Product Management — all roads can indeed lead to Rome
If one has these five qualities
Every two weeks, all Product Managers in my team hold a meeting to catch up. One of the agenda items is to share a personal learning or an anecdote with the whole team
Today, as I pondered over what I could share that would be relevant for other PMs, I realized that every product manager in my team has had a different path to their current role. Looking at many others in my network who are now working as PMs, I see a kaleidoscope of experiences before they all became Product Managers. One of them is a music major, and another a former consultant at McKinsey. But, are there any common traits they all have? The answer is yes.
I started my own career as a software developer at Oracle. I then moved to product management at a startup in India, before joining business school. Now, since then, I have completed my MBA and have been a Product Manager for around two years since graduating, back at Oracle. During this time, I have learned that, first and foremost, my job is about understanding the solution that a product provides. Professor Amir Goldberg and Professor Rob Siegel at Stanford University Graduate School of Business gave a great example to illustrate this in their Strategies of Effective Product Management class. This is an example from Clay Christensen’s Jobs To Be Done framework
“Think of a ladder”, they’d say. “When buying a ladder, is the customer paying for a contraption made of wood and rope? Or is he or she paying for access to their roof?”
This example has stayed with me since then. It shows that as a PM, one needs to focus on the solution that one is providing, from a human perspective. Many PMs call these solutions use cases.
Talking to many of the other PMs in my network, one common thread that I can see across all of them is that they understand the product and the technology they’re working with really well and they don’t mind seeking help to enhance their understanding. Although being a former engineer has helped me understand what is possible and pick the ‘low hanging fruit’ when making a product roadmap, regular one-on-ones with the engineers and the design teams have been vital. The colleague with a music major meets up with our engineers a lot more than I do, and he is one of the best PMs I have worked with.
Another common thread across all of them is that they all understand others’ ‘feelings’ really well. In other words, they all are empathetic people. But empathy as a ‘requirement’ is quite well known by now. There is one final quality that they all share, that is probably the most important if one wants to be a good PM.
One of the first steps that you normally take as a PM when working on a new product is to understand what exactly you’re addressing. You might be addressing an existing problem or you might be improving the lives of your users, but you need to thoroughly understand it, and you need to verify whether your customers would be willing to pay for it. Once you have done research on what you’re addressing and how you plan to solve that problem, comes the most important step, that is, to simplify
Simplifying ideas and thoughts from multiple sources and coming up with an actionable, and logical, set of next steps is key to be a good PM. Your engineering team, although would be interested in who they are building for and why, what they care the most about is what they should be building.
Overall, if a person thinks in terms of use cases, understands the product, is willing to seek help to build up on that understanding, has empathy and can simplify a whole lot of ideas into a simple set of logical next steps, that person can manage a product.
