A Learning Framework for growth
How To Evolve As a Product Manager
Product Management is a weird discipline.
The activities and work that one does as a product manager are constantly in flux. It is one of the least defined roles in an organization.
Product Management isn’t something you find as a major in your school, and most product managers end up in their role from a variety of disciplines. So whether you majored in computer science, industrial design, English, or political science, product management is a role that you can jump into.
Once you end up as a product manager, your growth and success rely on many different factors. As a product leader, you are wearing multiple hats — design, engineering, legal, sales, marketing, and so much more. One is expected to constantly pick up information in these areas and use their learnings to help solve complex problems.
What ends up being one of the essential necessities as a product manager is one’s curiosity and desire to learn. As a product manager, your growth ends up being so much determined by your love of learning.
Continuous Learning
To grow is to learn.
As mentioned above, many product managers come to the role from a domain that isn’t necessarily connected to the product they are managing. The task of continuously learning becomes such an important need for product managers to jump in and pick up the responsibilities of their role.
While the product management role provides ample opportunity to grow and learn on the job, one must utilize those moments.
Being able to pick up new skills and knowledge helps one become better at defining new product ideas and collaborating more effectively with their cross-functional peers in the organization.
The activities and work that one does as a product manager are constantly in flux. You must know and learn about technology, design, leadership, managing people, negotiations, organizational communication, and more.
Learning as a Framework
When thinking about growing as a product manager, you can view learning as a combination of three key areas:
Learning = (Knowledge * Skills) + Ability
1. Knowledge (Acquire)
Knowledge can be considered as any information that we acquire. It is considered the theoretical understanding of a concept or a subject. It could be information that you acquire from books, magazines, online videos, college classes, blogs, etc.
For a product manager, this includes:
- Learning about the latest technology trends like machine learning, IoT, etc
- Becoming well versed in user experience research
- Design knowledge and understanding
- Knowledge of analytics and A/B testing
- Familiarity with economics
- Domain and market knowledge
- Grasp of business fundamentals
2. Skills (Practice)
Skills are the application of the theoretical knowledge that we acquire. Skill is the capability of performing a task that we develop through practice, training, or experience. It is the ability to apply our knowledge.
For a product manager, this includes:
- Skills like communication, prioritization, negotiation, leadership
- Ability to use design, analytics, and project management tools
- Conducting user research
- Relationship and team management skills
- Story writing, feature definition
- Effective collaboration
3. Ability
There is a very fine line, but a line nonetheless, between abilities and skills. The main differentiator is that abilities are innate. So, while we can improve our abilities, they are still considered natural and inbuilt rather than learned behaviors.
Ability, though important, isn’t the key factor when it comes to learning and growing as a product manager. What ends making the biggest difference is how we deal with new knowledge and pick up new skills.
Growing As a Product Manager
When it comes to growing in our career as a product manager, continuous learning becomes important. However, we usually don’t have the time or the framework to understand where we need to prioritize our learning.
We can plot product management growth based on learning across 4 quadrants:
Quadrant 1
High Knowledge; Low Skills
In this setup, the individual focuses on attaining new knowledge but not necessarily engaging in constant practice to uplevel their skills.
As a product manager, learning under the specifics of this quadrant helps one gain a deeper understanding of one or many concepts in specific knowledge domains. In addition, this usually helps establish one as a subject matter expert.
A PM in this quadrant tends to gain expertise in their respective domain and develops a good eye for building products specific to that domain.
Quadrant 4
Low Knowledge; High Skills
This learning is usually seen when individuals spend most of their time developing their skills and executing. As a result, they tend to de-prioritize picking up new information and not focus on acquiring an understanding of new domains and topics.
As a product manager, under this quadrant, one tends to accrue and build skills across different areas of product management. Such learning helps a product manager grow into an effective individual contributor.
Organizations tend to look to such product managers to drive and execute major initiatives across the company.
Quadrant 2
High Knowledge; High Skills
This is the sweet spot for learning. Being able to pick up new skills while also spending time to build one’s knowledge is definitely the best way to ensure growth as a product manager.
You become effective at executing and build expertise to lead higher-level strategies for the business.
Quadrant 3
Low Knowledge; Low Skills
Ideally, as a product manager, one should not be staying within this quadrant. But, hopefully, given the nature of the role, you are always learning at the job in some way or the other.
Growth needs learning.
As you can see, both components of learning are important for growth. Focusing on just one while ensures learning can impact your growth trajectory as a product manager.
When we think about growing as product managers, continuous learning ends up playing a huge role in our ability to deliver better products.
The above learning framework is not restricted to just product management. I encourage everyone to look at their disciplines within this framework, and you will notice that long-term growth and success require similar intentions.
For more on product management, find me on twitter and feel free to check out the newsletter — Somehow I Product 🤷♂️.
