Product Management — the career for PhDs you’ve never heard of

16 min readMar 28, 2020

Three years ago, I graduated from my PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology. I was a bonafide, card-carrying scientist. Six months ago I made a career shift and today I work as a product manager for a digital health company.

One of the most frequent questions I get when I introduce myself to other product managers is “How does a scientist end up becoming a product manager?”

To me, the transition always made a lot of sense. There are lots of skills that overlap between the two roles, and I personally think most STEM PhDs would make great product managers. However, I’d never heard of it as a career option when I was in grad school. All the careers I’d heard about didn’t really appeal to me — industry researcher, sales rep, medical science liaison, science writer, etc. There were bits of each career that I thought I might enjoy, but I couldn’t see myself doing any of them full-time.

I’ve been doing product-related things at my current company for about a year now, and officially became a product manager six months ago. I love my job, and I get to use a lot of the skills I picked up during my PhD. My hope is that if you come from a similar background, you get to learn about a cool new career path today.

But first…

What is product management?

To be clear, I’m specifically referring to digital product management. Product managers were originally conceived of as “brand managers” in the fast-moving consumer goods industry. It was primarily a marketing role, which still exists today. However, it’s taken on a new life in the tech space.

Google “what does a product manager do”, and you’ll probably come across this image:

Caption: © 2011 Martin Eriksson. Also see his article “What is a Product Manager?”

The role of a PM depends a lot on who they work for, but ultimately their goal is the same: to “discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”, in the words of Marty Cagan, author of the book Inspired: How to Make Tech Products Customers Love. In general, PMs work with developers and other technical experts, user experience (UX) designers, and business stakeholders to build products that deliver value to a company.

Product management (which I’ll also refer to as PM interchangeably with “product manager”) is a difficult job to define, but ultimately it’s a leadership role where you lead by influence. PMs don’t usually manage developers or designers directly, but facilitate in creating the best solution to a business problem.

PMs come from a variety of backgrounds. As it’s a leadership role, it’s rare to find someone who started out in product management. Common backgrounds for PMs are software engineering, UX design, business analysis, and marketing. However, ever so often, a rogue PM with a non-traditional background (like yours truly) slips in.

My journey

So how did I end up here?

My PhD thesis was about the genetics of stress responses in nematode worms. Yes, you read that right — worms. When I graduated I didn’t have the most employable technical skills. Turns out poking 1mm-long creepy crawlies with a platinum wire and transferring small amounts of clear liquid from one tube to another are’t really hot skills in the job market.

I didn’t have a plan — I knew I didn’t want to stay in academia, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. By chance, a friend who worked for a local digital health startup posted on Facebook, saying they were hiring scientists. They clearly needed them quickly because one very casual interview later, I was hired on a temporary contract.

A startup was the perfect environment for me. There’s always more work to be done than there are people to do it in a startup. Before long I was doing a number of different tasks unrelated to my scientific specialty (I was “the geneticist”). This included project management: I would keep track of the different projects and tasks we were working on, estimate timelines, run meetings and take meeting notes.

Eventually, I started to question the logic behind some of the work we were doing. Why was one feature or strategy more important than the other? Were we making the right bets? How would we know? Did our customers care about what we were making? How could we make something more people would care about? Who, in fact, were these people?!

Somewhere along the line I learned that these were all questions a product manager was responsible for figuring out the answers to. I’m not sure how I learned this, but it probably involved lots of googling. I read books, blogs, and tried a few online classes. Eventually I mustered up the courage to ask my company to pay for some training. I took an in-person product management course at Brainstation Vancouver, which really gave me the confidence to start networking within the product community.

During this time, I made my interest in transitioning to a PM role known to my supervisor and colleagues who I trusted. I began doing product-related tasks — helping our director of product with day-to-day work, helping write marketing materials, drafting wireframes, launching smaller features. Eventually, when my contract came to an end, I was offered a full-time role as product manager.

What I do

I’ll be honest, there’s nothing more I hate than the question “so what do you actually do?” I have an existential crisis every time I encounter it. The problem is two-fold: a) product managers’ responsibilities vary a lot between different companies, and b) there aren’t many jobs like mine. But for the sake of this article, I’ll try to summarize it.

In essence, I’m a communication hub. I liaise between our business stakeholders and our teams on the ground, aka our developers, designers, and yes, our scientists. I take business priorities such as “we need to scale our system so we can run this 1000-person project with partner X” and help translate them to the different teams. That could be “we need to set up an automated reporting pipeline” to our developers, “we need to reduce friction in the onboarding process” to our designers, and “we need to curate data for partner X’s area of interest” for our scientists. Therefore, I need to have some level of familiarity with what each of these teams do, and to be able to speak their language to some extent.

I am also expected to be the expert when it comes to all things product. This means knowing what our product does and how it does it, but also who is using it, how and why. I put aside time every week to check our app analytics — if we had more users, this would be more frequent. I also do user research including surveys, user interviews, and secondary research (i.e. googling and trawling the internets). This helps me understand what our users want from our product, which is important for both providing input to business departments on strategy as well as helping our technical teams make decisions. As well, a major part of my job involves saying “no” to requests. Having this information helps me make a better case for saying no.

And of course, I still work in a startup, so I still do “whatever else needs to be done”. A lot of being a product manager involves filling in the blank spaces, and that’s especially true at a startup.

Why PM is a great career for PhDs

Alright, so why am I saying that product management is a great career for PhDs? Aside from the obvious self-promotion, there are a few unique characteristics PhDs naturally bring to the table.

Research skills

Remember what I said earlier about “being the expert” on everything product-related? That sound familiar? Your PhD is all about becoming the expert on something. How did you do that? Same way you become an expert on your product — research.

PMs are expected to be the go-to point for information on their product, their users, and their market. This might involve a long chat with a senior developer (let’s face it — several long chats), designing and analyzing a survey, reading market reports, or just good old googling. You read and absorb a ton of information related to a narrow topic, and you use that information to make decisions. In your PhD, that decision may be to run an experiment. In product, that decision may be to run an experiment…huh.

Which brings us to the next point:

Building and testing hypotheses

One of the most important skills you learn from a PhD is how to come up with and test a hypothesis in a rigorous way. In my PhD I might have come up with the hypothesis “If I increase expression of this gene, these worms will be more resistant to a toxin”. As a PM my hypothesis might be “If I add a prompt telling my users it’s been more than 6 months since their last test, it will increase the number of users re-testing” (this is definitely specific to the product I work on — feel free to come up with other examples).

A hypothesis should be testable. “I hypothesize that my product is useful” is not a good hypothesis (though hopefully that’s your starting point!). The critical thinking you develop during your PhD is really the best skill you learn, not just for product but also for life in general.

Analytical skills

Once you come up with your hypothesis and you have a solid plan to test it, the next step is to analyze the results from your experiment. Now here’s the tricky bit — it’s not just about slapping the data into an Excel spreadsheet and making a graph. Data without context is useless.

As a simple example, let’s say the number of users logging into your app this week is 500. By itself, that number is not significant. What are you comparing it to? Was it 1000 or 100 the week before? Even more importantly, do you know why you’re seeing those numbers? Did marketing run a special promotion this week? Did the snowstorm this week make more people use your food delivery app? Or, heaven forbid, is there a bug that’s causing a false increase in numbers (protip: always check it isn’t a bug before you proudly announce things like this to your boss)? If you did a PhD, you’ll know that sometimes a result is not all it seems. Think about the caveats section in your thesis or papers.

Also important is the ability to present data in a coherent way to business stakeholders. Again, this is a skill that most PhDs learn. A research paper is essentially a story presented in data. It’s just that the data is a little different. By the way, expect to be grilled on your data and your interpretations — but you defended your thesis and had countless committee meetings, so you should be fine, right?

One thing to note is that if you have advanced data analytics skills and you’re comfortable with graduate-level or higher statistics, some PM jobs (usually at larger companies) actually do require these skills. Seek them out!

Extreme ownership

I like this term, mostly because it has “extreme” in it. While it has its roots in the Navy Seals, extreme ownership can be applied to any field, including product. It essentially means you go above and beyond in taking ownership and responsibility for your product (and team). You don’t blame things on other people or say “that’s not my job”. You roll your sleeves up, take the lead and do what needs to be done.

A PhD project is an extended exercise in extreme ownership. While you’re not in charge of a team, you are responsible for getting this project done. Don’t know how to use an electron microscope? If it turns out you need it, guess who’s learning how to use one! Undergrad mess up the experiment they were helping you out with? Good luck putting the blame on them at your committee meeting!

Extreme ownership is a trait that does not come naturally to most people, but PhDs know all about extreme ownership already. You just need to apply it in a different setting.

Constant learning

PMs are constantly learning. Your job is to absorb and synthesize new information all the time and help your team make decisions. For many people, this is a skill that may be hard to re-learn once they’ve left school.

For PhDs, constant learning is a fact of life. There’s always a new paper to read or a new method coming out, even if you’ve been in your field for a long time. If you love constant learning, PM is a great career.

You can make a difference

This one is less about what makes PhDs suited to a career in PM, and more about why you should consider it. Behind many of the technologies, apps and websites you use today, there is a PM (probably many PMs) making decisions on how to build it. Sometimes these decisions may seem trivial, such as what colour a button should be. But often, these decisions affect how people use your products, which can go on to have major effects on their lives.

Consider an app that lets someone book appointments with a doctor. A good product manager, in collaboration with good designers and developers, will make sure the process is seamless for both patient and doctor, which may lead to someone being more inclined to book that annual checkup, which may lead to that tumour being detected earlier. On a more personal note, I make it my mission to make sure everything included in our app is evidence-based, and is valuable to our users. I may not be “in” science anymore, but I make sure the information our users get is rooted in science and also communicated in an accessible manner.

One of the biggest complaints I hear from researchers leaving academia is that their work has no real-world application. I know that was certainly a problem I grappled with in my PhD. When I went into industry I was told by many people that I would no longer be solving meaningful problems. I beg to differ. The world outside of academia is rife with meaningful problems to be solved, and there are simply not enough smart people to solve them all.

Who PM is NOT for

So is this a great career for any PhD wanting to make a shift into tech? Obviously not. Do some quick googling and you’ll find plenty of reasons why product management may not be for you. I’m not going to rehash what’s out there. Instead I’ll focus on traits more commonly found in PhDs that make them less suitable for the role.

You want to be a specialist

Some people really want to be known for one particular skill. If you love data analysis or coding, that’s OK! There are plenty of jobs where you can use those skills and really shine. The best PMs are T-shaped: they have depth of expertise in one field (usually related to their specific product), and some knowledge about most other areas. If you’d rather be a specialist, find a role that lets you do the thing you love doing most — frankly, it’s the easier route.

Interacting with people is not your jam

If you have, or are working towards, a PhD, chances are you’re a nerd, which means social interaction is not your favourite thing. I’m not saying you need to be an extrovert to do this job (I’m not an extrovert at all). However, you should enjoy interacting with your team — you’ll be doing it a lot! Most PMs spend LOTS of time in meetings, working sessions or impromptu discussions with team members.

You want to do it all yourself

I get it — most PhD theses are a one-person endeavour. We learn that we’re the only ones responsible for our project and that we have to do whatever it takes to get it done (hence the extreme ownership). But building a product is a team effort. You’re not the one writing the code, or coming up with the design, or doing the marketing. Your job is to provide good direction, trust your colleagues to do their best work, and occasionally pitch in when extra hands are needed. The micromanaging PM is going to have a hard time earning goodwill with their team. If this is a hard concept for you to grasp, PM may not be for you (yet).

You have a hard time saying no

It’s hard to say no in academia sometimes. Your supervisor and committee have nearly complete control over your fate. But as a PM, a lot of your job will involve saying no, sometimes to very good ideas. Maybe it doesn’t serve your customer needs, or it’s not technically feasible, or it just doesn’t have a good return on investment. You’ll need to have good reasons, of course, but you’ll still have to say no to a lot of things.

Tips for breaking into PM

OK, so you’ve made it this far, and you think this is something you might enjoy as a career. Now what?

I won’t lie, PM is a hard field to break into, especially if you’re coming from outside the tech and business realms. There are very few entry level jobs (usually known as Associate PM roles). I can only offer advice based on my experience and the experiences of other people I know who have transitioned into the role from other non-traditional fields.

(Note: Many of these tips also apply for those of you trying to transition to from academia to non-traditional careers.)

Do your research

If this article is the first you’ve heard of product management, awesome! Start reading up on it, there is a lot out there to learn. Google is your friend. Use it.

If you become more serious about it, I recommend taking one formal course, in-person if at all possible. I did Brainstation’s part-time Product Management program, which was great for a number of things — it solidified a lot of things I’d already learned on my own, introduced me to some new concepts, and allowed me to apply all those concepts to a project in a systematic way. It was also a great way to expand my professional network.

Work on your communication skills

Even if they’re good, keep working on them. You’ll need them all — writing, speaking, and yes, listening. You can’t be a good PM if you don’t listen. Learn to be empathetic and to put yourself in the shoes of someone else.

I highly recommend doing lots of science communication, or trying your hand at 3-Minute Thesis competitions. This is a great exercise in explaining complex, technical information to people of different backgrounds, as well as using data to tell a story. This was probably the most important skill I picked up during my PhD. Even if you don’t want to work in scicomm, this skill will differentiate you from the PhDs who can’t utter a single sentence without using jargon (yes, they exist).

Consider a lateral move

My transition to PM was much easier because I was already in a company where I knew the product and the team well. I might have been hired as a geneticist, but was able to demonstrate I had the skills to do another job within the company. Consider finding a technical role that matches your training, even if it’s not exactly what you want to do long-term, and pick up other experiences from there. That goes for trying to transition into any other kind of job, too.

Skill up

You may not be doing some of these things yourself, but you’ll need to have a basic understanding of these skills and be comfortable talking to team members who are the experts.

Coding: Most PhDs have heard by now that they should learn to code. If you haven’t done so, this is the time to start. There are lots of free basic courses online — any language will do really, it’s more the mindset of how to code something that matters. The Javascript intro course I did online two years ago was enough for me to be comfortable working with our developers. Just don’t learn R, unless you want to get into an area that’s heavy on statistics. Coding can also be extremely satisfying in its own right!
User experience design: Have you ever encountered scientific software that was terrible to use and wondered why it couldn’t be as easy as the apps you’re used to these days? It’s because most of that software didn’t have the benefit of good UX design. There’s a perception that “design” = “creative”/“aesthetic” which isn’t necessarily true. Good UX design simply lets users solve problems easily. Anyone can learn to run user interviews and draw a simple wireframe. The next time you encounter one of these terrible programs, think about how you could improve them to make them more user-friendly. Or think about how you might design a program to help you with a problem you currently have in your work life.
Data analytics: This one is the easiest for most PhDs to pick up. Take your Excel skills to the next level, or learn to use SQL or Tableau. Google Analytics also has an online course you can take for free. Don’t sweat about which ones to learn for now — just try something that interests you.
Business: Don’t worry about taking specific courses in marketing, finance, or whatever. Just learn the basic terms — you can always learn more about a specific field later if it makes sense for you.
Psychology: This is a big one. One pitfall of PhD training is you expect everyone in the world to think in a rational way, or you think everyone will necessarily adopt the latest and best technologies to solve a problem. Read up on behavioural economics, habit formation, and cognitive bias. I’ve added some resources below.

Network, network, network!

By now most of you have heard that networking is the key to career success. It certainly was for me — as I’ve already said, I first learned about my job through a friend. While networking isn’t the only key to career success, it’s definitely important in making a career shift. Many cities with a visible tech sector have PM meetup groups or societies that are free or inexpensive to join. Use these groups to learn about the product scene in your city and meet people who are building cool things. Most groups also hold educational events such as talks and panel discussions, which can supplement your own learning. Product people are also generally super nice and willing to share their expertise and ideas.