Yes, tech startups do need liberal arts grads
I didn’t think I had a chance of landing a job at any cool tech company unless I started boning up on my coding skills, fast. Only now do I know how wrong that assumption was.
I was recently hired as a junior member of the product team at Axial, a tech company that connects private companies with capital. The work is thrilling, but the position really wasn’t an obvious fit, given my liberal arts degree in Music and Sociology, and the fact that I walked into my interviews knowing practically nothing about startups, tech, or finance whatsoever. So how did I get the job? I’ll be the first to admit: what I lacked in relevant experience and qualifications, I made up for with exceptionally good luck.
Like many people my age, if you had asked me on the day of my college graduation where I thought I would be in my career today, my prediction would have been pretty far off. But what I can tell you is that two whole years passed between that day I graduated and the first time I heard the term “product manager,” in a conversation with a family friend. In a different world, I would have started working towards this career a lot sooner — if only I had known it were an option! I could have been reading the right books, following the right blogs, attending the right events, and developing more of the right skills. I think it’s safe to say that I would have been a very different candidate by the time I was twenty-four. Instead, I was taken by surprise and ended up stumbling into an exciting opportunity without much preparation.
But as much as I wish I had been savvy to product management sooner, ramping up here has actually been really manageable, thanks in large part to my liberal arts education. All those hours — spent in group discussions, problem solving, presenting thoughts and findings, considering perspectives from peers, responding to challenges from professors, forming and defending opinions on the spot — turn out to have been very good practice for the life of a product manager. I’m happy to say that short of taking a product management course, a liberal arts program was the best training for the role that I could have asked for.
So even though it feels like I’ve been winging it a lot of the time, my first few months have played out pretty much like a best case scenario.
But the fact that it took so much luck for me to end up at Axial is, I think, representative of a problem for young job-seekers and tech companies alike.
Consider the much more common — and much less ideal — scenario: the one in which the courseless millennial never encounters product management in the first place. That’s a lose-lose situation, where tech companies miss out on bright young minds, and where perfectly suitable candidates miss out on a great career path, all because they aren’t aware it even exists.
Over the past few months, I’ve discovered two friends from school who have also found themselves in product. Like me, they got there by concerted effort after a chance exposure. And like me, they love their jobs and wish they had known about the field earlier.
Product management should be an obvious choice for the liberal arts grad, but instead, it seems to be a well-kept secret, and that’s a shame.
How many college career centers are suggesting this path to their students? I know mine missed that opportunity with me, and that’s part of a bigger problem than the story of my own career. I’d be willing to bet that college campuses across the country are crawling with promising young people with great PM potential who, although they might shy away from hack-a-thons and tech events because of their focus in the humanities, would be totally interested in the path, if they only knew what they were missing. What’s more, the fact that the point of product is so often to bring about positive change in the world only strengthens the case for planting seeds with young talent sooner, rather than later.
Since I lucked out, I feel obligated to send this message from the tech world to students and recent graduates of the liberal arts: there is room for you here! And because there’s a definite need for strong talent in the field, I’ve devoted the rest of this piece to pitching product management to you.
Product Management 101
If you’re at all like me — or most of my college friends — you want to do something creative. You’re practiced in written and verbal communication. You dig innovation, and you want to be on the cutting edge of something. You’ve got critical opinions on the technology that has become so present over the last decade. You might even be slightly jealous of your friends who were sensible enough to study computer science, all poised for stable futures in the tech metropoles of their choice. Sound like you? Well, good news! You could be a good fit for product management.
Ok. But what does a product manager do, exactly?
PMs work closely with engineers and designers to facilitate the development of a tech product (in our case, an app) and to help make the best decisions about prioritizing improvements and new features. This involves designing experiments, conducting research, collecting feedback from customers and colleagues, and devising solutions to business problems. A PM needs to be intimately familiar with the product and must be able to think through how it works from both the business and customer perspective. The specifics of how the product is built are not our responsibility: that’s why we work with engineers. PMs also work to reduce friction in the engineering process so that improvements to the product can be made as quickly and smoothly as possible. If you can’t tell, the work is interesting, challenging, and honestly pretty fun.
On the challenging aspect, there’s always going to be a learning curve for an entry-level product manager to climb. In my case, I had to learn about the worlds of engineering, finance, and agile development. At first, sitting in on meetings felt like eavesdropping on an alien spaceship. For color, here’s a fun word cloud of (some of) the things I had absolutely no idea about when I started at Axial, which I now have at least a basic grip on:
As you can see, there was a ton to come up to speed on. But it wasn’t impossible. All it takes is writing things down, a good deal of patience, and asking a lot of questions. And as I’ve become more familiar with the domain, I’m finding it easier to contribute, and my questions are coming from more of a place of expertise than naiveté. Of course, I’ll never be done learning, and I need to continue to aggressively targeting my own knowledge gaps. But that’s all part of the fun.
I’ve found that product managers tend to be generous with their expertise, because they have a real vested interest in the state of the field (and of course, because it’s a small world). If product sounds like something you might want to pursue, start now! Find, follow, and study inspiring product people. Reach out to them and see what happens! As far as learning goes, there are lots of books, sites, and other resources out there: just Google ‘product management’ and see where it leads you.
