Two years ago I didn’t know what Product Management was. Now it’s my career.
Some of us have always known what we wanted to do in our professional life. Whatever it takes — qualifications, experience, planning each upward rung and avoiding the snakes — that’s all part of the game plan.
If that’s you too — fantastic! I genuinely wish you the very best of luck. For the rest of us, though, here’s a story about building a career in the 21st century, clumsily disguised as my own bio.
Like many people, I began my working life with the vaguest of strategies and a hopeful desire to build a life around my personal passions. For me, that started with photography.
It didn’t take me long to realise I wasn’t going to become the next Stephen Shore overnight. Though I’m as passionate about my craft as ever, I still need to pay the rent.
But when I finish writing this article today I’ll turn back to my day job, managing the delivery of products the end user can’t even touch but which — we hope — will make their life better.
Not so very different from digital photography, then, and I feel I’m still very much part of the visual storytelling universe. Here’s how it all panned out.
Hands on hardware
I studied photography at Nottingham Trent University and won a bursary to create my first solo exhibition the following year. At the same time my partner joined a postgraduate course in Brighton and I moved to the South Coast with her.
To help pay the bills I took a job in retail. I absolutely hated it! But at the same time I kept my hand in by assisting the brilliant Brighton-based photographer Simon Roberts.
He couldn’t offer me a paid job but one morning, en route to an early shoot, he told me he’d just sold a camera to MPB and thought I should check them out. They seemed cool and a lot of enthusiasts worked there.
I hadn’t imagined I’d be able to find a photography-related job that paid but I passed the interview and joined as a Product Specialist — one of the people who physically assess and photograph every individual piece of kit arriving at MPB.
This is great, I thought — I get to play with an incredible array of camera kit all day and earn a salary for it! It must have been obvious how much I was enjoying it, as my partner joined MPB a week later (she’s still here too).
And if you’re wondering what all this has to do with Product Management, the answer is … well, nothing yet (whatever the job title may suggest). But please do stay tuned.
Back in 2017, Product Specialists had to receive goods from the courier, carry them to the triage station, then sort and assign them before starting on their “actual” role — cleaning, inspecting, testing, grading, validating and photographing each item, before passing it on to the warehouse.
That was a lot of work, but it did mean I quickly learned how the business-end of MPB worked.
Levelling up
As I grew into my role I realised that our growing company would benefit hugely from developing our standardised training programme for new Product Specialists.
Why did it matter? Well, to take my own example, I knew plenty about Canon cameras and lenses but less about drones or video cameras, which interested me less.
Having a consistent set of training materials would enable us to level people up, making the team more efficient and allowing colleagues to gain confidence quicker.
I spoke to the COO, who agreed to let me train all new hires and develop a standard process, alongside my “day job”. It went well — I found I enjoyed skill-sharing — and in early 2018 I was promoted to Product Specialist Sub Team Leader.
Later that year I changed roles again, becoming Spares & Repairs Manager. I was now in charge of stocking and ordering lens caps, batteries, chargers, sensor swabs, cables and many more specialist parts. As MPB expanded globally, I built relationships with international suppliers of parts for our New York and Berlin locations.
In the meantime I still managed to continue training Product Specialists, now including the new Berlin team.
Going global
When I joined MPB there were fewer than 100 employees. Today there are over 450.
With our expansion came new underlying technology — ultimately great for our efficiency but a potential training headache in the short term.
So in 2021 I became Global Operations Trainer, responsible for maintaining documentation and frameworks for the new systems to be used by many different teams in the business.
This was also my introduction to Product & Engineering, the department responsible for the technology underpinning both our internal systems and the customer-facing MPB platform.
I worked closely with Product and Engineering and became the intermediary between the people building our new platforms and those who would be using them. This soon became a full-time secondment.
I was lucky that the engineering team had thorough documentation for the platform. My role was to translate it so everyone else could understand, work out what was missing and make updates — long before there was even a working system to test on.
Other teams I worked with for the first time in this role included those focused on Customer Experience and Seller Experience.
Clearly I didn’t know their jobs at all and I had to spend time getting to understand them and dealing with their feedback. I came to realise that they were teaching me at least as much as I was training them.
So by the time the new platforms were launched, and I had moved into Product Management permanently, it turned out I had actually been working in the role for months already.
The big reveal
It came as a surprise to learn that my first job at MPB as Product Specialist had absolutely nothing to do with Product Management. Of course all those cameras, lenses and related pieces of kit are products; they’re just someone else’s product.
Our product at MPB is a simple and safe online platform that lets people buy, sell and trade used photography and videography gear. My current job in Product Management involves delivering the right changes to that platform at the right time.
I’m the link-person between the engineers, who build these changes, and the business leaders (and by extension the customers) who want them. To put it another way, I’m a conduit between the infinite demands of the market and the finite resource of the engineering team.
The kinds of product development I’m involved with can be anything from changing the colour of a button on screen to launching a complete localised platform in a new market.
That in turn means being, as someone put it at a conference I attended, a “jack of all trades and master of most”. You have to know, or learn, an awful lot about everything.
Looking back at my previous roles in MPB I can now see how each experience has helped me get here, and continues to help me every day. But on day one in the new role I definitely underestimated how much I already knew.
I couldn’t have told you what stakeholder management meant, but I had certainly spent many hours patiently explaining why some things that seemed trivial had to be built now, while someone else’s top-priority item wasn’t going to make the build.
That isn’t to say it’s all plain sailing. I’ll never forget my first refinement meeting. I came out thinking “what have I done?”. I’ve had to learn to say what I mean and mean what I say, and to confidently demand evidence when it’s critical to a decision.
Brave new world
I’m lucky to have had some excellent managers at MPB who supported me at every turn and taught me a great deal. I started in Product working with a team dedicated to business functions I already knew well, which gave me time to learn my job before I had to start learning everyone else’s too!
It’s hard to put your hand up in a meeting and confess to not understanding. I’m lucky enough to have a supportive team who will offer me help in a heartbeat.
We have brilliant engineers, too. They all knew I didn’t have a clue about Product Management, but that I was the go-to person if they wanted to understand how a change might impact the business.
I’ve been on a couple of courses, which I think mainly cemented things I didn’t know I knew — things like how to form questions to stakeholders to obtain the best value.
I’m still learning and I’m sure most Product Managers always are. I’ve worked with Marketing, which was all new to me, and am now involved in payment and tax with the Finance / Revenue team, which again I previously knew nothing about! It’s a great challenge.
I think moving into Product Management from a non-Product background is a great move if you’re a bit inquisitive, you want to learn, you aren’t afraid to ask questions and you’re willing to challenge people — not in a negative way but to check you’re doing the right thing for the right reason.
Above all, it’s a role where you can really make a difference. And that’s pretty good for a job I hadn’t even heard of two years ago.
Tom Illsley is an Associate Product Manager at MPB, the largest global platform to buy, sell and trade used photo and video gear. www.mpb.com
