Breaking Into Product Management
Honestly, anyone from any background can enter product management, as long as you understand how to cultivate a product mindset.
I have a background in business analytics and technology management. The summer of my junior year at Babson College, I spent 3 months working at Fidelity Investments in Boston, where I was so fortunate to work on different projects, from business analytics to more technical things, such as building an automation tool.
As much as I like telling stories out of provided data, I soon realized I enjoyed working on the strategic side, while the pre-processing seriously gave me a headache. I also realized I want to do something closer to end users, something that would give me the chance to interact as much as possible with different stakeholders in a business.
Right now, I’m working as an associate product manager intern for GroveHR, an HRIS product developed by KMS Technology, a U.S.-based outsourcing company with a development and testing center in Vietnam. I have learned so much over here about product management and really recommend that my folks in Vietnam who are interested in becoming a PM consider joining the team. (Disclaimer: This is not a recruitment post.)
I’m by no means an expert in PM and have so many things to learn, but I figure there are other people looking into product management out there who don’t know where to start. This post is a quick recap of some of the very basic concepts and resources I used to get started.
BIG NOTE 1: Talk to product managers in different companies. Their responsibilities might be different, but sometimes, you’ll find them facing the same problems at work, and it’s interesting to see how each tackles those in a different way.
A classic but nerve-wracking question: What do PMs do, and who are they?
The responsibilities of a PM vary, depending on what kind of product you are building or what stage your product is in within its life cycle. Product development is often practiced with agile methodology, which is a practice that focuses on building a product through multiple iterations based on user feedback.
There are two types of PMs: ones who build internal products and ones who build external products. Simply put, internal products are those used by teams in your company or the entire organization, while external products are for users not within your organization. This can be a business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumers (B2C) product.
Since the product I’ve been working with falls into the latter category, I’m going to talk about the second type of PM.
What do they do every day?
From a high level, a PM works/coordinates with different stakeholders (designers, engineers, sales, marketing, etc.) to ensure the product is delivered in the right state, with the right requirements, solving the right needs of our users.
Let’s talk about the very basic workflow of a PM. For example, when I build a feature for our product, this is what the flow looks like:
- I start with researching. This is where a combination of your own common sense, user experience (UX) design and competitive research kicks in. Market research, competitive research and UX research all serve the same purpose, which is helping you define the requirements for the feature you’re building.
- After I define the requirements for that feature, I start building a user flow, which helps me break down how many activities the users are going to be able to perform with my feature.
- Now that I am able to get the concept of how my feature works, I’m going to construct a wireframe, which is a UI mock up that transfers your product concept into something visually nicer. Normally, I use Balsamiq or Sketch to do the wireframes.
- It’s time to get roasted by designers. After I have my wireframes that kind of show how I want this baby to look in reality, I’ll discuss with designers, and they will give me feedback. It’s not like they will judge how pretty my UI looks, because apparently, they know more about design than I do. Rather, they’ll give me feedback in the area of user experience — for example, if this button should be put here and not there, if a scroll bar is needed, etc. So make sure you know what you are talking about, and do your research before you transfer your wireframes to designers.
- If everything’s good with the mockup, designers will take your mockup and start doing some magic so it looks better. It’s time to write a user story!
Think about it like this: Now that you know how you want your feature to look, who is going to help you build it? That’s right, our high and mighty engineers.
With that being said, a user story is a user case in which you carefully craft a scenario from your user’s perspective.
A common “template” to follow is: As a [user], I want to [their need], so that [the result]. For example, if I built a feature that helps our users view a new announcement of the company, I’d write something such as: As an employee of the company, I want to view the list of news when I log in to the app, so I will be aware whenever a new change or announcement is made.
In a user story, you need to define the acceptance criteria with 100% clarification, so engineers and quality assurance (QA) folks can build and test if it works as wanted.
So that is a very basic flow!
Of course, you also have to work with marketing, sales and other people within your company to ensure anything related to bringing the product to your end users is properly executed.
As a product manager, you also take responsibility for your product’s vision. You’ll need to build a roadmap for your product that satisfies the business goals in different stages, and establish a way to measure your product success.
The list goes on, but that’s basically the main concept.
BIG NOTE 2: A product manager does not manage ANYONE, but rather, manages the product itself.
So what’s the most important skill?
When asking people with work experience in the product management field, a very common answer I got from them is that anyone from any background can break into this field. However, I believe an excellent product manager possesses a combined knowledge of these fields:
- Business (the most important thing, from my point of view)
- User experience (UX) design, because PMs need to understand the users
- Technology, because PMs need to coordinate with engineers, communicate with them and understand what is technologically feasible — and what’s not.
As for soft skills, the three most important ones for me are:
- Empathy for your users: Always ask why, how and what, because that’s the core of building any product. One can easily get lost in details, and forget the whole big picture of why we are building this product and how it’s going to benefit our users.
- Prioritization and critical thinking: Understand what features or functionalities are of greater importance and, therefore, should be included in our MVP, instead of investing time, money and human resources all at once to build a product that might not really solve the pain points of users.
- Research: Understand the landscape and our competitors in order to know where to position our product.
- OK, there are four: The ability to construct user mapping stories and user journeys to develop an understanding for your product, and most importantly, help other team members to get the big picture.
Resources
- Books: I find User Story Mapping and The Lean Startup are two useful books to cultivate a product mindset.
- Courses: I really recommend “Become a Product Manager” in Udemy. This is a great overview course that covers every basic thing you need to know about product management.
- Blogs: I subscribe to “Product Management Insider” on Medium to discover good articles about PM, and then just follow authors who have high-quality posts or sharing. Some links are below:
https://medium.com/@AngshumanGupta
https://uxdesign.cc/@will.lawrence
For UX design, I follow https://uxplanet.org/ and https://uxdesign.cc/
This is a very short recap for those new to product management, as I was five months ago. There are so many different lessons and insights along the way that I, hopefully, can share in another post. If you are also passionate about product management, I’d love to learn from you, as well!
