Product Designer to Product Manager and Back

Hi, it’s been a little while!

I’m prepping for 2022 and I am reflecting on where I’ve been for the past 5 years. I took a departure from the Design side of the house and took a Product Management role in 2015. After 5 years, I went back over to Design.

Being a Product Designer made me a better Product Manager. Being a Product Manager made me a significantly better designer and overall leader. I don’t think there is a right decision on this one, just a nice growth story here to show you that you don’t have to conform to one role.

I’m going to reflect on some of my pros and cons for anyone considering making the switch.

Things I like about product management

1. A Voice. People listen to you. You have a lot of decision making power in how things get executed.
2. Strategy. You get to see the strategy fold out right in front of you, and be a key part of it.
3. Story Telling! Your job is to move fast, make impact and show how you did it and how much in numbers

Things I didn’t love about product management

1. The playbook. People don’t really listen to you. Often times I followed the larger strategy and playbook of products previously launched. I often times was asked to follow the competitor as closely as possible.
2. The politics. I mostly liked the politics but it got really tough sometimes. There is a lot of people management, setting expectations, and stakeholder alignment in the role. You’re in between a lot of (possibly moody) players. All the time.

Things I like about product design

1. Creating! I am beyond happy to be making things again. It’s just a good time.
2. Leading. Design shapes the way the products are used and ultimately a good portion of the product’s success is dependent on design. It’s a really fun (at times noisy) area to have a voice in.
3. Collaboration. I work with so many wonderful groups. By far my favorite is the product management group. They are my partners in crime and when we are in sync wonderful things happen in the product.
4. Letting go. This one is a struggle but I am embracing it. I no longer lead and measure every product metric. I have a product management team and analytics team to compliment our design research and align our stakeholders. See this fantastic article featuring Molly Graham on ‘giving away your legos’ for tips on embracing this. I revisit this article a lot.

Things I don’t love about Product Design

I won’t do the things I don’t love about product design because my role now is as a people leader in design management, which is an entirely different and new frontier. If you’re a designer then you know where your brown grass is.

As my good friend says,

There is brown grass everywhere.