Writers: So you want to be a product manager?
Transferrable skills for writers who are considering a move to product management.
Audience is everything, they said. Write for the audience, they said. Sound familiar? Having recently completed a short course in Product Management (and with experience working as a product owner), I observed this to be one of the many transferrable skills writers have if considering a move to product management.
As a writer, you must have a clear picture of who you’re writing for. Working in product is similar in this way. While you may not write for an audience, you certainly do let users guide you. After all, a key indicator of a product’s success is user adoption. So, if you’ve always written for an audience, you might be in a good position to move towards product management.
Beyond writing for an audience, how can being a writer help? If you’re a writer interested in transitioning to product management, here are some of the skills you already have and how they might help as a product manager.
You’re a natural storyteller
As a writer, telling stories is your thing. Telling the same stories in different ways is your bread and butter. You know who might benefit from stories? Product teams.
Building a product requires the brainpower of many different people who come from different disciplines. It’s the culmination of different skillsets that make working in product and technology so exciting. It is the role of the product manager to bring the outside in. By this, I mean product managers often take what they know about the market and their customers to product teams who are busy focusing on the details of what needs to be done. It’s the product manager's job to paint the business need. Because there are so many people who come from different disciplines in product teams, telling stories is one way to cut through the noise and speak a common language.
Why are stories so important to building a product? Stories help solidify who your users are, what they need to do and how you might help them achieve it. Most importantly, storytelling is one way to ask and illustrate the ‘why’. Of course, you’ll need the help of many people to tell the story but if you can capture the vision through story, you can bring people from different disciplines together.
- What you’ve already got: Ability to tell stories in written form and from different angles.
- What you might need upskilling in: Telling stories to a room full of people.
- What you might want to sharpen: Shopping ideas to different departments or stakeholders.
Scenario thinking
This is closely related to storytelling. Thinking in scenarios is about seeing things from different angles and asking what could potentially happen.
As a product writer, I’ve worked closely with developers and other much more technically-minded people. At first, I found this daunting. At times I found myself stumbling through sentences trying to ask questions to get to the bottom of what needed to be done. I knew what I needed but didn’t always speak the developer’s language.
So I turned to storytelling. Bringing the problem back to the user. Asking questions about what could happen. How would a user think, what would they do or how would they feel in a situation? Looking at situations in this way helps bring real-world use cases to the table, something that a developer may not be thinking about because they’re solving it from a technical angle.
Later down the track, I discovered BDD (or Gherkin statements) and user statements which more or less put structure and logic to storytelling. Storytelling helped me unlock a way of working with developers without knowing how to write code. In product management, it might also help to unlock customer personas and needs for product teams.
- What you’ve already got: Storytelling skills.
- What you might need upskilling in: Writing stories as Gherkin statements.
- What you might want to sharpen: Working with development teams.
Understanding your audience
Audience is everything. Knowing what interests them, what makes them tick and pre-empting what they want to know about a particular topic is something writers are familiar with. In the same way, product managers are always in contact with customers to uncover how to evolve their products. Product managers receive feedback, translate it into business requirements and bring it to their teams. They pre-empt what’s needed, what customers respond to and ultimately what their team needs to build.
- What you’ve already got: Asking what your users want.
- What you might need upskilling in: Techniques and frameworks for gathering customer feedback and market analysis.
- What you might want to sharpen: Industry knowledge.
Check your sources
Research. Statistics. Quotes to help support different sides of the story. Interviews. Talking to subject matter experts. These are all the things that writers do. Product managers may not be doing all these things with the same detail as a writer but people will look to them for the facts and sources (in whatever form that is) to further validate solutions and directions.
- What you’ve already got: Research and interview skills.
- What you might need upskilling in: Putting together research and presenting it in boardroom-ready formats.
- What you might want to sharpen: Facilitation techniques to help mine information from subject matter experts and encourage collaboration.
An instinct for a good story
Finally, and perhaps the most difficult to explain, writers just have an instinct for things. Whether it’s how users will respond or trends in the market — there is something about writing and publishing that trains you for this kind of instinct.
In product, it’s about validating an idea or hypothesis with users and then iterating. Failure is encouraged (provided you are truly working with agility) because it’s assumed that the new product or feature isn’t perfect but will continuously improve based on feedback. However, I still believe there is a place for instinct — not to the point of assuming yourself to be the user but following your gut when you don't have the luxury of user research or testing.
The beauty of ‘following your nose’ in a product context is that you can start with that instinct and test it. And if you miss the mark then hopefully it will only go towards the general improvement of your product.
