I have no #@!%-ing idea how to be a product manager
The path to working in product management is equal parts versatile skills, great satisfaction, and vulnerability to stress and burnout.
How do I become a product manager?
How can I start doing what you do? It sounds so cool!
How do I switch careers to product management? I get this question at least once a month. Truth is, I have no #@!%ing clue! I was a small ice crystal that got caught in the software-making avalanche, and the snowball that rolled to the bottom of the hill is the product manager I am today.
The good thing is, though, almost anything you’re doing before entering product management is very much relevant, or can be made such. Struggle is inseparable from entrepreneurship, and by extension product development. It almost makes me think that the more lost and traumatized you’ve been, the better PM you become.
But suggesting self-induced trauma is irresponsible advice, so let me share my actual learnings and skills acquired from jobs that had seemingly nothing to do with the product craft.
The Ph.D. that never was
The Academia, where dreams are born as quickly as they disappear. Most of us attempted to get higher education, and most of us heard that academia would not prepare us for the job market. I was genuinely passionate about psychology and social sciences. From the start, I kept hearing that this was the discipline of the troubled and hopeless aka I have no idea what to do with my life, I probably need a degree in something, psychology sounds nice…
Well, they weren’t completely wrong.
However! There are things you can learn by reading, things that you can learn from YouTube, and there are scientific methodology, mathematical logic, probability theory and statistics. To this day, I swear I wouldn’t have learned it any other way than at university.
Apart from a variety of research techniques, psychology and STEM in general come with an incredible rigor when it comes to writing. From desk research to APA style to the reigns of evidence above any other content.
This and other things I took away with me:
Scientific method
Academic research
Applied statistics
Public speaking
Writing without bulls#@!
An arranged affair with (tele)sales
I was genuinely passionate about psychology and social sciences. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that all the Ph.D. opportunities I pursued would render me not capable of self-sustenance. I still had no idea what to do with my career. And I was completely broke.
For sales job number one — telecom telesales — I received training on basic selling techniques. Since then, my utmost respect goes to all the salespeople out there, being able to go from “swap pay-as-you-go to a €50 monthly fixed contract” to “never miss a Skype call with your grandchildren while camping” in a split second, while a customer was on the line.
Personal mobile plans and enterprise deals have little in common, but the principles are the same.
A benefit- or value-driven mindset is the cornerstone of sales, marketing, and product management. It’s not the color and the texture we chase after in a freshly-squeezed orange juice; it’s the feeling of rejuvenation and reminiscing about our last vacation in Spain.
At sales job number two, I became a jack of all trades in a bookstore that was also an art gallery, that was also a cafe. Sales, events, inventory, social media, photos, customer service, not to mention knowing all about books and art, all for an hourly rate of a junior barista. After a year’s worth of work, I came to my boss asking for a raise and brought what I would now consider a business review of how much money I brought in, and how little I got in return.
It was a survival move, but it successfully pushed me to demonstrate the impact of my work. I got the raise, and I also quit after another month cause it finally made me feel worth something.
Powered by:
Sales techniques
Benefit and value-driven mindset
Outcomes vs. outputs
Business impact
Content creation as a service
One of the careers I took was to run online campaigns for the government. Social media, SEO, ads, personal branding. In post-communist Europe, to say that bureaucracy went hand in hand with a rich-and-round language register is to say nothing. The craftier the vocabulary, the less the citizens would’ve understood, which was great for business.
I met an ex-journalist turned public affairs magician, and we entered the path of reversing years of convolution. He knew how to write simply, concisely, and impactfully. He also knew all about traditional media, while I chipped in with all the “young people outlets” (that was when Facebook was still considered young, yikes).
In our PM jobs, we are guilty of adding unnecessary words to messages that require brevity.
I wrote a blog in 2015 with some cool learnings from that moment in my career. And oh, look, they make sense for product management too. Another fun fact, it made my YouTube anchor feat possible years after, already as a product manager.
This wouldn’t be possible without:
Storytelling
More writing skills
Visual design
Media editing
Managing teams
Foot in the industry door
Eventually, we all stepped into the tech industry at some point. My path started as a project manager at a digital agency, a path I recommend to this day to amateurs wanting to become pros. An incredible chance to own very little, but build an awful lot, and start over each time a client runs out of budget.
Priceless skills my clients had to pay for:
Facilitation skills
Business operations
Project management
Software lifecycle
Product design
The dark side of product management
And yet, there are events that I wish I’d never gone through. They made me who I am, but sadly, they should never be part of any career.
A CEO told me I was completely useless to them. I felt unsafe and under appreciated. I was told to push people to work unpaid overtime, repeatedly. I had to fire people I wasn’t even managing, more than once. I faced hatred and envy of others. I did the job of four people for the salary of one. I gave face to ideas I never stood behind. I was gaslighted because I didn’t have an engineering background.
Those experiences are not specific to product management, but they do share a backdrop.
PM jobs are generalist jobs. Generalist jobs are flexible, adjustable, by definition… not precisely defined. The business needs and domains vary, the markets vary, the practices and styles vary. The expectations about the role and the results often come from people who didn’t read Marty Cagan. It is genuinely hard to keep being self-motivated while everything around you fights the romanticized version of the job you wanted so much.
Entrepreneurship is inseparable from struggle, and being a realist, I can’t say you won’t ever come across situations like the ones I described.
The best thing I can do to support you, fellow PMs of all walks of life, is to openly talk about it, and recognize that you are not alone.
Be mindful of the stowaways that are flying with us:
Stress
Imposter syndrome
Anxiety
Depression
Burnout
Light at the end of the product tunnel
I am a professional. But truth be told, I don’t have a #@!%-ing idea how to be a PM, academically speaking. It’s everything. But it’s also nothing in particular.
Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones. Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.
― David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
David Epstein’s Range was the light at the end of my product management crisis tunnel. It helped me realize that by ceding specialization, I am not worse. It is in fact my only superpower.
Product managers, you are able to put your mind to almost anything, and get it done. It won’t be perfect. But you’ll follow through. You can do it all alone, and y’all know well what happens when there’s a team of specialists to do it with you, together.
Every single skill will become relevant if you generalize it. And you are masters of it, no matter your background. Arts, humanities or STEM. At the end of the day, your specialty is not being specialized at all.
You’re the VFX team behind Everything, Everywhere, All at once — a group of filmmakers that had great experience in movie production, but very little in VFX itself. That didn’t stop them from making the product of their work Oscar-worthy.
Never lose that bit of curiosity, uncertainty, pathfinding ability and courage that led you to this profession, and enabled you to learn so much along the way.
What is your story? Share your thoughts and comments.
