Reflecting on the First 100 Days
(Of being a product manager)
I was thrilled to land my first product manager role at Pluralsight, something I’ve been working towards for the past couple years. Even though I came into the role familiar with both the product I’d be working on and the teams I’d be working with, I’ve learned a lot on the job. Last week I celebrated the first 100 days on the job and wanted to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned so far.
To be a product manager, you need to:
Be on top of your shit
Being organized and reliable isn’t a nice-to-have personality trait — it’s a skill that can and must be developed for this role. It’s been awesome to stretch and push my organizational and project management skills in this role, given that a lot of my days look something like this:
I’m not going to lie, it helps to have some OCD tendencies in this role. Everything from knowing where the latest version of a document lives, running effective meetings, following up on a timely basis are all essential to effective product management. To be good at my job, everything I do must be rock solid. No dropped plates.
Understand the fundamentals
100 days ago I didn’t really know what a self-healing API did or why you would build one. I knew the word “heuristic” before but hadn’t paid too much attention to it’s meaning. Good design vs. bad design was a gut feel thing, not something I could articulate well. Since then, I’ve dove into these concepts and more, but not because I have to. I work with an amazing UX designer and a fantastic engineering team — they know more about these things than I ever will. So why learn these things? Because understanding these fundamentals makes me more of an asset to my team, user and product. It enables me to contribute productively to the conversation and share relevant information to help shape technical and design decisions.
Know that it’s okay, maybe even better, to say “I don’t know”
Early on, I felt like I had to follow along with everything the engineering team was saying or know all the answers to the questions they asked me about product decisions and strategy. When I didn’t know or didn’t understand something, I panicked a little — I didn’t want to be judged or considered unworthy of my new role. But as soon as I started admitting what I didn’t know, asking better questions and taking the time to understand or follow up with the right answer, I started having a better grasp on things and hopefully, earned the respect of my team for being honest and dependable.
Communicate, communicate, communicate
No matter how much I think I’m communicating, how proactive I think I’m being, it’s not enough. Being a remote part of a larger team further adds to the challenge but I’m starting to find a rhythm that works. If I don’t do my job communicating the right information out to the right people at the right time (which is often two weeks before anything actually needs to happen), the system totally breaks down. Establish some structure early on for what you need to communicate, how often, with whom and stick to it with consistency. I’m not there yet but working on this now.
Be specific, clear and don’t sugarcoat
I’ve already been in a surprising number of conversations that contained questions like, “why is this a priority?” or “can customers expect to see this by the end of the quarter?” The people-pleaser in me wanted to say things like “yes, maybe, we’ll try our best” or not say anything at all unless I had a definitive answer. I had to break those habits real quick because there’s no room for vague, false positives in product management. If you’re articulating what will be done within a specific timeframe, don’t hesitate to articulate what won’t be done in the same breath. This extra clarity can help mitigate misunderstandings or crossed signals.
I knew product management was the right place and the perfect challenge for me but 100 days in, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do. Can’t wait to share other learnings along the way!
Thanks for reading, ❤-ing and sharing this post! Greatly appreciated.
