Becoming a Product Manager

One of the longest traditions that I uphold is listening to Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen at least once a year. I use it as a sort of a checkpoint to see how far I have strayed from some compact-packed guidelines I like to follow.

What does this have to do with becoming a Product Manager? In this article, I want to present how I have come to become one and, since I’ve never been much of a writer, I’ve decided to reuse some of the wisdom from that song/speech to tell my story.

How did I get to LaterPay?

At one point in my life, I was a freshly graduated Computer Science bachelor student in Italy, not exactly knowing what kind of a career I wanted. Choosing to stay abroad instead of moving back to Croatia, where I am originally from, I studied Business Informatics masters in Vienna, Austria, while hoping to find a part-time job to support myself. You can see I did not quite have a strategy at the time.

“Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life.
The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives
Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.”

At a later point, my plan was working better than expected. I started working as an engineer, my masters was going well. Three years in, I got a great offer to join a multinational company as a Technical Consultant.

3.5 years into that role, I had my masters degree, and a job that did not fulfil me as much as I thought. I fell in love and moved back to Croatia after 12 years of living abroad. After some six years of direction and relative certainty, I had no idea where I was going, again.

“Don’t worry about the future
Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum”

My time as a LaterPay Integration Engineer

Then I found LaterPay. The role seemed to be ideal for me — and it was a fully remote gig. I applied, got the job and started in February last year. I had no idea how working with people I have never met in “real life” would work, which was among other worries I had at the time.

“Do one thing everyday that scares you”

Straight off a motivational poster, right? Fear is a powerful motivator, though; it challenges you and might even bring the best out of you. This seems to have worked out in my case, as I was able to enjoy the (truly amazing) colleagues and culture, the job, and actually be fairly decent at doing it. The best part was, I was able to balance the famous “work and life” objectives, as remote work has enabled me to travel and spend time with people that matter to me.

“Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle
For as the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young”

Becoming a Product Manager

After a year in the Integration Engineer role, I was offered the opportunity to move to the Product camp. I’ve given this role a lot of thought in the past, but I never expected it to drop in without big preparation or fanfares. If you have read through this text, I mentioned something about fear, and learning to embrace it; so I went along for the ride.

“Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s”

I have now been in this role for six months, and it has been six months of hard work, learning, uncertainty and lots of head scratching. I was appointed as a product manager of a new, API-based product, and the fact that delivering such a product was new not only to me, but also to most of the company, that feeling that we were all in the same boat was of the utmost help.

I think what has helped me the most, though, was to try things out. Talk and write about them openly and get as much feedback as possible. A lot of ideas we come up with sound amazing in our heads, but, once shared, lose all of their might.

The thing is — due to a weak general definition of the product manager role — getting the feeling of what might stick and what might not in a given context is essential to getting things done. In other words, since no product manager role is the same, even within the same organisation, a form of “qualitative analysis” of one’s ideas remains the best method to produce value, regardless of how it is represented.

Introspection is also an important part of it. The perception of the role is defined by one’s appetites. Big picture, clear value? — Business PM. Data, data, data? — Data PM. The list goes on. You’ll probably find yourself locked in between two of the archetypes, and that is already an important step in finding one’s “PM identity”.

You might be exposed to the market, customers and partners more or less, depending on your product manager identity and context. The important thing to keep in mind is the word product in your job title, and the product is linked to the market, and market to the customers, and customers to a problem they have and your product should solve. Nobody wants a product that they do not need, or are not willing to pay for — it’s as simple as that.

Be ready to attend five to six meetings in a row, because communicating with various internal and external stakeholders is an essential part of the role. As you’ve probably read so many times now, product managers are the bridge between various interests, capacities and approaches. Managing all of them simultaneously can be tiring.

After reading this, I am sure you think that I have it all figured out by now; however, reality is a different matter. I am still struggling to find my product manager identity, and marry the interests of different stakeholder groups in and out of the company while defining a killer product that will be delivered in time, scope, budget and smiles on everyone’s faces.

Figuring it all out will take a lot of patience and time, and I think that if I ever do, I will be moving to a different position, following the Dilbert principle, but also my own desire to get scared again.

Oh, and, don’t forget — listen to all advice, but take it all, including what you just read, with a pinch of salt, because:

“Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth”

Some bullet points

• Be scared!
• Talk or write your ideas, then listen, and learn from the critique
• Read the theory, but don’t stick to it
• Ask yourself what you want to do, and try doing it
• Always keep in mind the problem your product is addressing
• Wear sunscreen