Does Being a Subject Matter Expert Make you a Better Product Manager?
I transitioned into a Product Manager role at AdHawk around a year and a half ago. Prior to that, I was the Director of Account Management (also at AdHawk), and before that I was an Account Manager (believe it or not, also at AdHawk). The company was making a push towards building out tools specifically for Digital Advertising Account Managers, and wanted someone with a deep understanding of the job and its challenges on the team. I had always been interested in making the transition from Client Services to Product, and jumped at the opportunity to help build tools to solve problems I knew all too well.
The transition was predictably challenging, but it allowed me to take advantage of the knowledge and experience I had built up over the previous 5 years to influence the product’s direction. Being a subject matter expert had many obvious advantages as I transitioned into the world of product. There were, however, a good number of unforeseen challenges and pitfalls that presented themselves as a result. This begs the question: “does being a subject matter expert actually make you a better Product Manager?”
The Pros
As a PM, there are some pretty clear benefits that come from having expertise in the target industry. Firstly, there is a deep understanding of and empathy for the customer. In this case, the customer was the AdHawk Account Management team, and having been a part of that team for 2+ years, I felt like I was in a good position to advocate for their needs.
Another great advantage I had coming in was a thorough knowledge of the problems that needed to be solved. I had been there. I knew the challenges that I had faced on a day to day basis. I knew what tasks were the biggest time suck. And I knew where a tool could make the most impact. This helped me steer the product roadmap in a direction that would provide the most benefit for Account Managers.
Having a subject matter expert embedded directly within the Engineering team also allowed us to move more quickly. When industry-specific questions came up (as they always do), for the most part I was able to answer them.
For example, we were working on a dashboard that would track how different advertising campaigns were trending towards their target monthly budgets. Part of this involved querying different metrics from the Google Ads and Facebook Ads APIs, and then aggregating them to give Account Managers a holistic, high-level view of performance.
One of the challenges with combining data from different ad platforms is that they all have different names for metrics, and fields rarely line up one-to-one. Facebook has 96 different action types that they report on (at the moment). Multiply that number by the different attribution windows you can select, and you are looking at 500+ different metrics of varying degrees of similarity. The team needed to sort through these options to find the correct fields to pull, then sort through the fields available from Google for the equivalent, and then combine those and display the total.
By itself, this shouldn’t be a huge blocker, but similar situations would arise on a recurring basis. Starting and stopping all the time can really kill a team’s momentum, and over time, that adds up to lost productivity. I was able to answer most if not all of these questions as they came up. This helped keep the engineers unblocked, and allowed the team to move faster than it could have otherwise.
The Cons
One of the main challenges that presented itself as I was ramping up with the Product team was that I tended to assume that my needs and struggles as an Account Manager were universal. If I was convinced that this one feature would have helped me, I thought it would undoubtedly help all Account Managers to the same extent.
The truth is that Account Managers have different processes and strategies that they employ, and no two work in exactly the same way. AdHawk works with small businesses in a variety of verticals (eCommerce, flooring, services, medical, etc.), and as a result its Account Managers have to be fairly dynamic in the way that they approach each account. I had to make a consistent effort to dismiss the assumption that my experiences and problems were all encompassing.
I also found that I had to consciously take a step back and listen when Account Managers and other stakeholders described their problems or the features they wanted. It’s not hard to bias the product development process by relying too heavily your own purported expertise, and not truly listening to what others are asking for.
Even with a thorough interview and survey process, I would find myself interpreting the responses in a way that aligned with my own beliefs. For example, “Only three people mentioned this issue, it’s probably not that important” vs. “Three people mentioned this issue, it’s definitely worth digging into further and perhaps conducting a follow up survey about this specific topic!”. Sometimes you have to check the ego at the door and take on a beginner’s mindset in order to get the truest picture of what your customers actually need.
Recap
Unsurprisingly, being a Product Manager with subject matter expertise has plenty of benefits and can make you more effective at your job. It was especially useful in my case, as I had zero experience as a PM but was still able to make an impact on the team I was transitioning onto. I knew there would be challenges coming in, and none of the ones that I encountered as a result of my background were insurmountable by any means. Still, I find it useful to regularly reflect on these potential pitfalls in order to avoid falling into similar traps moving forward.
