Discovering Product Management as an Engineer
I have been a web application engineer for the better half of a decade, before that I performed client work in web and graphic design. Throughout the years I have always been fascinated with the customer, and their experience. I found deep interest in process, cross-team collaboration, understanding what drives success for a product, and what it means to see an application from ideation to production.
It was only about a year ago, that I realized that there is a place where you need to understand the technology, user experience, and business. That place is product management.
The months following my discovery of product management, I dedicated most of my free time to studying the art, as well as what it means to be a product manager. These are my findings.
Product is Loosely Defined
At it’s core, product is defined as such:
something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/product — Merriam Webster
The key word in that definition commodity. By example, this would be a social media platform, a back of house system used to process orders, an office desk, or even a shoe.
In product management, a product isn’t always directly tied to a commodity. Dissecting the social media platform, it has functions that would in theory be management by multiple product managers. For example:
Social Media Platform
There are multiple functions of a basic social media platform, e.g.:
- The ability to add, edit, and remove connections. How do you define the social aspect of the social media platform? How do you differentiate from other platforms, what’s the edge?
- The registration process. What information does the platform need to provide an above adequate experience to the user?
- The profile. What would users care about on this platform, what would users want to learn when connecting with other users?
- Sharing or posting capability. How can we keep users engaged? What would make a user come back to the platform, retaining relevancy while also retaining a competitive edge?
- Capitalizing on the social media platform. How does this platform make money? What are the KPIs and metrics that measure success for the platform’s organization.
- etc.
In each of the functions above, there needs to be extensive market research, industry analysis, measurements of success for each function, user experience evaluation and hardening, technical definition, security and privacy concerns (looking at you GDPR and CCPA), A/B and experience testing, etc. The list goes on.
Having multiple product managers for each individual function enables focus, focus enables success, success drives KPIs and metrics.
Although in many instances product may be considered a single commodity… Product isn’t always defined as such.
Product is Not Linear, But in a Good Way
Coming from a user experience and engineering background, there has always been an answer to a problem. Engineering more-so than user experience.
Problems in a product, are much less linear, for example; a shoe company releases a new shoe, projected sales are stagnant. Heck, even the customer focus groups were very receptive to the new shoe, we have the qualitative data to back our decisions up!
The answer isn’t so simple, some of the issues could be as follows:
- A recent competing shoe company released a very similar new shoe, not only is it marginally cheaper, but there isn’t that stabby in-seam sewing on the inside of the shoe.
- Customers would like the ability to customize the color of the shoe, they did not respond well to the three colors it will be manufactured in. Can we have customers do this online?
- For those whom bought the shoe, they aren’t using it for it’s intended purpose. We built a running shoe, that is being used as a business-casual shoe. How will this impact the product roadmap for v2, and v3 of the shoe?
From an engineering perspective, these aren’t problems that can easily be solved. These aren’t linear problems, with linear solutions. Furthermore, they aren’t all problems that can be solved by just a product manager, this is cross-team collaboration effort. How can these problems be solved? Is there an issue with marketing the product? Do we need to re-evaluate the material we used for the in-seam to prevent that stabby-ness? How can we work with our IT and UX teams to release a feature on the website to allow customers to customize colors on our shoes?
This is what keeps product interesting. As a product manager, you are responsible for the ultimate success of a product.
Product Training is Also Not Linear
There isn’t a one-stop-shop for learning product management. There are thousands on resources, but the industry doesn’t recognize one particular track to become proficient in product management.
Below are some of the resources I have used, and each have taught me an abundant amount of product management.
There are also many product management Slack, LinkedIn, and Facebook groups you can join, along with many events like ProductCon.
Ultimately, my journey in learning product management has been fantastic and wonderful. I would recommend this path for anyone that, like me, has been excited about the customer, the tech behind an experience, and of course what defines success for a product.
