My First 30 Days as a Product Manager

Starting a new career can be both challenging and enlightening, providing one with a fresh perspective on day-to-day challenges.

Most product managers come to the Product world from a long, winding road of disciplines, and at RetailMeNot that also holds true. Our Product team boasts a wide variety of career experiences, backgrounds and degrees, which adds to our effectiveness as a team and brings a true mix of perspectives to the table, which helps us build better products.

So, how do you get into Product?

Regardless of formal background, most product managers tend to have a few things in common. They have a passion for helping the customer. They are great at building and maintaining relationships. They are organized, and big-picture thinkers. Over time and many careers, I realized that product management was my true passion, and sought a way to enter this exciting and rewarding career path.

Product management is not yet a widespread subject one can study in school or at universities, but many current product managers come from prior roles in Operations, Analytics, Marketing or Engineering. Understanding the customer, how to analyze cause and effect for a given metric, or having a strong grasp of back-end systems will help tremendously. In my case, I had built a strong background of work in analytical and operational roles, which was helpful in landing a product management role.

The trickiest part about getting into product management is being able to demonstrate your value as a product manager without already holding that title. Requirements for the Associate Product Manager (APM) program at RetailMeNot included the ability to drive projects to completion, being analytical and self-motivated, having an ability to build and maintain relationships, understanding both external and internal customers, and being able to grasp the needs of many interdependent teams as we build and sell products for our end users.

Transitioning to Product at RetailMeNot

Our new class of APMs with our VP of Product, at our downtown Austin offices.

I found myself as an APM on a small-but-mighty engineering team which owns our programmatic advertising business as well as the monetization of our in-store B2C solutions. Our senior product manager quickly set up brainstorms and knowledge-share meetings — introducing me to the interrelated software systems our team uses, how they interact; explaining Agile release planning, test versus stage in the software development lifecycle, Android versus iOS dependencies for App, and more.

In addition to meetings with my direct manager, the Product team as a whole meets weekly in different iterations with senior leadership to share and vet best practices, plan our next increment of progress, shore up loose ends between teams, discuss Objective Key Results (OKRs) and evaluate new ideas.

There are endless opportunities to learn, from hearing our SVP of Product talk about the direction the company is heading, to being part of a global prioritization meeting with senior leaders from engineering and product, or even taking part in discussions on overall product direction. These conversations tackle questions like, “How do we build goals that are measurable but still informative, and find a midline between impossible goals and sandbagging?” or “How do we share resources across teams?” and finally, “Which initiatives should be prioritized for this time of year and how do they support our vision of becoming a true savings destination for our customers?”

I am still ramping up, including finding the best way to write acceptance criteria for engineering requests, learning how to write OKRs that make sense for the team, and helping bridge the gap between customer needs, retailer wants and engineering possibilities. I’m excited to continue on this program to become a true contributor to the success of RetailMeNot, and have the opportunity to improve the lives of consumers everywhere.

RetailMeNot Product & Design teams volunteering at the Central Texas Food Bank in Austin, TX.

10 ways to increase your chances of moving into Product

Here’s some of what I’ve learned and studied that helped me land my first role as a product manager:

1. Work to understand your company’s customers and their current pain points. Website and product comments, App Store reviews, customer support inquiries, UX and UI sessions, and reading customer profiles are all good places to start. It’s difficult to build the product the customer needs or wants if the customer isn’t fully understood.
2. Know who your stakeholders are — the more relationships you build, and the better you understand the concerns and goals of the other teams, the more you’ll be able to get done together.
3. Take the time to meet or befriend engineers at your company; the ideal product manager is a conduit between their Engineering team and the rest of the business. Taken one step further, “[a] good product manager is an Engineer’s best friend.” The job of a product manager encompasses empathizing, cheerleading, igniting, ideating, collaborating, motivating, organizing and so much more. In line with this is understanding the systems Engineers work on — learning your company’s backend systems so that you can contribute to the conversation at a higher level and better anticipate risks and difficulties for your team is so important.
4. Stay curious. Keep learning, reading, networking, growing and connecting ideas so that you can contribute at the highest capacity.
5. Put some time into becoming familiar with JIRA, Kanban, Agile, Scrum and release planning — as a product manager you’ll need a way to keep track of initiatives in a collaborative way across the team and organizations, and these are all in standard practice.
6. Set aside time to understand the larger goals of the business and upcoming priorities. Some good places to start are internal Wiki pages, talking to senior leadership, or attending office hours.
7. Form alliances with other product managers and learn from each other. This can either be through program groups (like our APM program), mentorships (we have a Women’s Mentorship program at RetailMeNot) or through extracurricular activities (offsites, volunteering, or department outings).
8. Stay sharp and up-to-date on the latest in your space and product management in general: Attend Meetups, Product Tank, Product Camp or Agile Camp; watch TedX talks or YouTube videos if you can’t attend; follow blogs and industry news (a few I like are Mind The Product, Silicon Valley Product Group, Hacker Noon, Fast Company, and Medium).
9. Take stock of your competitors — what are they doing well, what are they doing poorly — and learn what it is that customers prefer about their product, if anything.
10. Finally, be a nice person. Leave your ego at home, avoid throwing your team (or other teams) under the bus and call out credit where credit is due — all of which will make you a more effective product manager in the long-run.

A product manager can be one of the most cross-functional roles in a company, and the best ones are often unequivocally excellent at both building and maintaining relationships. It’s the rare product manager who can achieve success alone.

Now go forth and change the world through great products and good teamwork!