Are you secretly a Product Manager ?
Are you :
In your late 20s/early 30s ?
Worn more than a couple hats in a corporate or startup environment ?
Constantly looking for new skills to learn in order to boost your credibility and effectiveness
A person who always asks for extra Guac.
Have an eye for design
Lurvvvvv Technology
Find yourself frustrated with an app or website, thinking “ There has to be a better way”
If you nodded yes for all the above. Then its definitely possible that:
Nope, sorry your not a wizard. But very possibly a proactive professional wearing a Product Manager suit underneath.
So what is a Product Manager (PM)?
A quick google search would tell you that PMs are mini CEOs, work at the intersection of Business,Tech and User experience or some crap. Although these definitions are true. Put simply, A PM is a customer champion. Who truly empathizes with the customer, understands their pain points and works with almost every department in the company to make the experience of the customer a llloottttt better. Keeping in mind the overall goal of the company which could be revenue or growth. It is the PM’s Job to derive the most value from the product.
Wait a minute….Isn’t that the job of the CEO ?
Most CEOs/Founders of smaller companies do start out as the acting PM, but move on to other functions such as raising funds or company re-structuring. Then they hire a PM to take over and hire multiple more if they have a suite of products.
Now for the serious stuff
Some very notable people like Sundar Pichai (CEO Google) and Stewart Butterfield (CEO Slack) started out as PMs. PMs have the super power of having a macro view of the entire company and complete understanding of customer behavior and trends. These attributes make them very strong candidates for the CEO position. Its pretty important for PMs to follow trends in marketing, be tech savy and obssesed with user behaviour. These can be learnt. The most important attribute of a good PM is to be really empathetic towards their customer and know how to work across many teams.
We’ve all seen this float around on the internet.
So as you can see it takes a good PM to streamline these efforts. To deliver a quality experince. Some of the best companies like Spotify or Amazon have.
But wait, dont I need to know how to code, have an MBA or know how to sous vide a steak perfectly?
Nope, nope and maybe.
Most PMs leave the coding for the engineers. They are the experts, it is important however to be tech savvy and speak the lingo in order to better communicate with your engineers. It’s not a “Need to have” its a “Nice to have”. There are great PMs out there that have a MBA, but it doesnt take a MBA to make a great PM.
So what can I do about it ?
The internet is full of rich information on Product Managers, but the best way to learn about what they do, is by actually talking to one. Reach out to people in your network and see if they can connect you with a PM. The PM community is incredibly helpful and ready to answer any queries you may have.
What got you interested in the Product Manager Role ?
As the E-Commerce operations head for Viveks.com, I found my self interacting a lot with marketing, operations, accounting, vendors and mainly with website engineers. Over night I had to figure out things like how to create product road maps, figure out which plug-in increases conversion or how to reduce bounce rates. Although scrambling overnight on the internet to figure out these problems has helped. I needed to bring clarity to all this madness. Bring a systematic method to prioritize the needs of the customer, the company, work effectively with engineers and have a long term vision for the website.
Product management swooped in like a tall glass of water after a night of beers with the boys. After a bit of snooping. I enrolled in Product School. I chose Product School as the lead instructor is always a Senior Product Manager at a big company. I wanted to know how they solve problems on day to day basis. On day 1 I found out that most of my class mates were in similar situations. Then I knew I was in the right place.
Onward and upward !
Although you may speak like a PM and associate alot with one. Established PMs today have a lot of experience and skills under the hood. Its important to access one’s self and find the gaps. We are lucky that resources today are only a click away. So look below and click away :)
Blogs
Books
Courses
Should I share more about my transition into a PM? Reach out and let me know :)