Product Management Changed How I Interact With People
Steering the Product without having a direct authority
In uni, my programming projects were not the best. I didn’t much care for optimising my code to make it super fast, or tight, or clean, but I found it fun and relatively easy. As long as my logic was sound, my algorithm did what I told it to. I have control. I had clear expectations and they were met with a few lines of code, no problem.
When I started working as a dev (in a traditional, project-based team), outside the vacuum of pre-defined Specification/Requirement documents of profs, there were added complications. I had to untangle what the previous devs did, work around a growing technical debt, and deal with sometimes-unreasonable requests from The Business. It got frustrating a lot of the time, but there’s almost always a certainty: it’s just me, my code, and the requirements. The expectations are definite, and the way forward is clear; even if I have to experiment with plenty of debugging messages.
With Product Management, there are more external forces out of my control that I have to interact with and try to influence every single day. There’s a whole host of previously untapped skills and disciplines that I needed to learn quickly. There’s also a ton I had to unlearn.
You have to learn how to really listen
“Forget what you think you know,” my senior told me. When I interview a stakeholder or a customer, I have to constantly remind myself not to restrict what I’m hearing based on my existing paradigms. If I’m told that something isn’t working when I know for a fact that it does work, I have to let go of that and find out their definition of “not working”. More often than not, they help me uncover a flaw in the design or the business process itself.
In Jordan B. Peterson’s “12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos”, the clinical psychologist posits that real listening is frightening because you have to let go of yourself and step into the speaker’s world, and explore their views and way of thinking. By doing this, you are inviting the possibility of being altered yourself. So instead, we try to “win” by formulating responses to each of their points in hopes of establishing ourselves as the better person in the hierarchy.
To be truly effective as a Product Manager, you have to be comfortable in humbling yourself and trusting that every single person you speak to can teach you something that will make you better at your job. Part of that is probing and asking ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ multiple times even though the answer seems obvious (forget what you know, remember?). Questioning someone again and again, isn’t for lack of trust. You want to trust them, so you give them a chance to reveal themselves to you, and hopefully, in the process, they learn to trust you, too.
You have to filter out some of those truths and live with it
After getting to the root of the matter, you then have to choose which of those issues or goals are aligned with the company’s vision, and cut out the rest — even though you really think they are also relevant and have the potential to delight your customers.
You have limited resources, the product team doesn’t have all the time in the world. You have to say NO to a lot of seemingly reasonable requests and clever ideas.
You must be able to communicate it to everyone
You have to be able to present and communicate your findings and the narratives in a concise yet nonrestrictive manner. Don’t dictate or box the solution — it’s not your job to tell them HOW to solve it — but frame it enough so that the product team is bounded by a compelling WHY. Why are they being asked to do this? Why not use this existing feature? How will this help achieve our OKRs?
Remember that you’ve had to commit to some trade-offs, and leave out some admittedly quality-of-life enhancing features? You must have a solid reason to back-up your decisions when you do let your customer or stakeholders know about them.
Finally, you just have to be brave enough to launch this imperfect, seemingly unfinished product and defend to the non-believers that this is what the company needs to succeed.
You don’t just shut it off
I know this is true for a lot of other careers. It doesn’t make it less true for Product Managers. You are constantly deconstructing and rebuilding stories and belief systems. Deconstruct in order to remove the barriers to learning from your customers’ point of view; rebuild to make it make sense for the product team and to teach the customers to view their problems differently, and therefore solve it differently. This way of experiencing and navigating the world just naturally seeps into your off-work behaviour.
I’m not saying I’ve perfected the art of all the above. I lean on my team quite heavily and they do help me process my ideas better. Even so, I believe it made me a better wife and friend; it made me a way better conversationalist, and I don’t feel as awkward with new people anymore.
Well, that, or I just got older.
