How my experience in HR prepared me for a role in Product Management

I have always been a builder. As a kid, I spent countless hours playing with blocks, creating spaceships that assembled into bigger spaceships. As an adult, I have to confess I keep doing that with my son, leveraging the fantastic variety of sets and pieces that exist today. Had I been born a couple of decades later and had I known it was a possibility, I would have become a brick model designer. (Am I too late, LEGO? Please say it ain’t so!)

Also as an adult, I spent countless hours building websites, then teams, then practices, then high-level strategies and culture. While I enjoyed the job most of the time, I felt that I was losing touch with my blocks and that I was distancing myself too much from the final build.

That’s one of the main reasons that motivated and informed my current exploration of a career pivot towards product management.

(Wait, what? Am I leaving the HR field for good? Well kind of…not exactly…
What I am exploring is to either move into a Product Management position in an HR Tech company or to work in HR for a company that is willing to treat HR as a product, with everything that this entails).

I have to say, it’s not an easy move to make at this point in my career, and after such a long tenure (full of growth and exciting challenges) at a single organization. And It is kind of a scary one too because the market is in such a weird place right now (millions of unfulfilled job positions and 15,000 tech layoffs in May, happening simultaneously). But ultimately I have found a lot of joy in diving deeper into the Product Management world and learning so many things from so many interesting people in the past year.

HR experience points for Product Managers

It was exciting to see that some skills translate pretty well from HR to Product Management.

Of course, there were some things that I already had before I even got into HR 20 years ago:

• Curiosity and desire to learn (always, all the time, from everybody)
• An eye for design (I have done my share of designs and wireframes way back when)
• A storytelling approach to communication (I knew all that fiction reading would come in handy)

But there are some other things that I picked up or enhanced along the way in my HR career:

Working for so long in a digital product agency gives you a deep understanding of software development processes, methodologies, and tools. And you need to keep your technical chops sharp to keep having engaging interviews with candidates and prospects. Technical candidates can smell non-technical recruiters from a mile away. The minute you show you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ve lost them.

Interviewing users is a key part of recruiting, both when you’re talking to the Hiring Manager trying to understand exactly what they need, and when you’re conducting interviews with candidates.

Developing empathy, listening, and understanding pain points is something that comes naturally to most HR people. One wouldn’t be in the “people business” if one didn’t have a natural inclination to empathize. And one wouldn’t be too successful either if one can’t build relationships based on vulnerability and trust with the rest of the team.

When you’re operating as part of a successful HR team, you need to have a sharp focus on your client and understand their pain point, be it your Candidates, your Hiring Managers, or simply your Employees. Everything you do (or stop doing) can and will have an impact on the user experience (candidate, employee, alumni, etc) and the overall internal climate of your organization

A good HR team never operates in a silo, there is always deep collaboration across teams and practices to ensure that hiring, performance management, career development, compensation and rewards, and many other things, happen in a programmatic, coordinated way.

Part of that coordination requires talking to stakeholders at all levels of the organization, from the CEO to the different department heads, to the first-line managers, to the actual front-line employees. You need to gather feedback from everybody, and align, engage and motivate the whole organization so that change management is not so much of a pull.

HR participates in A LOT of conversations and initiatives, with most all initiatives in a professional services organization having a “people component”. This means that HR’s plate is always full, and there is no shortage of fire drills, which requires developing your prioritization skills.

HR also generates A LOT of information, from every interaction with current, prospective, and former team members, and it’s easy to get lost (and learn nothing of the experience) if you’re not keen on People Analytics that help you make sense of reality, with both descriptive (lagging) and predictive (leading) indicators.

And the evaluation, selection, implementation, and administration of HRIS, ATS, LMS, and other HR-focused products have made me into a sort of an HR Tech Subject Matter Expert (exhibit 1 and exhibit 2). Although -truth be told- I do not enjoy the word “expert” so much because it sounds so final and definitive. Mastery is so much more a journey than it is a destination.

(Note: I also had the major benefit of being a Partner and part of the Board of Directors, which allowed me to acquire deep business skills and be involved in entrepreneurship initiatives that some HR people never get to experience)

Some required adjustments

Such a journey of learning does come with baggage, though.

There are some skills and behaviors that I am trying to unlearn because they are sort of tolerated professional vices within HR, but they have a (much bigger) negative impact on Product Management:

Risk aversion is tolerated and even encouraged in HR. Depending on the size and nature of the organization (and the strictness of the market it operates in), taking too much HR risk can result in significant legal exposure and critical financial impact. Some recent examples of poorly executed branding mishandled employee relations and downright unethical DEI performances illustrate why the concept of “fail early, fail often, fail forward” doesn’t translate so well into the HR field.

Becoming too absorbed by the tactical actions is a natural thing HR people do, out of their passion for helping other people. “Roll up your sleeves” and “all hands on deck” can result in permanent professional myopia, as you become so enticed by the immediate rewards of small actions of immediate results and limited consequence. One essential skill of successful Product Managers is the ability to easily switch the scope back and forth between strategic and tactical work, without forgetting that ultimately your strategy should inform all your tactical decisions.

Connected to the above, there is a tendency to rush to a fire-fighting mode that all HR people are familiar with. As I said before, there is no shortage of fire drills in HR (immediate hires, sudden departures, and that cold sweat that runs through your back when an employee requests an immediate meeting with HR, out-of-the-blue on a Friday at 4 PM). But operating in that knee-jerking mode permanently can be stressful and damaging for a product manager. Proper fire management (and the temperance of letting things burn when they have to) are essential Product Management skills.

Being an SME can also come with a disadvantage, and it relates to my previous point about the static nature of the word “expert”: if you’re not careful you can be blindsided by your own expertise, and also fail to innovate, resulting in incremental improvements rather than exponential ones.

So what do you think, my Product Manager and HR friends? Is there enough of a useful overlap between these two fields? Are there any other common or conflicting aspects you’re aware of? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Note: While I was doing some final research of links to include in this post, I came across a couple of other articles that share a similar intuition. I didn’t use them as sources because my article was pretty much already written, but it was great to get some confirmation, and I thought it would be appropriate to give a shout-out to their authors.

https://backhq.com/blog/hr-teams-think-like-product-managers/
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hr-product-management-shailendra-nath-jha/