Paths to PM Series: Finance to product manager
Product managers come from all walks of life, across a myriad of academic backgrounds. Most of them can attest that becoming a PM was not top of mind when they started their professional career. But many transitioned into product management later on. These are the three most common paths to becoming a PM:
- Internal transition at a large company. Generally the quickest and easiest path, but requires alignment of three things — having the opportunity to demonstrate PM skills, perhaps through side/ad-hoc projects, an internal transfer process of some sort, and most critically, an internal PM champion for your transition (generally your would-be new manager).
- Joining a startup with a burning demand for PM. Small startups are growing quickly and often need to fill a gap for product management work, and will do it with someone who doesn’t have a PM background. The key is to have a growth mindset, show a lot of hustle, and demonstrate success by getting things done when given the chance.
- Finding a junior PM role within a large company. Large companies often have Associate Product Manager (APM) or internship programs. For example, my company Atlassian has an amazing APM program where folks go through a 24-month product leadership boot camp. It gives our PM graduates an accelerated product craft growth opportunity, including an “MBA-like” exposure to executives from all areas of the business (marketing, finance, engineering, design, etc).
We’re excited to introduce our series, Paths to PM, where we cover the stories of PMs that came from different roles, how they got there, and what they learned.
We’re starting with my story where I made the transition from a finance role into product management. Some key learnings include:
- The aspects of being a finance professional you have to “unlearn” to succeed as a product manager
- The finance skills that are relevant in product management
- How to find opportunities to demonstrate PM qualities while working in finance
How my journey began
I’m an accounting and finance major, and started my career in the Risk Advisory practice at Ernst & Young (EY), helping Fortune 500 companies improve their business processes, mitigate financial risks, and drive corporate governance and accountability. After 5 incredible years at EY, I joined an early-stage digital marketing SaaS startup to run their finance function.
A month into my new role, a PM opportunity presented itself. Our 30-person startup had an urgent need for a product manager to support a growing R&D team. While the PM recruiting process was underway, I raised my hand to help temporarily fill this role (it couldn’t be more true when we say startup folks wear multiple hats!). Our CEO and cofounder who was overseeing the product took a bet on me. That’s how I began my foray into PM. I went from managing balance sheets and tax returns, to tossing away my Certified Public Accountant (CPA license) and owning product requirements and feature specs. Balsamiq became my best friend. That moment was a turning point in my career, where my temporary PM gig subsequently became a permanent one. The transition was rough and there were many setbacks along the way. However, those experiences have molded me into the product manager that I am today.
Example Mistake: Putting myself before our users
One of my first PM projects was to streamline the account setup flow for our Digital Marketing product so that our customers could start receiving smart recommendations on how to improve their web page elements to boost their organic search footprint. After understanding the current flow, I decided to remove an existing “button” from our recommendations module because I felt it was out of place, and would help reduce clutter. This button, which allowed users to add their webpages into our system so that we could generate smart recommendations, also existed on our settings page. I believed that customers would naturally go to the settings page if they needed to perform this administrative task.
The Monday after this change went live, our customers were up in arms wondering where the button went. They now had to go out of their way into the settings page to perform the same task. Our customer success managers were bombarded with questions from disgruntled users who were pleading for us to bring back the button. My job as a PM was to improve our customers’ lives and make things better. I did the exact opposite and made their lives worse.
Lessons learned:
1. Don’t make decisions based on what is best for you personally as a PM. I thought our customers would be like me and use the settings page to add new webpages into our application. However, our power users/early adopters were nothing like me and relied very heavily on the button I had removed. I should have put myself in the shoes of our users, and understand their current workflow. Performing user interviews before hand would have surely helped.
2. Use data whenever possible. If I had run some usage numbers prior to the proposed change, I would have uncovered that a substantial number of users are using the button that I wanted to remove. This would have made me think twice about removing the button, or at least find an alternative so that our customers’ workflow was not disrupted.
Even today, I cringe every time I recount this incident.
The aspects of being a finance professional you have to “unlearn” to succeed as a PM
During my days as a finance professional, I’ve experienced some ways of thinking and approaches that were critical in the finance field that held me back as a product manager that I would like to share.
Living by rules and regulatory policies
On the finance side of the house, there are strict rules to follow. For example, there are accounting and auditing regulations (e.g., GAAP) that we absolutely cannot deviate from. When we prepare a company’s financial statements, there are standard operating procedures to follow, and we typically refer to prior years’ work papers to guide our approach for this year. There is little area for creativity. In fact, creative accounting is a big no-no, as it can be seen as “cooking the books” which may lead to outright fraud.
But to thrive as a product manager, you have to undo this pattern of thinking. A product manager does not have prior year guidance to follow. You put your customer first and when uncovering customer pain points, you have to address them based on what is appropriate for that situation. Something that might have worked in the past may not work in the future. Good product managers have to be creative, think outside the box and solve problems. In the world of product management, it’s an open greenfield for PMs to get the creative juices flowing and become forward thinkers.
Chasing perfection
Accounting and finance generally attracts a studious crowd with a penchant for accuracy. You are expected to be accurate and complete in your work deliverables. For example, when generating financial statements after the accounting period has ended, you strive to deliver financial numbers that are accurate and error-free. A tell-tale sign of an imperfection is when your balance sheet fails to balance. Therefore, it’s imperative to triple check your work and deliver the “perfect” output.
In agile product management, perfection is the enemy of execution. In my early days as a product manager, I was guilty of spending more time staring at the weeds than assessing the forest. I got lost in the details instead of questioning whether my work was moving in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong, we all want to design the “perfect” solution to meet our customers’ needs. But often times there isn’t sufficient data to know what the perfect solution is. Instead, it’s more important to get something out the door, and iterate from there.
“Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without” — Confucius
Finance skills that are relevant in product management
Developing user empathy
In my client serving role at EY, it is paramount to have a deep understanding of my customers’ business processes and identify operational gaps that might give rise to financial risks. I conducted frequent customer interviews and developed a strong sense of user empathy over time. The main tenets that I held dearly were:
- Asking “Why” several times to dig into the root cause of an issue
- Putting myself into the customers shoes in order to “feel” their pain
- Internalizing customer feedback to distill out the core use cases
The above are very applicable in product management as well. As a product manager, you are the voice of the customer. You need to develop deep user empathy, become the owner of your customers’ pain points, and champion a solution that works best for your customers. In addition to customer empathy, product managers should also have empathy for your engineering team members. These are folks who are deep in the trenches with you, building solutions to the customer problems that you own. While we all want to build the best solution to address our customers’ needs, we need to be realistic and be mindful of the technological constraints and available engineering resources.
Empathy is all about being able to slow down enough to listen and observe, and be humble enough to learn and adapt.
Working under pressure and thriving in chaotic environments
A routine activity within the finance world is to finalize a company’s financial information and create financial reports after an accounting period has ended. Sometimes, this activity is anything but routine if the numbers are late or wrong. You have a limited time window to “close the books” on a monthly, quarterly and annual basis. Furthermore, finance folks need to strike a balance between closing the books quickly versus reporting accurate financial numbers. It is not uncommon for them to accept long hours, and late nights during the close process to satisfy management’s expectations and to answer to external shareholders.
As a product manager, we frequently encounter a similar “pressure cooker” environment. There will be urgent questions from your team, ad-hoc requests from senior management, short term crises and fires to deal with, and critical decisions that have to be made — all due today! Therefore, it’s important for product managers to filter out the noise, know what to focus on, and prioritize rigorously and ruthlessly. If you have experience hustling in order to answer to the public under a tight financial deadline, you would be unfazed by all the PM-related dependencies, risks and asks.
How to find opportunities to demonstrate PM qualities while working in finance
Finance professionals looking to break into product management should start thinking about how you want to shape your narrative and demonstrate PM chops. In fact, you may already be more of a PM than you think if any of these apply to you:
- Are you in a role that requires you to work in a team and tackle problems through analytical thinking?
- Are you leading a project from start to finish to solve a burning problem?
- Have you analyzed data to filter out insights and drive decision making?
- Have you prioritized a list of initiatives based on a framework?
- Have you iterated on an improvement based on user feedback? (Think outside the box on who your “users” might be. It could be your client, your managing partner, your CFO, your business partners, or anyone who might be interacting/utilizing your end product.)
Closing thoughts
On the surface, the two worlds of finance and product management couldn’t be more different. Candidates who are looking to transition to product management sometimes feel intimidated at the idea because they feel their finance background is holding them back. However, this isn’t the case in practice. There are so many qualities finance professionals bring to the table that make them awesome product managers. Now that I am on the other side, I strongly believe that if you are determined to succeed and have the intellectual tenacity to learn, you absolutely have the skills needed to become a product manager. My hope is that this article has helped to demystify the process by sharing my personal journey and learnings.
Are you an aspiring PM coming from finance? I would love to hear your journey so far in the comments below and hope this article is helpful for you. Additionally, are you a finance professional or someone with a non-tech background who has transitioned into product management? Would love for you to share your story in the comments below, as I’m sure it would benefit those looking to make the pivot.
