Becoming a Product Manager

From software deployment in hospitals to software creation: a story about an internal move into Product Management at Doctolib.

When someone asks me “What is it like being a Product Manager at Doctolib without any previous experience in product management?”, there is one thing that usually comes to mind: a song from my favorite Fatboy Slim album, “I’ve come a long way, baby”.

Let’s rewind to a year and half ago.

I was managing an awesome team of 6 Hospital Deployment Consultants in the Key Account team. At Doctolib, the Key Account Deployment team is in charge of:

• installing Doctolib’s main software which allows healthcare professionals to manage their appointments and to run teleconsultations, and allows patients to book appointments online,
• ensuring that Doctolib is connected to other key hospital softwares (eg. the CRM and medical files of the hospitals) via APIs.
• making sure Doctolib is included in the strategy of the establishment, by building a strong long-term partnership with the hospitals key stakeholders (from doctors & secretaries to C-levels)

Why I wanted to change roles

After three years in Key Accounts, I felt it was time for a new challenge. But when it came to defining precisely what I wanted to do, I was struggling. I knew three things for sure:

1. I wanted to spend more time with internal teams: in my previous roles, I would usually spend 80% of my time with clients.
2. Managing a team was no longer a priority for me.
3. I wanted to leverage my previous experience working on the Product: as a Deployment consultant, my role was to ensure that the transition from the previous BMS (Booking Management Software) to the Doctolib BMS would go as smoothly as possible. To do so, I needed to run thorough audits to understand how users (mainly secretaries, but also doctors) were using their BMS, in order to assess which features were “must-haves”, and which ones were “nice-to-haves”. I also needed to have a perfect mastery of the Doctolib BMS and all the tricks & workarounds to be able to match our users’ needs without having to make product requests everyday.

As I was pondering over my next career move, I spent quite some time talking to other Doctolibers in various departments to help me gain knowledge on other jobs that could potentially interest me.

One day, I had the chance to talk to one of the Product Directors. He told me about the Associate Product Manager (APM) program, which allows Doctolibers without product management experience to apply for a PM role. This discussion made me realize this job was pretty close to what I was looking for, and I decided to apply to the APM program.

The APM application process is a rather classic hiring process, which includes:

• Sending an application,
• Having a chat with the Talent Manager in charge of the APM program,
• Preparing a case study. This has been the most stressful stuff I have done for years! But definitely a great opportunity to assess whether Product Manager was the right job for me. Those long hours I spent preparing the case study have been my best investment. EVER.
• Presenting the case study to 2 Product Directors,
• Going through the final interview with the Doctolib CPO and Product Operation Director.

Spoiler alert: I got accepted to join the 1st promotion of APM at Doctolib! And there began my journey as a Product Manager (PM), discovering a quite different world from what I had known so far in my career.

I first discovered the job of PM via the Product Camp. A 2-week onboarding with all the new Product Managers at Doctolib, and the other 3 persons selected for the APM programs.

And now… discovering the real life of a Product Manager!

When I think about my first days and weeks as a Product Manager, I mostly remember that it was hard, but my team has been so kind and helpful that I would feel at home from day 1. I was discovering a totally different world, with discussions like:

• “Hey Julie, I just merged the PR, you can do the QA in staging, and bear in mind that the dev will be in production after the next roll-out” 🤨
  This basically means that the developer made sure the produced code is integrated on the platform and can be tested before going live in production to all our users (doctors, secretaries).
• “Hey Julie, for the patient check-out, did you assess the use case of sharing documents to a minor relative?” 😱
• “Hey Julie, when a user renews a prescription, we retrieve the treatments’ posologies and fetch Vidal alerts” 😨

Needless to say, I felt a bit lost at the beginning 🤯

Despite my 11 years of experience since I finished school, I felt like a 20 years-old rookie discovering Excel and PowerPoint for the 1st time. I was lost but I got so much help from my managers, the amazing feature teams I was part of, and also my peers, of course.

Here are the 3 main difficulties I faced in my first months as a Product Manager, and what I did to overcome them :

1- Struggling to prioritize and be efficient:

• As of day 1, I took the ownership of the scoping (which is the whole preparation work to conceive a feature) and delivery (which is the follow up of development and roll-out in production to users) of several features. Even though the Product Camp was very hands-on, managing so many topics (eg. QA of the ongoing sprint, preparing the next sprints, ensuring follow-up on urgent bugs, etc.) and being able to know exactly where to invest my time wasn’t easy!
• What helped me a lot was to improve my personal organization, by making sure I was investing the right amount of time of each topic, based on their level of prioritization. For daily tasks for which I would need to be very reactive (mainly QA and bug management for the whole « Doctolib Practice » software), I would have dedicated slots, several times a day, which would allow me to focus on other things the rest of the time.

2- Feeling confident enough to take decisions:

• I remember that I was quite lost when it came to making decisions, especially on technical and design-related topics. My main challenge was to know what criteria I should consider to choose one option over the other.
• To overcome this challenge, the best advice I was given was to rely on data (provided they exist !), and talk a lot to users and prospects to understand their pain points. And if you end up with a tie, trust your intuition.

3- Getting to know my counterparts and understand how to collaborate with them:

• Starting a new role during a pandemic context is definitely not the easiest context to meet and get to know my colleagues.
• When I joined the Product team, I started by getting e-coffees with my main counterparts and tried to assess how to make our collaboration as good as possible. This takes time, but it definitely helped me get pieces of advice from their own experiences.

The first 6 months as a PM have been the toughest in my career. But also the most exciting and amazing ones. There was so much to learn everyday, but being remote was not easy for me. My previous experiences in Sales and Project Manager had given me super helpful skills for this new role, but I needed to gain knowledge on basic Product Management (eg. understanding the phases of product development), and understanding how to work with all my counterparts — mainly Developers, Product Designers, User Researchers and Data Analysts, but many other teams (Sales, Consultants, Product Support, Technical Services, Product Operations, etc.).

I managed to climb the mountain of becoming a Product Manager from scratch, stone after stone, rocks after rocks. A colleague of mine recently said to me: « You look like you are where you belong ». Well, it took me (at least) 6 months to feel comfortable in my role, but I can tell you that « now… I have the time of my life » (I don’t do the Dirty dancing moves everyday at work, but it definitely feels like it!).

3 takeaways if you consider moving to a Product Manager role

Anyway, if you relate to this story and think you could be interested in Product Management, I have 3 pieces of advice:

1. Take the time to think about what you no longer want to do, and try to assess what you like in your current role.
2. If you feel like becoming a Product Manager could be a good fit for you, then talk to one, in order to assess whether it could really be the case. If you don’t know any, just go on LinkedIn and check in your network!
3. Once you’ve made up your mind, well… Just do it 😉! I appreciate that making a bold move in one’s career is not easy, especially when it comes to a professional reconversion. Lucky me, Doctolib offered me the opportunity to change career path through the APM program, but there are loads of companies offering Product Management classes (eg. Join Maestro, Noé, Le Wagon, etc). Whatever your age is, it’s never too late. NEVER.

If you are interested in other Product Management related articles (especially if you are considering this role or just started), I would also highly recommend the article « The 3 most important skills for new Product Managers » written by Félix Revert.

Thanks for reading my first Medium article, hope you liked it! And if you feel like starting a conversation on this topic, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn, I’d be happy to discuss!