Steps to transit
Opening Story
I came from the southern part of China — a beautiful province called Fujian.
Because of the unique geographic location — we not only have delicious tropical fruits, beautiful landscape but also, unfortunately, frequent visits of typhoon.
When typhoon comes, it’s not unusual to see tree got pulled up, building got damaged and your neighbourhood got completely flooded.
No one in my family can swim…and with the increasing frequency of the flood in the area — my parent decided to send me to learn swimming with a mission to be the saver for the family. I was probably around 4 years’ old that time.
But they have a very unique way to teach me that — they got me to study all the swimming moves and techniques at home for weeks.
After I could memorise every single technique and skill by heart, they took me to a local swimming pool.
As they can’t swim, I have to go to the water by myself.
As you can imagine, the moment when I first got into the water, I immediately started to panic. I couldn’t remember any single technique I learnt.
I was trying to paddle so hard, just to keep my head above the water.
What was worse, my parents were yelling instructions for me from the shore:
“ Charlotte, remember to breathe, you are going to sink if you continue doing this,…@#$%!”
The fear of sinking and my parents’ “helpful” introduction was so overwhelming
After few minutes’ struggle (I called it near death experiences.. but my parent would disagree), I left the pool and swore I would never go back again!
Of course, my parents brought me back the 2nd day, 3rd day…
That intense feeling of fear and struggle stay with me for a really long time.
Until one day, I don’t even remember how. I realise I can swim a couple kilometres without much sweat…
Why I share this story with you today?
Because I have very similar experiences when I first transiting to product manager.
Before that, I have worked in relevant product and tech space for over 9 years. My experiences of working as a consultant had also helped me to stay ahead with all the most in techniques and framework around Product management space.
I thought it would be an easy transition, until I actually become one.
Then I experience the same level of overwhelms and struggle as I first time step into swimming pool. That’s when I realise I have always been on the shore of product management before…Then this thought hits me:
If you want to swim, you need to get into the water
so if you want to be product manager, you need to be a product manager.
My Transition ‘Framework’
I have pivoted my career a few times to explore my passions and life goals.
Before every leap, I have always do the below 3 activities:
- Understand the Why
- Identify your Skills & Gaps
- Just start doing it
And I always feel grateful that I did them afterwards, as the answers of them have been the anchor to guide me on every self-doubt and future decisions of staying or leaving. Here is a summarised version of the activity.
1. Understand the Why
This is the single most important step to start any transitioning.
Without understand your personal mission and motivation, it is difficult to find a purposeful job and adventure next, as you will not be able to identify the.
These are some of the questions I asked myself to explore my “Why”:
- What motivates me to get out of bed everyday?
- What is my “desired land” like? Why?
The “desired land” refers to your ideal states/goals
These are the 5 major aspects I looked into:
- Relationships : What kind of the relationship I want to prioritise and it’s important for me to maintain (Partner, Family, Friends, colleagues, community etc)
- Career : Where do I see myself in 3 years, 5 years in my career? What is my ultimate career goal?
- Community: What kind of communities I want to belong to?
- Lifestyle : What kind of lifestyle I want to have? (Luxury, Minimalism, Layback etc…)
- Feeling: How do I want to feel? — I started to ask this question more and more in the past few years
- Why do I want to be a (Product Manager or any role you may want to transit to) not anything else?
This question always involve some research to understand the value, scope and vision for the role. Sometime different organisation has different perspective about the role.
- Can it help me to achieve my motivation or move closer to my ‘desired land’?
Then it’s time to evaluate if this role (PM) will help me to move closer to the “desired land” I defined before.
This process generally take the longest time and require a lot self-discovery to get there. I tend to do this by asking myself multiple “Why”.
2. Identify Skills (Gap)
Below is my favourite quote from a product conference, I don’t really remember who said it, but I quote it all the time:
After understand my Why, the next step is to find out the key skills needed for the role (What they want) , my key skills (What I have) and the gap between them. I am not trying to say if our current skills are not 100% match with the new role, we should not try to make the transition.
In fact, that’s actually opposite of what I would encourage. Because without trying to get out of the comfort zone and try to go for something beyond our existing skillset, we will lose the opportunity to learn new skills and grow.
The purpose for this exercise is for us to make conscious decision and be able to plan our life around base on the size of the gap.
For example (this is a bit extreme example , I know…):
if you are professional baker who is applying for a role that required rocket building skill. It’s not that you shouldn’t apply, but the awareness of this skill gap will allow you to make a choice between: sacrifice all the leisure time in the next 12 months (to 6 years…I am not sure) so you can pick up some spaceship knowledge to achieved your desired role or you can choose this might not be the role for you right now.
3. Just start doing it
This is my learning philosophy as mentioned:
The only way to learn how to swim is to get into the water! The fast you can get into the water the quicker you are going to learn.
I know you might say this is easy to say than done… well, that’s true.
These are my attempts for leaning in the domains I want to be in.
They have been working out for me:
- Join the Community
- Upskill by doing
- Apply the thinking
Join the community
I always try to immerse myself to the community that I want to belong to (remember the question we asked ourselves when defining our ‘desired land’, that’s when they come handy)
Before I got my 1st Product Manager role, I was expressing my interests of transitioning to Product to almost every single trusted network- my direct manager, colleagues, mentors, sponsors and I also try to go to every single product meetups and conferences in town.
So when I eventually got my first PM role (no surprise here — that was through my network) , I have received overwhelmingly congratulations from my network.
Upskill by doing
Do you know someone in your team, organisation that is currently doing your desired role? If so, reached out to them now and ask if you can shadow them or assist them in any sort.
In my experience, most people will say yes, as most people are nice :) and also wants to help others grow.
When I was a scrum master/agile coach for a saas company a few years back, I approached the Product Manager in my team and ask if I can learn about Product management from him. He not only provided me consistent product mentorship, but also task me with some actual product work — do some market research and competitor analysis with him. That act really spark my interests in product and I also inspired to be a Product manager like him from that point. (Hey, Andy, if you have ever came across this blog, hope you receive this big thank you from me:) thank you for inspiring me for being a Product manager and a nicer person!)
Apply Product Thinking
If for some reason, you couldn’t get any access to community support, this is something you can do right now and not depending on others. And this is certainly something I start with.
Because Product is also a way of thinking, I was trying to apply this thinking everywhere. I tried to apply it with the community that I care, David Berry (my co-PO for the meetup) and I have spent solid amount time to define this meetup’s unique value proposition, our audiences, our market and we also have a well-executed roadmap. (See our meetup page, we have grown our members from 8- 2,295 since we formed!)
I applied this to my personal side hustle and also myself. I constantly try to figure out what is my vision, mission, channels and roadmap, if you want to have a sneak peak on my operational model, please see this blog
This is the end
This is a long blog about transitioning, this is inspired by my recent presentation in the Everything Agile Meetup to share about my experience to transitioning to product management space, you can see the full slides here
This is my ending thought:
If you want to swim, you need to get into the water
