Real-world learnings from being a product manager

It’s been only a little over 2 years since I stepped into the role of a Product Manager(PM) but the learnings from this domain have crossed the professional boundaries and helped me grow in my personal life as well. Product Management is a domain that not only helps in one’s day-to-day work but also in life.

Source: Photo by Kimberly Farmer on Unsplash

To understand the real-world learnings of being a PM, one must pay close attention to the skill set that a PM needs to succeed in their job. This includes the keywords that are commonly included in everyday job posting and role descriptions but carry a deeper meaning, skills such as empathy, ambiguity, structured approach, stakeholder management, and prioritization.

By drawing parallels, let’s try to understand how one can learn from Product Management and apply it in their day-to-day lives.

1. Dealing with ambiguity: Product Managers have constant encounters with ambiguity: be it open-ended problem statements or a hypothesis that needs extensive validation, ambiguity is always staring a Product Manager in the face. In life, we don't know what is going to happen next and there is a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding us. Learning to deal with it helps in minimizing the anxiety that uncertain events will bring in life. This not only provides you with the tools to deal with the ambiguity but also prepares you for all kinds of situations heading your way.
2. Bringing in structure: Approaching a problem statement in a structured manner is what PMs do efficiently. They will break down a problem into smaller problems and bring in a structured approach to tackle them. This helps in solving the problem in a very tactical manner and doing this takes away the dreadness of a problem statement. Life throws problems at us from time to time and we might feel scared with the vastness of them. But if we approach those problems in a structured manner, we might realize it was nothing that we were fretting over. The structure also helps in organizing one’s routine and brings in more discipline in life.
3. Prioritization: PMs can’t build all the features at once because of limited available bandwidth. So, they have to pick which features or problems they want to take on. Similarly, in life, there is so much to do but the time is limited. So, one must prioritize things in life and pick their battles wisely. Maybe that episode can wait but exercise or meditation can’t.
4. Managing stakeholders: As a PM, one interacts with almost all departments depending on their role. From engineering to design, from marketing to finance, managing the stakeholders is a key part of the job. In life, we have been blessed with multiple people touching our lives in different roles: family, friends, spouse, children, colleagues and the list goes on. While it gets difficult to take out time for everyone, it is important to nurture and cherish those connections from time to time. Product Management teaches you how to manage time in interacting with different stakeholders involved in a product lifecycle. Such a skill can be used in daily lives to nourish our relationships.
5. Empathizing with others: This is the most critical skill that any Product Manager should acquire because without it one won't be able to understand the user’s perspective let alone build any feature. Stepping into the shoes of the customer is an integral part of PM’s responsibilities. Applying this to one’s life can result in reducing the arguments or conflicts with your partner, family, or friends to a great extent. When a person starts to think from another person’s perspective, he/she understands their thought process, their position, and the situation thereby leading to the resolution of conflicts and arguments in most cases.

My learnings from being a PM

While these are some of the learnings that I learned on the job and was able to apply to my life in general, they are not limited to only the Product Management domain. Every domain teaches us a lot of things and there are so many learnings that one can borrow from their professional lives. So, do look out for them and expand the scope of those positive learnings beyond your 9–5 schedule.

When you are becoming good at something by investing a lot of time daily, why not reap the benefits by broadening the horizon. Developing these learnings further will not only help one succeed on the job but will also help one succeed in the test of life.