Presales to Product Part III: Skill Overlaps
This article is part of a mini series on transitioning from Presales/Sales Engineering to Product Management. Start from the beginning here!
Aesop’s 226th fable is a story about a tortoise 🐢 and a hare 🐇. Full of confidence, the hare takes off to an early race lead, but falls victim to distractions along the way (…a nap does sound nice right about now 😴).
The tortoise, however, focuses on their strength: consistency. It takes one step at a time until it crosses the finish line victorious.
What does this have to do with skills? There is a unique overlapping set of ‘strengths’ that SEs have in common with PMs (see Venn Diagram above). Focusing on these strengths improves your potential to make a successful role transition.
In other words… be a tortoise, not a hare!
Let’s look at three (out of many) skills that give SEs their ‘turtle-shell strength’ while making the transition to product management.
Overlap 1: Communication
No skill is more vital to the success of a product manager than communication. Let me repeat that for the people in the back:
📢📢📢 No skill is more vital to the success of a product manager than communication.
PMs encounter dozens of stakeholders on a daily basis. These encounters create many opportunities for PMs to practice tailoring their messaging to each unique stakeholder (see ‘Difference 2’ in Presales to Product Part I for a full list of stakeholders). The key to communicating across many different stakeholders is to adapt your approach with each of them so you can land your point(s) of clarity.
SEs encounter this same dance all too frequently. Customers come in all shapes and sizes. SEs spend a lot of time breaking down technical concepts for different learning styles, handling objections, and playing good cop/bad cop with their Account Executives. SEs thrive in scenarios that require chameleon-like communication skills (and their sales counterparts love them for it!).
So how can you practically display this skill during the transition from SE to PM? Simple: lean in hard to presentation skills as a showcase for your communication strengths.
Presentation skills are an SE superpower not to be downplayed during your transition process. Product managers must constantly pitch and evangelize their products to gain confidence and investment from leadership and customers. After all, most product decisions are made based on the ability for the product to make money or save money. Communicating this tactfully to executives is essential to gain product funding.
Presentations are a key part of closing a deal, especially in B2B software sales engineering. And when the deal is large enough, it’s very likely that those presentations and demos are made to the C-suite. All of that practice of demoing and presenting to executives trains an SE to tailor their message and handle objections on the spot. After all, it is the SE that ultimately reinforces a customer’s confidence in what they are being sold. It’s important to showcase this overlap to hiring managers because it provides a practical example of how you’ve “done the job” in a different setting.
Bottom line: SEs communicate clarity with their stakeholders just like PMs do. Presentation skills are an effective tool to lean on to showcase this skill overlap and highlight their ability to manage stakeholders.
Overlap 2: Curiosity
Successful product managers fall in love with problem solving. Notice the order of the phrase “problem solving”. The word “problem” comes first.
Deeply exploring and understanding the different variables and “shades” of a problem is essential to developing its solution. It may sound contrarian, but the curious PM knows that most customers don’t actually want what they ask for. It is only after curiously peeling many layers of the “problem onion” that a PM discovers a pattern of pain that applies to many customers. It’s that (validated) pattern that is a candidate worthy of solutioning.
SEs know that conducting ‘discovery’ is the key to an impactful sales cycle because it allows them to speak the customer’s language and develop solutions rooted in the customer’s pain. The more time that is spent with the customer, the higher the probability of unlocking information that can be used to showcase a solution that meets the customer’s needs. It is the curious SE that fights for access to their customer’s users to interview and discover their experiences. Couple that with the research done at an industry or domain level to uncover key trends that contribute to a strong point of view, and you have a strong chance at “WOWing” your customer. Or, at minimum, striking up another conversation to discover deeper insights for the next step in the sales cycle.
It is only after this discovery that solutioning begins. To make a successful transfer to product management, SEs must make the leap from looking at solutioning for a single customer’s use case to solutioning patterns that apply to many customers. The probability of success for making this leap depends on the depths of the SE’s curiosity.
Bottom line: Think of an SE’s customer discovery sessions as a lighter form of a PM’s product discovery processes. A key shift from SE to PM is expanding curiosity to dig into patterns of pain that apply to many customers instead of just a single customer.
Overlap 3: Selling
I’ve mentioned before that I believe PMs are the Account Executives of their products (link), and that’s because PMs are always selling. PMs need to evangelize their products to gain continued adoption, support, and momentum.
PMs sell in many different ways. A few examples:
- Pitching a new idea on the roadmap to executives
- Generating a point of view on the market that highlights your product’s differentiator
- Promoting your product in customer meetings and at events
- Writing blogs and thought leadership pieces inside your product’s domain
- Participating on panels, podcasts, and keynotes, whether internally or externally, to share ideas and key customer wins
- Building and socializing your strategy for your product internally to develop collaborative opportunities with other teams
- …and more
The list of ways a PM must sell their product is endless. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that you can slightly alter each example above, and it would apply to how SEs sell their solutions with customers:
- Pitching a new idea to a customer on how to best use the company’s product/features
- Generating a point of view on the customer’s business that uses your product as a differentiator
- Promoting the company’s products in customer meetings and at events
- Writing blogs and thought leadership pieces on solution (or industry) domains
- Participating on panels, podcasts, keynotes (usually internally) to share ideas and key customer wins
- Building and socializing your strategy for solutions in your account to develop opportunities to bring more value to customers
- …and more
Look how much overlap is in these examples! SEs can lean on their past experience during informal interviews to make hiring managers aware of these overlaps. In fact, volunteering to share a previous solution point of view for an account is a perfect example of how you can instill confidence in the transfer of your abilities to develop a sound strategic plan.
Bottom line: Both PMs and SEs are in sales. There are endless examples of selling-related activities both SEs and PMs do on a day-to-day basis. Finding a few examples to highlight during formal and informal interviews is a great strategy to highlighting the skill overlaps of the two roles.
In this three-part series, we’ve covered the differences between SEs and PMs, the skill gaps, and the skill overlaps. Next, we’ll tackle three actions you can take immediately to start your transition from presales to product management in Part IV.
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About the Author:
I’m just a Sales Engineer turned Product Manager that’s sharing my experiences with folks who are eager to make a similar transition. Feel free to drop me a note in the comments!
If you enjoyed this article, check out some of these blog posts!
•Presales to Product: A Mini-Series
•Presales to Product Part I: The Three Biggest Differences Between Presales and Product
•Presales to Product Part II: Skill Gaps
•Presales to Product Part III: Skill Overlaps
•Presales to Product Part IV: 3 Practical Actions for Transitioning to Product
