When starting as a product manager
Every beginning is bumpy and adventurous. What is there to know when starting as a product manager?
Background story
I lost my job in summer 2019.
My work visa was linked to the company where I worked and although I studied in Germany I was still not a resident and it was a critical moment: my visa was expiring and I was being left without a job.
I had two options: go back to my motherland or to find an alternative marketing position in a very short amount of time.
Choosing the second was very tricky because August is the month when everyone is on vacation and marketing roles were very limited in those months.
I knew that I would not be able to forgive myself, if I didn’t give it a proper try so I decided to take a couple of months and find a suitable job.
August was devastating. I was very close to giving up and returning to my parents house. But things changed in September, it felt like every position I have applied to was coming back to me with a proposal for an interview.
That lifted me up and gave a great sense of hope.
And one day in the beginning of September I received a call from my future manager and within that call I believe the prospects of my career have been decided.
There is a big “but” in all the above. See, when you are desperate, you tend to grab on every opportunity given to you. This is how I applied for a product manager position.
Did I know how to act as one? — No.
Did I have a past experience in product management? — No.
Did I think deeply through when applying? — No.
So how did that happen?
I read the job description and I realised that I can do it.
This may sound superficial and bold to you, but let’s break it down and you will see what I mean.
The core of a product manager role
I have been writing a lot about the product manager’s role in my other articles (What Makes a Good Product Manager Great?) and I believe studying responsibilities and skills required can prepare you for getting into the field.
In a nutshell a product manager (PM) is someone who acts as a “bridge” between three main pillars tech, business and customer. Nowadays you will find a lot of other, more complex and overloaded graphs about the PM role. I suggest to keep it simple and focus on these three areas because they are the core and each of us, product specialists, has to find our strengths in them.
There is no real degree to become a product manager (so far, not counting the certifications and additional qualifications). This means that the role is very practical and each has a potential to grow into it.
We all have different backgrounds, there are some of you with a focus in tech, some in marketing, some in sales, etc. One thing to remember — leverage and strengthen what you have in your arsenal and constantly improve the areas where you are lacking.
I was coming with a couple of years of marketing experience and I cannot stress enough how much that experience has helped me.
Customer-centricity (one of the core pillars) is incredibly important for a product manager and undoubtedly what I learned in marketing about the user and market analysis has given me a lot of confidence and credibility in my interviews. Due to my past knowledge and experience I was able to express my opinion convincingly and resolve the challenges in the interviews with a strong belief in my own words. Sounding confident and honest is very powerful and appealing. This is a good example of using your strengths in one area.
For the areas where you don’t shine, it is important to keep your knowledge up-to-date. Let’s take tech as an example. You don’t have to know how to code and maybe you don’t even need to know all the programming languages, but you have to understand how the product development works. And sure the more you know about it, the more you will speak the same language with the engineers. But I find it more complementary in the beginning, rather then a must. And being entirely honest, a lot of things you will learn along the way, your development team is going to be your best teacher.
Tips and tricks
No matter, if you have come to the product field like me (being left without a job and searching for an alternative) or if you were dreaming of becoming a product manager, these would be my recommendations to you in the beginning of your professional path.
Leverage your strengths
If you have been researching on the product manager’s role, then I am sure you have seem a lot of different articles on the most important traits that one has to have. Some of those articles list qualities as such being a “visionary”,having “intellectual honesty”, focusing on “innovation” and although these might be helpful along the way, they are not anything that you need to worry right in the beginning of your journey.
See, product manager’s role is extremely demanding on multiple dimensions. We are expected to be good at marketing, data analysis, user interviews, understanding UX and coding. The list can go on and on. Your tasks is to know your areas of excellence. Find where you feel most confident, use your knowledge and experience in that field to contribute in your new role.
In the very beginning of your path it is very likely to be overwhelmed by the amount of unknown and new that you need to learn. In order not to lose your confidence and self-esteem, use your strengths — leverage on them. Find support in what you can do the best and establish yourself by using that mastered skillset.
For the areas where you know that you lacking skills continue educating yourself and keep your knowledge updated.
No need to say that no one has all the answers. We learn a lot by practice, therefore stay humble and curios to improve and develop.
Build a strong connection with the engineering team
This is one of the most important aspects of successful product development — a trustworthy and reliable relationship between the product manager and the developers.
The progress in product development and the ability to create impact and solve user problems are very dependent on the collaboration in the team. Real life is never what you have defined on your roadmap and not what you have outlined in the quarter planning. It is more complex and multi-layer. This being said you can only succeed when you have a well founded relationship with the team.
But how to establish a good collaboration with the team?
Today we work remotely more than ever (62% of of workers aged 22 to 65 state that they work remotely at least occasionally). This is a new reality for all of us and there is a lot of new learning that we need to do, but regardless the way of working together there are still areas to look into when wanting to build a strong collaboration in the team.
Based on the study conducted by Slack (see on the graph below) apart from having clear responsibilities, transparent communication and agreeing on the goal, we also find that 12% mention trust and 11,1% refer to getting along on the personal level. This proves that we are bringing our personalities to work and connecting on matters beyond work is essential for a healthy team spirit.
All in all you will need to take a lot of decisions which are going to be very challenging at times and having your team’s support, ability to consult with them and simply have them backing up those decisions, will make things way easier for you.
Work on your communication skills
Most of your day is going to be spent in meetings. No matter if you a presenter or a curious debater, knowing how to express your thoughts is extremely important.
There are various techniques and methods on how to improve on communication skills and for every and each of us the improvement area will differ. But one thing for sure, speaking with confidence is an absolute game changer. The best speakers and orators knew that in order to sound convincing and trustworthy one has to speak with confidence.
I have seen it many times in my own experience how very smart people failed to deliver a message because they didn’t have the right vocabulary, the right tone and most of all they were lacking the self-assurance.
Based on the article “The sound of confidence and doubt” from School of Communication Sciences and Disorders there are many components in the perception of confidence. This is what the authors conclude in their research:
…there can be no doubt that the voice serves as a powerful medium for communicating subtle clues about the reliability or commitment of the speaker; which when coupled with adjacent cues and existing knowledge, are likely to promote a variety of pragmatic inferences about the speaker and about the value of their message in the social context.
In other words our when it comes to confidence, it is not only what we say, but also how we say it.
Product managers are seen as leaders (even when they are not team leads), therefore knowing how to confidently express oneself plays a vital role in the way we posses ourselves among the colleagues and eventually influences our relationships at work. And this is extremely important to set right from the beginning.
One thing at a time
When you just start it feels like you need to be everywhere, know everything and be on top of each topic. Especially at the start using the precious commodity — time — is incredibly difficult.
I know that we all want to create a good impression and please people (we need it biologically in order to feel safe), but in the end of the day you leave work drained. And that is not a good long-term plan.
We, humans, are not really good at multi-tasking and it is a fact. The loss of productivity because of the context switching is massive. There is a lot of scientific evidence for it.
A study in the Journal Of Experimental Psychology has shown that it took students 40% longer to find solutions to difficult mathematical problems when they had to multi-task.
What does it mean for us in workplace?
As per Gerald Weinberg, for situations when we are managing 5 projects at the same time, 75% of your work goes nowhere. That is good three-quarters of your work. Looking at the numbers really helps to reconsider how we spread our time and most importantly what we give our focus to during the day.
Multi-tasking has been studied on the brain level. It has been proven using by mapping the brain while we are thinking with fMRIs that we are incapable of thinking about two things simultaneously. The scans reveal that the process is happening in serial fashion: it runs in each lobe of our brain switching from one task to another.
I believe this is enough evidence for you. By trying to run multiple tasks at the same time, we are doing nothing by wasting our time. I know what you are thinking, the world we live in is very complex and very fast, but it starts with each of us. Taking a small step is better than nothing.
My suggestion to you is to define your focus areas and invest your time in them. It is tempting to attend all those new (seemingly very important) meetings or take all the calls, but in the end of the day your performance is going to be assessed the positive change that you will bring to the product.
Therefore, channel your time and energy carefully. Don’t spread yourself all over the place, rather keep your focus in most important areas in the beginning of your journey — getting to know the team and learning how to work with developers, studying the product, the user and the market, deep diving into the strategy (both short-term and long-term). In the longer run, this will give you much more advantage. And I promise going home or shutting your computer in the end of the day will give you a great sense of satisfaction and fulfilment.
Find an inspiring mentor
There is no doubt that we as kids learn by observing grown-ups. No one gives us a manual on how to walk, we just watch the parents, older siblings, we copy them and vualá — we are walking ourselves.
We are very much influenced by the people around us. There are numerous studies about it. The point is — choose wisely the circle you are surrounding yourself with and most importantly find a mentor that you can learn from.
On a more practical scale, research shows that having a mentor is beneficial for getting promoted, sharpening the skills, staying engaged and even having less desire to quit
In many companies there are mentorship programs where more experienced colleagues can help juniors to grow professionally. If your company doesn’t have such a program, go ahead and reach out to someone from the lead level, to someone who you look up to.
I know, it seems scary or redundant (because we are sure that we can learn and discover all by ourselves), but this is one thing you need to push yourself to do. Get out of your comfort zone. What bad can actually happen? You will hear “No, unfortunately I don’t have time.” If you face this answer, you smile to the fact that you made a new connection and move on in your journey to find a mentor. It is not as scary as it seems.
If there is no one inside your organisation, you can seek a mentor externally. I am sure that reaching out to someone via LinkedIn is more than usual these days. And if that doesn’t work, there are a lot of platforms that provide mentoring services where you can connect with the experts to find inspiration and guidance towards new learnings.
Once you have the right person, it is time to check with yourself: do you have a clear goal? Get ver specific with yourself and outline your purpose (e.g. I want to become a better writer, I want to be an expert in A/B testing, etc.).
Remember that it is also a two-sided relationship, so the mentor should also get value out of it. What do you bring to the table? Possibly you have an interesting experience in the field or you are willing to become a part of your mentor’s team. Whatever it is, make sure that this collaboration is also in the interest of your mentor.
And the last thing to keep in mind is that
you need to be the one driving this relationship!
So be ready to set up the meetings, defining the agenda, come with the points for discussion and forget the list of prepared questions.
Summary
There is no universal rules on what to focus on in the beginning of your product manager career. You know the best the areas that you need to strengthen. This article is more of a guide for you to point you in the right direction.
Always remember that your experience, as any others, is unique and special in its own way. Keep your mind and heart open and I am sure that your journey in product field will be very interesting and exciting.
