Crawl, Walk, Run …
I started teaching recently at the Product School helping aspiring product managers get their foot in the door. Before teaching this course, I did not think too much about how hard it can be to switch into product management. Now that I understand more about the challenges my students are facing trying to break into the field, it got me to reflect over my own path and the things that I have done right or wrong along the way.
After I replied to several students questions and did some coaching, I realized that it all boiled down to small behaviors that made a big difference for me over time. The insights or takeaways from this exercise turned out to be applicable to job growth in general, not exclusive to product management. Here is an snippet of a note that I sent my students that I thought was worth sharing:
To differentiate yourself and grow in your career, you really have to continue making small investments over a long period of time to reap the rewards. Quoting one of my mentors, you got to crawl, walk, then run.
Below you will find a number of concrete useful behaviors that benefited me over time. These are not one time fixits, the more you do them, the better you get:
- Practice public speaking as much as you can
- Maintain a blog, or write on Medium or LinkedIN (about topics of interest, passions, or companies that interest you). This goes a long way in making you more visible and credible.
- Get out of your comfort zone (PMs need to spend a lot of time talking to people they don’t know, uncovering pain points and digging deeper, these are not things that we are born with. It’s uncomfortable and you need to force yourself to do it).
- Ask for it. You don’t get what you don’t ask for. Sometimes, all it takes is just asking. If you have a position or company in mind and you know someone there, ask them. Up to you what to ask, just learn more and build on top of any knowledge gained to improve your next question and so on.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means. Just a sample of small behaviors that made a big difference for me. Would love to hear others’ thoughts on their own growth path and what small investments paid off large dividends for them.
