Should I Become a Product Manager?

This post started as a quick reply to someone who wanted guidance for moving to a PM position from another role in IT. As I didn’t have time to make it shorter, here’s the whole brain dump…

Hats and Caps in Berlin

Off the top of my head, there are three different hats you can wear as a product manager:

1. Strategy: identify the need and define the solution. Built a roadmap with high level business and functional product milestones.
2. Definition: Research user expectations and market fit. Or just articulate that disrupting vision so it can be understood by mortals, if that’s how you roll, you visionary beast you. Wireframe, specify, design. Prototype and test.
3. Implementation: Transform the specs into functional and technical requirement. Plan the sprints and manage the day-to-day for the development, delivery, test, design, support teams. This is project management.

In addition to this, at all levels you will have an extra layer: stakeholder relationship management. It’s the part where you provide ETAs, manage expectations and prepare releases and deliveries.

Looking at this list, PM seems like a complex and crucial job. It’s not, really. If the founder, designer and tech lead have great experience and insight, the PM functions are absorbed into their day-to-day. Unfortunately (for stakeholders) or fortunately (for PMs) the product management tasks still take some specific skills and time and are worthy of their own position in a structure.

Look at the above list and try to imagine yourself in any of those positions. If you see a good fit for one of them and you can do any of the others for an extended period of time, you should be a product manager.

Which hat suits you best? Follow that path, start writing, designing, testing, prototyping and just practice in a productive way.

There is overlap between the fields and you need to understand all parts regardless of your role. These are also not actual steps (as in “waterfall”) so there’s overlap in the roll out too.

Continues with First Steps Into Product Management