In April 2013, I joined a digital agency because I surveyed the landscape of “tech” companies in NYC and realized that the entry-level positions for someone “technical” and vaguely related to “user experience” and exploring how to develop “digital projects” were mostly in marketing and advertising. I became a junior project manager. Thank you, JS, for recognizing my ambition even though I barely knew what ambition meant. Within six months, I had the “junior” dropped from my title. Thank you, MM, for recognizing that I was not a “junior” anything.
By June 2014, I realized that I would never shape “project” strategy the same way as “account managers” or “creative directors” or “user experience designers.” Outside the world of marketing and advertising, the start-ups were busy wrecking assumptions of project management by encouraging a “product owner” role. I knew where this was going, so I was determined to become a product manager.
I quit my job, lived off savings, and worked with my first client ever as a product consultant. In the meantime, I applied to product manager roles.
Like all good product managers, I took exhaustive notes of the process. In a spurt of productivity, I detailed the reasons I was not ready to be a product manager, according to the people who interviewed me.
The following lessons are a blast of the past and thematically relevant today.
Five things I learned from interviewing for Product Manager positions
1) Despite all the rhetoric surrounding “product management” as a career path where the most important skills are, at their core, related to curiosity and ambition and not necessarily experience, you will have to defend why you do not have a “Product Manager” title on your resume.
2) Despite many successful Product Managers and technology influencers who did not graduate with a technical degree, it is still vital for your interviewer to ask how you “go from” professional writing to the tech industry. Hint: the emphasis of a multidisciplinary education is the single biggest feature of Carnegie Mellon.
3) Honesty about your reservations for a specific role will be damaging for your prospects–even if you were honest about the reality of the situation because you are ambitious about improving it.
4) When your (male) interviewer asks where you see yourself in 5 years and you answer ambitiously that you want to be a Director of Product Management for a product you care about, he will be thinking, “This girl [sic] doesn’t have any product manager experience, how is she going to do that?”
5) In the words of Sheryl Sandberg:
Professional ambition is expected of men but is optional–or worse, sometimes even a negative–for women. “She is very ambitious” is not a compliment in our culture. Aggressive and hard-charging women violate unwritten rules about acceptable social conduct. Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishments come at a cost.
It was a messy post, but the overall sentiment was bitter rage that my own talent and brain could not be realized because I had not mastered the optics of ambition yet.
Fortunately, I am a lot less angry these days, because I do not find it a useful emotion. When things are close to making me angry–when something does trigger this blind rage and aggrieved despair that are disastrously intertwined–I confront and remove it.
It is healthier. I am learning to be healthier as a product manager.
The hardest thing to be a product manager is to maintain emotional neutrality when you are expected to navigate daily highs-and-lows with the mental clarity of someone who is not sleep-deprived and discouraged by second-guessing and critical comments from your team, your stakeholders, your customers, your peers, and especially yourself.
That is the reality of being a product manager. I still think it’s worth it, because I always conquer my goals, in one form or another.
As much as I genuinely love the craft, the discipline, and the skills that you learn through this structured mental framework; as much as I love the interactions between psychology and design and technology to build these incredible moments of “wow;” as much as I cannot walk away from this career blend of deep thinking, big ideas, diligent execution, and lots of different kinds of data–product management is actually pretty rough. It took seven grueling years to acknowledge that the most important thing to prioritize in a roadmap might be the health of the person responsible for developing the roadmap.
Healthier sentiments means much more control to be reflective and intentional with the work that is required from a good product manager.
Develop that sentiment early. Start with these five habits to become a better product manager.
Five product manager habits
- Read literature. All of it. A lot of it. Short stories. Essays. Personal essays. Prose poems and poem poems. Philosophy and psychology and humanity are core to these ideas, and this is core to product management.
- Write. Journal. Random notes, scribbled on half-written journals. Buy blank journals to hype yourself up to filling them out as you keep writing in them. Nothing will ever be more important than writing, and sharing. Words, written down, are incredibly powerful.
- Walks. In nature. In the city. In the woods, and up the mountains. Take time to notice why you are walking–don’t speed through it all. There are amazing things in the simplicity of a tree growing undisturbed, and the tree that is toppled over at some point of history. Walks help you compare, and listen, to your environment. These signals are how you develop your intuition.
- Talk to your friends. Hear about their lives, and what’s important to them, and make an effort to see them as much as possible. The same applies to family, but it is sometimes easier to keep in touch with friends. It is one of the more important things that you need to do.
- Think about ideas from the Harvard Business Review. And The Atlantic. Think about ideas across the spectrum, in general. Perspectives are your strengths. Build up this muscle by constantly exposing yourself to different ways of thinking, because the core quality of change is constant, and you can both expect it and wrestle with it by constantly challenging your own way of thinking.
In a way, these are the habits that make you a better person. And guess what–being a better person involves empathy and observation, because ultimately, hopefully, you are using these magical powers of business-generating best practices and structured thinking to help everyone become better people. Technology works for humanity, and product managers are there to be the shepherds.
