Paths to PM: Art meets science — A journey to product management

We’re continuing our Paths to PM Series with a second post after the great reception to the first.

Atlassian used to be known for only hiring product managers with a tech qualification. It makes me proud that as a company we have since come to realise that product sense, customer empathy, and knowing how to collaborate with engineering teams does not always require a technical background.

Many great product leaders here at Atlassian have changed careers and industries at least once before finding their way to product. They found their passion in product and followed it, and someone recognized their potential and took a chance on them. It’s rarely an easy journey, and there’s often an unconscious bias against career changers. Many just don’t know how to make the switch. I want to share my journey to inspire and empower those looking to move to product, and also encourage hiring managers to recognize the value of a multi-industry career changer and the unique skills and innovation they can bring to the team.

“A good product manager is a master of both the art and science of product development; they have the creativity to come up with great ideas, and the discipline to execute on them.”

– Jonathan Rosenberg, VP of Product, Google

Growing up, I’ve always had a love for both art and science, but I thought I had to choose between the two. When it came to choosing my university degree, I considered doing software engineering but at the eleventh hour I chose fashion design because, well, it looked more fun! (The lack of female representation at the uni open day computer science stand may have also had something to do with it).

To pay the small fortune needed for my university graduation project ($15k — a lot of money for a 21-year-old uni student), I started my own small business running fashion illustration workshops for high school students and teachers. I did every aspect of starting and running my business including:

• Competitor analysis: there was only one company out there doing this and they taught fairly generic skills.
• Product market fit: pitched my niche classes as workshops to help final-year high school students prepare their major work portfolios.
• Sales: cold calling schools to sell my workshops.
• Execution: traveled to 20+ schools in New South Wales teaching up to 60 kids at a time.

I made up to $2.5K for 2 hours of work each time and managed to finally afford my final year project, and then some! Little did I know I was also building some core skills of a product manager.

After graduating, I yearned for fashion industry experience and more variety in my work, so I started the job hunt expecting to become a designer at a trendy fashion label. Unfortunately for me, I had more in common with the main character of the Devil Wears Prada than just her name.

Me on my first day of work

I struggled to get my dream job as the global financial crisis had just hit, so design openings were scarce. I eventually managed to land a job at a small fashion label (with a terrifying boss who would give Meryl Streep a run for her money) as the “E-commerce manager” launching their first online store. I did everything from photographing the clothes, social media marketing, and packing and shipping orders to customers. The most crucial and informative part of my role, however, was that I answered every email and took every customer phone call.

I loved this part of my job. I spent hours on the phone helping them understand our website and products; learning about where they wore them; what they wanted; what fit well and what didn’t; how they wanted it packed and shipped. Again, I was continuing to build core skills around customer empathy and understanding the user experience, which are so crucial to product management. I was essentially the product manager for the website, but that job title didn’t exist in the fashion industry at the time.

I’d always had a passion for tech though, and a few years later, that itch for innovation made me decide to take the risk of changing industries and careers. I got a job in a four-person tech start-up through a friend of a friend, with a founder, a PM/UX designer, a developer, and me. My job was a mix of sales, marketing, events, and tech support, and after the initial struggle of learning the language of the tech industry, I found my groove getting on the phone and talking to our customers. I loved learning about who they were, why and how they were using our software, and what problems they were having with it. I spent hours doing demos of our product and running educational webinars to teach people how to get the most out of it.

While I loved the customer support part of my role, I eventually got tired of putting out the same fires again and again. I wanted to build fireproof features instead of firefighting all day. So I asked one of the investors of our start-up, an ex-Atlassian PM, for advice and he told me:

“Get involved in the product industry — go to meetups and meet product managers, volunteer at conferences, get amongst it!”

So I did. I got over my fear of the social awkwardness of networking and went to product meetups every week.

Me at my first product networking event

I learned about roadmaps and why prioritization is the never-ending task for product managers. I volunteered for the Leading the Product conference where I got to meet the speakers backstage and network with hundreds of product managers from different industries. I spoke to as many product managers as I could, learning about what they were working on and what problems they had. From there, I formed a strong network of women in product who were early in their product careers. Years later, we are now all seasoned PM’s at some of Sydney’s best tech companies, who share tactics and support each other as a peer mentor group.

I also took my learnings back to work. I asked our product manager about the roadmap and his pain points with it and learned about his struggle with investors always wanting to know what he was going to build in 12 months time. I learned about a tool called Jira that the dev team used, and suggested that rather than pinging them on Slack about bugs I’d hear about from customers, I could write them as user stories in the backlog. I worked with them to learn what kinds of details they needed, and just like that, I had added ‘user story and acceptance criteria writing’ to my repertoire.

Then one day, my product manager was working on a customer problem that I knew deeply, so I asked if we could work on it together. We ideated and refined our ideas, and when we thought we had a viable solution, I called up some of my regular customers and we ran it past them for feedback together. Soon after, I launched my first feature with the product manager! It solved a huge problem that was being experienced by almost every customer we had, and in some cases was losing customers and sales.

All of this experience meant that when it came around to job interviews, even though I didn’t yet have the job title, I could say that I helped deliver the feature from beginning to end and knew how to make real impact.

When it came to my first PM interview I was able to speak about being able to:

• Explain the challenges of creating a roadmap in an early-stage start-up
• Write user stories
• Identify meaningful customer problems
• Collaborate with engineering design and PM to ideate and create a new solution
• Test ideas with customers
• Launch new feature to market

After I landed my first PM job, I asked my manager why he hired me over other candidates and he told me it was because I spoke passionately about wanting to solve customer problems, because that’s what’s really at the heart of product management.

Since then, I’ve been a PM for accounting and tax lodgement products, APIs, data science teams, document storage products, growth teams, and now finally, Jira. Each one has taught me different skills that have helped me grow more as a PM. When I reflect back and appreciate the skills and worldly experience I’ve gained from having such a varied career, there are a few skills in particular that I feel actually came from my life before product:

• An eye for design and user experience — from my design degree.
• Market assessment and launching a service — from launching my fashion illustration business.
• Customer empathy and research — from the hundreds of phone calls and emails with customers at the start-up and the fashion e-commerce store.
• Storytelling and presentations — from the many hours spent creating webinars, demoing and conducting sales at the start-up.

So for those looking to break into product from another industry: focus on unique skills you bring to the table that fit into the mould of a great product manager.

For those looking to hire product managers: consider craft changer candidates for their ability and drive to learn fast and adapt, their growth mindset and courage to take risks, and all the soft transferable skills they have picked up from other crafts that will make them PM superstars.