My PM Journey — What do strategy & surfing have in common?
Creating a roadmap on my own
This post is somewhat a celebratory one.
A few posts ago, I mentioned that one of my biggest weaknesses is strategy. I believed that without rich experience, anything I predict to happen is nothing more than a mere guess. Over time, a growing fear crept up that I just might not have it in me. It made me feel that what I lack is not experience, rather the renowned PM “X” factor of making great decisions even in uncertain and unclear situations.
The puzzling thing about strategy is that it’s quite hard to learn, practice, and measure. During my first weeks on the job, the strategic decisions were set by the leadership without much of my involvement. Due to that fact, having made few strategic decisions even after several months in, I hadn’t in any way practiced or improved on strategy.
I knew that H2’s roadmap will be primarily mine responsibility. Weeks before, I was already appalled by this task. In my single previous roadmap experience, I found myself clueless and scared. Given no added practice or experience, I had no reason to believe that this time would be any better.
The surfing / strategy overlap
If you’ve ever surfed, you must be familiar with this common first time surfer issue -
A few years ago during my first time surfing, I found it incredibly hard to even simply sit on the board in the water between waves. The waves kept flipping me over and it was painfully embarrassing. What really drove me nuts was that nobody around seemed to be having any trouble in this position. As you can probably imagine, I wasn’t very optimistic about my surfing career given that I wasn’t even able to sit on the board.
After several times in the water, my core muscles learned to passively do the job, sitting became effortless and I completely forgot about this ordeal. Only months later a friend experienced the same thing and reminded me of it.
Even though I didn’t do anything active or dedicated to improve, just by being in the water and working to remain stable, my core muscles adjusted and rapidly turned this initially tiring task into something I could handle passively. Unbeknownst to me, being in the water required me to do the work, no questions asked..
Core PM muscles
Maybe some things, even if not practiced actively, improve over time by simply being around them.
Contrary to all my fears and predictions, my H2 roadmap planning was a completely different story. My increased familiarity with the holy trinity of Product-Clients-Market was being passively strengthened, helping me visualize the upcoming roadmap and general strategy. It almost seemed like common sense or simple logic to me.
When surfing, my core muscles were able to improve & grow even without dedicated effort or training. Perhaps similarly, my core PM muscle, strategy. This professional workout improved and strengthened my PM skills, simply by me living the PM world and getting to know my clients, the market, and the product, better.
I truly hope that this part doesn’t end in six months with the realization that this strategy I’m so proud of was an absolute train-wreck, but if that’s the case — I promise to link that post to this and help you make fun of me.
See you in the next post!
If you liked this post, please tune in to my journey from the beginning:
2. Analyst to PM in three months. How?
4. Surviving my first month as a PM
5. Product Managin’ my way through month #2
6. Wrapping up my first Q as a PM
7. Q2 Part one — Finally out of the backlog
