Why choose product management as a career?

Hello, aspiring product managers out there!

According to a LinkedIn survey, product management is amongst the top 15 promising jobs with ~29% yearly growth in job opportunities. After being a product manager for 2 years, I can certainly vouch for this research. I have found product management to be a highly satisfying role, which has opened up learning and working opportunities for me.

In this article, I will share the insights that I have gained about this buzzing field. Here are the topics that I will be discussing:

1. Basics of product management
2. Role of a product manager
3. Checklist for a career in product management
4. Skills needed to become a product manager

What is product management?

Product management is building something from scratch or adding new features to an existing product. For example, building a complete e-commerce product itself or adding a search feature in an e-commerce product. However, it is not limited to that. It also comprises seeing the results of your hard work when the users are finding value in what you have built and continuously working towards building the best products for them.

Who is a product manager (PM)?

Let us first see what a product manager is NOT. A product manager is NOT a software engineer, designer, analyst, consultant, marketer, data scientist, or project/program manager. A product manager is also NOT an authoritarian figure in the role because sitting at the intersection of tech, business, data, design teams, a PM has to collaborate with different teams over which they do not have direct authority.

Marty Cagan, a renowned author of the book ‘Inspired: How to build products customers love’ and a Silicon Valley based product executive with more than 20 years of experience, describes the job of a product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. To accomplish this, a product manager needs to be someone who has the knowledge and understanding of different trades and is a master of planning and coordination to deliver the product that is valuable. In order to do so, a product manager identifies the most important problems and defines which ones need to be solved.

Gathering information from different sources, prioritizing the tasks in hand, delegating the tasks, and delivering the final product that caters to the consumer’s needs are some of the things that a product manager actively does. Irrespective of what a PM does, they need to ensure that the product is aligned with the business goals.

You will find product managers working in start-ups as well as established companies handling consumer products, B2B products, B2C products, internal products, and so on. But at the core of everything they deliver a product that customers want and are willing to pay for. To do this, a product manager needs to be someone who has a vision and the ability to drive decisions and lead through influence.

Why should you consider a career in product management?

1. The role has a HUGE learning scope as it requires you to work with multiple cross-functional teams. Working with engineering, design, research, marketing, business, analytics, sales, support, and content teams is going to enrich your domain knowledge and experience. The skills that you will acquire through daily collaborations, communications, challenges, and frequent decision-making are going to turn you into a great leader for your career ahead.
2. It is going to be addictive to solve users’ problems, seeing how the product you have built is being used by your end-users, and how it is impacting someone’s life.
3. You will also get to communicate with the top leadership of the organization which will help you understand the vision of the organization better. Seeing the bigger picture will help you in making the right decisions for your product and organization.
4. You will find the role flexible as you will be the one who will be driving the decisions and prioritizations of the tasks (of course in alignment with the business as I already mentioned above.)

If you have found your reasons for considering a career in product management, let’s move onto the next important question.

Is this uber-cool product manager role right for you?

To answer this question, here is the checklist for you:

1. You live for the thrill of problem-solving. Do challenges pull you towards them with excitement instead of fear? Do you like fitting pieces together to identify the best solution? Do you have trouble falling asleep until you solve a problem? Then, this is the right role for you!
2. If you have spent your life talking to people and listening to their stories, problems, and ideas, then you will feel right at home in this role. As a product manager, your days will be spent talking to engineers, designers, customers, sales team, finance, marketing, and almost every other team that is there in the company.
3. You have an independent opinion and you speak up whenever is needed. You will be expected to be the voice of your end-user in the team and make decisions that are best for them.
4. You are able to make frequent decisions. This quality is going to be really helpful in the role because your teams will be looking forward to your decisions in order to continue their work. This is because a PM is known to have the most context in the company and accordingly makes strategies that are aligned to the company’s vision and prioritizes the tasks based on what, why, and when to build in order to achieve the greater impact.
5. You have the hunger for knowledge and you constantly look forward to learning new things. If you like understanding all the aspects of your business, then you are going to enjoy this role because you’ll need to have an understanding of design, development, sales, marketing, content, data, and much more to build successful products.
6. You are the go-to person for people to know the past, present, and future of a task or a project. You will be expected to be on top of what happened last week/month, what is happening now, what is planned for the next week/month, and so on.
7. You can lead a team by influence instead of authority. As a product manager, you will need to keep your team motivated and aligned to the larger goals. You will be responsible for inspiring them and giving them the whys and whats of the product/features they are working on. This helps the engineers and designers understand the business point of view and reason behind the tasks which encourages them to feel more connected to the product and results in shipping the best product for the end-users.
8. You can maintain your calm in the face of uncertainties. If you can be ready for the uncertainties like whether or not the features will be released on time, whether or not the users will like or use the feature, and all the other factors that are out of your control. You should be able to maintain your calm in all such situations and make the right decisions by analyzing what went wrong, whether the feature needs to be rolled back or improved to get the desired results, whether the project needs to be broken down further into smaller modules to ship it on time, and much more.
9. You like to understand the why behind a problem instead of jumping into the how.

If the answer to all the above-mentioned points is yes, then let’s move on to understanding some key skills to get your first job in product management.

What are the skills that you need to become a product manager?

A PM is expected to be skilled at many things. Interestingly, you might already possess some of these skills that I am going to talk about. If you have the willingness to learn, then you can learn all the other skills required after getting into the role.

The following skills will make you a great product manager:

1. Strategic thinking: To begin with, you’ll need to have structured thinking and brainstorming skills. You should be able to answer complex problems and have a long-term vision to make sure the product is growing as per the market standards.
2. Communication: You will need to communicate with customers, development teams, designers, etc. in 1:1 or group meetings, via product documents or emails, etc. Hence, clear written and oral communication with different stakeholders is one of the most important skills that a PM should have.
3. Empathy: Understanding the pain of the user helps in understanding the problem completely and finding the best possible solution. Understanding the product and its challenges from different user perspectives, inferring what the user wants, and then deriving useful insights from it is important for a PM.
4. Collaboration: Even though you will be leading the product and making the decisions, you will have no authority over people you will be working with because all the teams a PM collaborates with to deliver a successful product are independent in themselves. The team members will not be reporting to you directly. Hence, collaboration becomes the key skill for a PM. You will have to get things done with others within and across teams by influencing them and collaborating with them so they actually listen to you. You will be expected to lead/participate actively in meetings and squad processes, support product execution across different teams when needed, and solve problems of and with the squad to deliver the results effectively and without any conflicts.
5. Technical: Having technical skills like engineering, design, prototyping, story writing, analytics, etc. is going to be of great advantage in the role.
6. Attention to detail & quality: You need to be good at driving results and delivering small or large products/features on time with few bugs and 360-degree thinking while working on a product or feature.
7. Prioritization: As a PM, the amount of things you need to focus on is going to be huge. You need to know the art of prioritization because you need to be sure of what you want to focus your energy on.

Even though you should consider a few things if you want to get into this role, the best advice I would ever give is — if you possess some of the basic qualities required and are enthusiastic about the role, then just get into it to try out the real PM experience by working on the products that solve the real-world challenges.

Now that you have stayed with me so far, let me talk about a few common concerns that beginners often have -

• Is developer experience mandatory for a PM?
• Can I become a PM immediately after my graduation?
• Do I need an MBA degree to become a PM?
• Do I need to be from a computer science engineering background to become a PM?

The answer to all these questions is NO. If you have the skills and qualities I have talked about and the right mindset to learn, then getting your first PM job could be much easier for you than you think.

So, are you ready to give product management a shot?