How To Pivot Into Product Management
If you are an aspiring product manager, I wrote this piece for you
By now, my assumption is that you have given your pivot into product management some thought, and have even began the career transition.
In February 2010, I was in your shoes. I spent sleepless nights digging into hundreds of product management blogs and resources.
Why Product Management?
Was I aware it was called product management?
The year is 2005, my 1st year in college as a Computer Science Major and I had always wondered how stuff worked. From hatch-backed computers, to how Facebook, Flikr, Hi5 got millions of eyes. My head asked probing questions-
Who’s leading these teams?
How do they know what to design next?
What’s the next launch plan?
How did they figure what users liked?
I began to dig through sites like YouTube, SourceForge, and blogs, searching for any leads to guide me home. I was searching for resources that would expose the logic to handling all the moving parts involved in shipping these products to end users like me.
I found a few skeletal leads. In 2005, not a lot of founders knew they were product managers. They barely chronicled, documented or even shared their creation journey, as their northstar (goal, target, key KPI) was to get the product across to as many users as possible, get feedback, and continue to iterate.
Next step was to get into the mind of the developers. Enters SourceForge — Like a full 40hour work week job, I majorly used SourceForge to extract and (legally) download thousand of website source-code, host them locally on my 17inch Packard-Bell PC running Windows Vista, to foray the design perspective of the founder/developer and spent very long hours interacting with the products.
This gave me the best shot at understanding design principles, the philosophies behind early stage design, feedback collection, customer usage, iterations, north stars, metrics and several logic that centered any product.
For those on this journey, here’s a few questions to answer (Feel free to respond in the comment section):
a. Without taking a cursory Google search- What does product management mean to you?
b. Do you ever wish you were in charge to decide the direction of those favorite services you love to use?
c. If you could, how likely are you to build a feature shelf for your favorite Apps.
d. Who do you love the most, your customer or your shiny App?
Fast track to 2nd year, I had journeyed into Microsoft products, XP, Vista, Active directory, networking and other new technologies. I had written over 20 of those certifications whilst in college, just for knowledge sake. The idea was to dive deep enough to predict the future of these technologies and where they were headed, hence I moved quite swiftly with the times.
With every new product I could lay my hands on, I would naturally critique them based on- the amount of time it took me to login, good/bad user experience and generally how I perceived the product or service. This was meant for my use only. Between 2005–2009, I had critiqued over 30 products from dating apps, to enterprise services, to productivity tools, peer-to-peer services and co. I just had fun doing it.
BIG SURPRISE!
I pivoted from product management (or so I thought) in my final year and took on web development in PHP/C# stacks. Biggest influence to this, was my quite consuming final year dissertation. This led me to explore a different aspect to design thinking from a developer perspective. Applying my dev. know-how and with the help of an old friend, I built 2 websites that drove 200,000+ unique visitors and also co-founded a successful certification training startup that trained over 200 students in its first 4 months. That startup died anyway :( .
I found my way back to the customer-centric side of things when I realized too much of my design principles as a developer was based on how I wanted the subscribers to interface with the products. That made me really guilty and I reverted to my old normal.
Anyone pivoting into product management must be ready to think like the customer 99% of the time- popularly referred to as empathy.
Here are some lessons I believe every product manager should learn from my journey:
- Develop a product mindset for everything you do — Life is a product and everyday is an iteration. Every time you encounter a glitch in an app, gradually critique them and cohesively maintain that list.
- You will need to write a lot. Product Managers do a lot of writing — from user requirements, to user stories, road maps, empathy maps and co. Writing is a great excuse to read.
- You do not need to learn to learn a programming language — Based on my experience, I personally recommend that you learn basic SQL.
- You must be open to learning widely about how products work and keeping abreast of how designs, data and market trends to understand how everything connects and enables one another.
Please know that I am happy to read your replies with any questions you may have. I would be responding to them as well.
See you on the next post.
Salem.
