From Product Manager to Leading The Product (the ultimate road trip)
I like to travel. I’ve spent the past 2 years living and working in Hong Kong and travelling around Asia and Australia in my role as Product Director at SEEK. It’s a long way from home (London) and has been an amazing adventure. I’m heading back to London soon to join TransferWise, but before I go I have a date with the Melbourne edition of Leading The Product to share my perspective on product leadership.
When I signed up to speak at the conference, I was looking for a metaphor to help explain how to navigate the career paths of product management, and travel felt like a good place to start because it’s been such an important part of my career (and my personal life too). So I went with the concept of a road trip, which I hoped would also make my slides look good.
I wanted to start the talk by explaining why I chose to speak about leadership, an area that has been explored, discussed and documented all over the place. Especially when I heard that product management leadership guru Rich Mironov was going to MC this year’s event, as well as running a workshop on product leadership. No pressure… Let’s just say this made me want to be double sure I could add something new here (besides sharing beautiful pictures of Iceland).
The reason why I thought I could do this is because Product Management is changing - fast. The role of the product manager is disrupting how businesses work by putting customers and technology at the centre of organisations (where once traditional strategy teams sat, in reclining arm chairs). In the ten or so years since I started calling myself a PM, the role has matured, disrupted itself and now has tentacles of responsibility stretching into the heart of the boardroom and the highest levels of leadership. It’s no longer just about website optimisation.
This is an amazing opportunity for the product leaders of today, but more importantly the product managers of today, some of whom will go on to be the product leaders of tomorrow. As the world gets smarter, faster and more automated, products and services are being forced to evolve to satisfy the increasingly ‘unreasonable’ demands of everyday consumers. Food delivery start-ups are one of the most ubiquitous examples — our expectations of the quality of food, the speed of delivery and the ease of ordering and paying for it have been transformed by technology and the companies using it to disrupt age-old ways of doing things.
The value we add as product managers is in leading or driving businesses to meet these changing customer needs (or expectations) in a more systematic way, by moving the user closer to the heart of business strategies. The Product Manager role today is what differentiates services like Uber, Grab and Deliveroo, companies like Google and Amazon, products like iPhones, Slack and Zoom. It’s no coincidence that the fastest growing and most valuable businesses are increasingly led by product and tech types. So, I thought, if I can inspire or help even one more product manager to find their way into a leadership role, then talking about my experience of moving into product leadership would be worth it. For unreasonable, impatient, quality-obsessed consumers everywhere.
For those coming to Leading the Product in Melbourne, I hope you find it interesting and useful. I’ll share some of the concepts I talk about and links to more detail here after the event.
Update: to keep reading, follow the link to the first part of my talk about the difference between product managers and product leaders.
