The product manager role and assessing your product-management intelligence
Choosing the product manager role can be compared to landing with a parachute in an unknown land. Each person lands at a different point on the ground. As with any unknown landing, you have to quickly find your place in the new environment. As you start to navigate, you may become afraid and get lost in this unknown territory.
If you do not meet all the expectations placed on you, you will be steered by other people’s immediate demands and by the lack of a suitable framework for what is asked of you, and if you do not have enough knowledge about this field, other people will create this field for you.
The good feelings you had about your new role as a product manager may quickly disappear, and you may go back to the previous state in which you were working. You accepted this new job in the first place because you imagined yourself as a product manager who manages and steers a product to success in the most desirable markets. If you cannot reach that success, you will feel unsuccessful.
You are not alone. My research shows that a high percentage of product managers become disappointed within a few months of starting a new job. The main reasons are:
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Organizational obstacles they do not know how to remove.
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Inability to set a path because strategies were out of their reach.
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Lack of knowledge about the product or the market.
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Doing work that is very project-based and task-based.
What adds to the weight of this responsibility is the amount of knowledge bosses have high expectations of. At times, regardless of how much time they have put in and how hard they have worked to reach the goal, they feel unable to meet these expectations.
This chapter provides the essential ground for you so you can understand the product manager role, how to assess your “product management,” and how to start or continue your journey as a professional product manager. In this chapter I will help you speed up your socialization in the company or your new role as a product manager.
Your starting point depends on several factors. The most important thing is that you identify and assess who you are and where you stand so you can calibrate your view and the view of the people you will work with. With that in mind, I categorize you in the three forms below:
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You are a new product manager who is entering a new organization as a new employee or from another job (for example, a marketing analyst, a UX designer, an engineer, or another role) and from there have moved into product management.
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You are already a product manager who wants to apply your skills.
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You are a product owner, business analyst, or someone in a similar role and you want to become a product manager or take on more product manager responsibilities.
No matter how you arrived at your role, the important point is that you must be able to understand the path you are on so you can more easily map the path ahead with a targeted professional-development strategy.
The journey you are about to start in the product manager role
Business and military strategists always try to understand the landscape of the battlefield so they can get the big picture and carry out their mission. That way they can set their goals and milestones. They use their battle map as a way to determine a strategic position for their resources and deploy them to claim victory.
At the beginning of this chapter I used a metaphor that product managers parachute into the open space of their own organization. If you land in that field and are attacked from every side (meetings, stand-ups[1], action items[2], or endless emails), you may become a captive of other people’s needs in your organization without even knowing it. Obviously that situation is undesirable and unproductive. You need to be aware of the components that are used for promoted product managers. I have described most of the attributes as part of learning your way, and that is where self-assessment comes in.
It is completely natural for us to perceive ourselves in a particular way. However, if our perception and beliefs do not match reality, a challenge arises. That is why a good self-assessment gives you a rich, data-based information foundation from which you can chart your next move and stay ahead of the curve. When you can draw an accurate portrait of yourself from the start, you will be in a position where you can make changes by advancing and improving your game.
Conclusion
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As you start or fine-tune your strategic plan as a product manager, it is important to become familiar with how others understand the product manager role, the prevailing culture, and other dimensions of how your company operates. As you will learn, people who work in different departments have a wide range of experiences working with product managers. Some are positive. Some are not. What matters is that you learn about these people’s core understanding so you can find out how to influence, interact, and ultimately collaborate effectively.
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Assessing product-management insight does not cover the full territory of attributes. It is a starting point. As you deepen your experience and widen your views, you may want to expand the list based on the situations you faced and what you learned about those situations.
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The SWOT analysis shown in this chapter is an excellent tool to help you set learning and development goals. It is a good idea to look at it every three months and review it with your manager. The benefit for you is that you focus on your personal development, stay alert to new opportunities, and show your boss that you are serious about your career and professional progress.
This was part of The Product Manager’s Survival Guide. To buy this book, go to the shop.