.
Also, not to mention the amount of collaboration the role demands from internal / external stakeholders. If one doesn’t get into the groove and take control the situation could well be enough to get overwhelming right at the very start itself.
It could all boil down to lots of close observation being a fly on the wall in scoping how things work and then try to fit in, needless to quote the level of focus and attention it demands.
Remember, users aren’t experts in software / even using them let alone building / designing / taking it from the stage of an idea to a finished product. If it is anyone who is touted as the expert, it is supposed to be you.
Most of the users’ requirements may be vague, even though they think they know what they are doing / saying. It becomes necessary for you to go through the drill time and time again in reading between the lines, asking tons of questions, understanding their pain points, getting into the nitty gritty of their motivations behind their asks.
Laddering will definitely help here.
Also, it is always the job of the PM to flesh out the user’s pain points and get down to those unidentified needs as well and articulate them.
For instance:
A user may say – I need you to bring up the system calculator.
If you take that verbatim and bring up the calculator (which may be so damn easy for your team to do as well).
But, a question you’d need to ask to yourself is - Why is the user trying to do the math?
And, if you double-down, you’d can be sure to understand more.
Here is an example:
3.5 Interviewing skill
What one could expect as a new entrant is a ton of requests from all places, some predictable and some totally unexpected and one would be expected to take all of them up with the same fervor.
Digging in, doubling down to get to the bottom of the issues, tasks be in within teams / internal stakeholders or users / external stakeholders / collaborators is a given in this role. To be able to do all those efficiently one would need to understand a lot about the background, reading a lot into the context towards establishing the emotions, the motivations behind those on-liner ask of the users / the blatant refusals of team member to believe in your ideas and follow them.
Conduct interviews or even if that means to ask a set of questions that are contextual, relevant to the situation so as to concisely build an understanding is a primary trait of the role.
3.6 Keen Listener
When it is important to be able to ask the right questions, it could be equally important to pay a lot of attention to what is being said so that you could drilldown and explore a certain route of interest that could lead you towards identifying something of great importance.
So, the onus is on listening keenly and only if that is done well can anyone expect to even get as close to empathizing with the people over any given situation.
But again, one shouldn’t stop at that. One should be biding his time parallelly to take suitable notes and compile thoughts in popping relevant questions / few pointers in helping teams with those crucial insights they may have missed out on by drawing their focus to it / forcing them to think about how they’re going to overcome those issues and avoid any roadblocks.
3.7 Reasoning
This is the most crucial trait that most people are judged on even during their interviews. Being able to collect information and derive insight is mostly a logical progression of tasks. And, that is of course tied to the skill of reasoning and they could be everything from:
Deductive reasoning
(Top-down approach – theory -> hypothesis -> observations)
(reasoning by comparing common elements & drawing a parallel)
Critical thinking
(analysis of facts, evaluation of issues -> judgement)
Abductive reasoning
(Set of observations -> simplest conclusive that’s most probable)
Cause & effect reasoning
(Tries to reason by finding a common ground b/w a cause and an effect)
If you want to be at the helm of your game as a PM you’d primarily have to master the top four listed above. And the reason you have to know them is it will help you discern the thought process behind why something is being said and you’d have some kind of a framework to map & bucket those thoughts into an order of importance and pick on the ones that may be more relevant to the discussion you’re having.
Knowing all of them is a definite bonus though.
3.8 Influencing without Authority
I’d hate to break it to you if you are new to PM / playing the role of an APM, JPM somewhere today in the expectation that you could then get into only managing other team members / other PMs. You don’t / never ever going to have any direct reports until such time that you get into a Product Leader’s role. And, supposing you did, you’d still have to get down to the nitty gritty of PM work in some ratio over your leadership role.
So, if you understand that you may have to align many teams that don’t even have any formal reporting hierarchy even remotely, your understanding of the role is perfect. That’s the reason why one of the core strengths of a PM has to be able to “Influence without authority”.
3.9 Healthy camaraderie
There is never a substitute for fostering seamless collaboration and that could happen only if PMs maintain a healthy relationship with all teams & members. Over your regular day you’d have to interface with many stakeholders from many teams both internal & external and managing all their expectations, keeping their emotions in check, coordinating with them and expecting them to believe in you and themselves would require a rock-solid character who is sold over the vision of the product and has clearly charted out action plans that could help steer the team.
Egos (if any) in all certainty are to checked at the door as you enter office every day.
3.10 Growth mindset
PM’s work never ceases to stop, as in there would hardly be any breathing space for you between a product’s release and in getting back to ideation / designing work. Immediately post that major release, you / some of your team members would be coordinating directly with the users in trying to gain an understanding of how the product is being received. So, it could be a high-energy activity that could be filled with a few experimentation sessions, working with the design & dev teams, re-releasing stuff and gaining insight in correcting some bugs / revamping it as required.
Also, as a PM one can’t stop constantly tapping the analytics and checking them against the set Metrics. Post some stability seen in the Drop-off Rate the focus would again shift towards Growth.
Post that major release PMs would want to get back to coordinating with the entire team in covering the next big item in the backlog and get everyone’s focus completely on getting that out of started off targeting a release as planned - on / before the next promised delivery date.
The growth mindset has to be inherent in any PM as he’d often be required to stop at nothing.
4.0 The Relationship
So, summing up all the “Roles & interfaces” & “Core Skills” one must carry all throughout his PM career onto a canvas we arrive at this relationship.
If you’re someone who is new to PM / an aspirant trying to break into this field, you may have to brush up on these core skills to be able to fit in and feel comfortable around your job role and responsibilities that quite frankly can sound like it is limitless given the numerous interfaces you’d need to have over a daily basis and not to mention the responsibility of holding it all together overseeing that it all runs smoothly.
To Conclude
Being a PM is tough no doubt, but getting into the nitty-gritty, learning the idiosyncrasies, gaining an understanding of how to get it right should be the path to tread on. As you take up that coveted PM job make sure you spend your time initially scoping things like a fly-on-a-wall, understand how teams get work done, methodologies / frameworks they use, blend yourself in well & then bring in the insight & experience over spearheading teams with what’s to be done aligning them over goals.
Also, don’t discount the power of keeping in touch with the social communities on PM in order to continuously learn new stuff bettering yourselves and remember to use those skills / traits you carry from your previous job roles sparingly well and to your advantage.
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