I’ve recently enabled my LinkedIn Career Advice to share my professional experiences esp. in product management, and hopefully to help others along the way. I’ve been doing this occasionally, mostly in conversations with peers or in meet-ups, and I hope this new channel is a more structured way to go about it. I’m very much a learner myself, and am also looking for mentors that could help me get to the next level.
So far I’ve had already a couple of questions, and I’m posting it here so it could be useful for other aspiring PMs out there.
Hi Ken, I’m reaching out to you through LinkedIn’s Career Advice Hub. I am an NUS undergraduate majoring in Communications and New Media due to graduate in July 2019. I have considerable experience in both Public Relations and Marketing, but I want to make a career pivot to enter UI/UX and Front End Web Development so that I can eventually enter a career in Product Management.
What do I need to do or have to convince a first employer that I have the skills to do UI/UX Design? What sort of skills (technical or not) did you have that you felt were most important for you to enter and stay in Product Management?
Hi! Thank you for connecting and reaching out. Glad to see a fellow CNM major!
Great questions, and to be honest I don’t have a definite answer. However, I can certainly share my experience and hopefully it would help you forge your own path.
There are a few things you’ve asked and I’d like to go over them
- Path to a PM role through UX/frontend dev
- Convincing first employer of your UX skills
- Skills to enter and stay in a PM role
Your Path to a PM Role
I’m quite intrigued by your choice of the path, but I lack the understanding of your motivations behind this particular choice. Perhaps you could help me understand this a bit better?
However, I think it’s a good path for you to gain different experiences/exposure for an eventual entry, the only thing I’d advise here is to own your main skills, as they form your core strength. It’s rare to have PMs who are great at everything because mastery takes time and perseverance, but it’s possible to get really good at a couple of things you dedicate to. Yes, PM is a generalist role, and rightly so as you will have to be at the intersection of business, tech and user experience, but there will be times when you need to bring your expertise to the table. Develop one and own it. (I’ve had my fair share of dabbling, trying to learn everything under the sun. Personally, I think it’s better to be great at a few things than be average at a lot of things).
One other thing to keep in mind is problem-solving is a key part of a PM role. UX is a great field to develop it. In my experience spending time and effort to deeply understand the user and problem you’re trying to solve saves a lot of time down the line.
Convincing First Employer of UX or Relevant Skills
I’m giving you a conventional answer that you’ve probably heard before: do your own project. Pick a problem, understand it, and develop a solution based on your understanding. It’s a great way to demonstrate your critical thinking and your ability to break down a complex problem. This product critique is one of my favorites https://medium.com/@derrickng/propertyguru-app-redesign-bff05f20efea and Derrick definitely got the attention of the team for this very detailed post. And he wasn’t that far off from the actual process of how it would be done. We had no vacancy then but we did invite him to our office for a chat. And as you can see I’m referencing his work again.
One other related point is to work on your communication skills, which I believe you won’t have a problem given your background in PR and marketing. This is one of the key PM skills. You understand the problem, you have great hypotheses, and you must be able to communicate your understanding and get others’ buy-in. As a PM you will be regularly interfacing with tech, marketing, sales, customer services etc. so being able to communicate well is VERY important. And of course, it extends to your potential employer too.
Necessary Skills to Enter and Stay in a PM Role
My path to a PM role was almost unintended, and I honestly didn’t have the clear goal to become a PM like you do now. I started my career in a completely unrelated role (editor/journalist), moved on to something quite similar (content manager). While I worked on the Newsloop app we had a problem with growing both our content and user base. (Quite frankly I didn’t even know there’s such a profession called PM). This led to me just struggling and scrambling to find creative ways to crack it and eventually led to my move to PropertyGuru (my first role with them was to build an internal CMS and grow our content platform — so that’s the connection).
This ties in with what I’ve mentioned early on. Understand the user, the problem really well, and this gives you a head-start in devising solutions that work. I joined PG not having any prior knowledge or experience in a formal PM role, but I believe it was my owning the domain knowledge and critical thinking that convinced them to give me a chance. I’m not saying this is everything to it, there are many other factors like luck or even relationships, but as long as you know your stuff very well, it gives you a great shot.
For staying in a PM role, it’s down to staying on the grind, continuously honing your craft. Double down on your strength (by that I mean even if everything else fails you can still get people to pay you for that skill), and explore.
One specific thing I do is to pick a product or process, spend time thinking about the Ws — why it was built/developed that way to solve what problem and for who, what I would do if I were to crack it myself, and would I be able to get people to pay for that solution. The WHY is often the toughest and where you’ll have the most fun. It doesn’t have to always relate to your current role or industry, PM skills are very much transferable across domains.
I hope what I’ve shared can clarify things a bit and help you in any ways. Feel free to reach out to me. I may take time to respond but I promise I’ll get to it.
