So you want to manage a product?!
Am I the only eager product manager, or are there many eager managers out there? People who are not product managers — consultants, MBA experts, engineers — want to be product managers. If it is true that “everyone” wants to become a product manager, I will not be surprised. This is one of those roles that does not require having many hard skills. To be a product manager, you do not need to know how to create data models. You do not need to know how to code. You do not need to be able to design a website. All of these can help, but they are not required. Unlike being an engineer or a designer, you can wake up one morning as a product manager.
Also, the job looks sweet on paper, and of course it has impressive terms and titles too
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You are the CEO of the horizontal.
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You lead others.
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You are the expert in this industry.
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You decide how the product looks today and in the future.
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You get paid well.
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You are the boss!!
I mean, don’t take this list too seriously. If you are not a product manager, or have not been in deep interaction with someone who is, product management is not what you think it is.
In short: what is product management?
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Being the heart, mind, and voice of the user
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Facilitating cross-functional teamwork
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Creating commercial goods
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Reaching the end goal with fixed time and resources
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Leading people on a product-progress roadmap
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Being positive and practical
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Making hard calls with little information
What product management is not:
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Being the most important voice (going it alone)
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Being the sole idea creator (only ideation)
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Being a designer
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Being a programmer
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QA management
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An SEO expert
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Writing a marketing plan
How do I know what product management is?
I applied to be a product manager at a company. At the time I was a senior in college and was leaving a psychology major. I desperately wanted to go home, and with dissatisfaction, among all jobs, there were only some twelve-person, technology-focused jobs. I was looking for a new job where they would mock me less!
To my surprise, I was offered a rotating product-management assistant role at Intuit, an amazing technology and culture company. To my surprise, because I really did not know what a product manager does, I kept reading and rereading my offer letter. “All I did in those interviews was talk about my feelings. I don’t know how that was enough for them.” That too was surprising, because my thesis was about psychology. The last time I checked, the psychology of language had nothing to do with financial software and product management.
My first product-management role was for QuickBooks. I was responsible for managing our annual beta, and this complete experience amazed me about product management. I understood and learned things that are not in the job description.
Here are four main parameters:
You do not manage a product. You manage the problem you solve!
When I found out I was going to manage QuickBooks, I did not feel good at all. “QuickBooks?” I said mockingly. “This is older than my grandfather!” (This is not actually true, but when you live in Silicon Valley and products are born every second, QuickBooks seems like a grandfather.) I was disappointed that I could not do what a “real” product manager does. “Innovate.” I wanted to manage a product that was young and innovative.
But I was so wrong.
When you start managing a product that has at least one customer, you quickly understand that your job is much larger than even the most complete product. Your job is to understand deeply the problem your product exists to solve, make others understand it, and pursue the main goal of solving every nuance of that problem.
You will always have many feature requests and very little time. Too many problems and too little time. There is always work that must be done. When you have a mature product in which users have built their habits and your company has created various processes, you actually need to be extraordinarily creative so you can successfully live with all your constraints.
Being a product manager means a compromise between what your team can do in a given time window and what your customers need. You are constantly in a highly complex race against time, between the team, customers, and your business. Winning is, in part, in balancing short-term and long-term product strategy, no matter whether your product was designed today or twenty years ago.
Your product is only as good as the user’s understanding of it.
When I ran the beta, I not only emailed testers weekly, I also talked with them on the phone, sometimes spending whole days providing all kinds of technical support. At first, this created a large frustration. Why am I answering problems? I wondered. I am supposed to manage a product!
As I spent more time talking with customers, I learned that what they said “doesn’t work” really did not meet the performance they expected. The customer’s understanding is reality, and it is not easily obtained.
Product managers are neither designers nor engineers!
As part of the process of submitting a new version to the app store, I was told I had to design my sales page. While I was still new, I took my task literally and buried myself in Photoshop layers and color palettes, and very seriously and excitedly I sent the page design to my manager. His response was not as enthusiastic as I expected:
Great. Did our graphic designer design this? I think we should push them more! The color palette has problems!
“Graphic designer!?” “What is he talking about?”
That is how I learned that, especially in a large, healthy company, a product manager does not create visual designs. They also do not write code. Your designer is the design expert. Your engineer is the programming expert. And you, the product manager, know whether the design and its function meet a particular need that the user available to you has.
Product management does not mean being the star of the team, but it is about managing a new world.
On my first day on the QuickBooks team, my manager took me to his office to introduce me to everyone: support, marketing, engineers, design, and finance. This was very interesting to me, but I was more worried about how much time my manager was wasting. I did not know why he did not just start by introducing me to the other product managers. I thought: “I’m sure I can meet the rest of these people later.” More frightening than the very large number of people he introduced me to was the way he did it. He told them: “He is responsible for launching QuickBooks.” I did not know how I could launch this product when I had not even downloaded QuickBooks on my computer.
As the weeks passed, it became clear that I could not release QuickBooks alone, as a single person — exactly unlike releasing pigeons at a graduation ceremony. Instead, my job was to facilitate the right brainstorms and conversations among all the groups I met on my first day so I could reach effective decisions in execution. It was eye-opening and a little calming (only a little). I did not have to find the best idea in the room. I only needed to make sure I had the right people in the room to grow many ideas so I could choose the best of them.
After three years of product management at a large company and a startup, I realized that those feelings I expressed in my first product-management interview — a deep understanding of other human beings, relieving people’s pain in life, writing, field research, finding patterns and trends in data, designing for humans — were exactly what my interviewers were looking for, because that is what it takes for a product manager to succeed.
As a product manager I have had, and still have, my constant worries — feeling stupid when talking with engineers, wishing I could design websites, hating myself for creating technical tasks myself, not knowing whether I am anything but a JIRA writer — but at the end of the day, when I sit there watching a user’s smile while they engage with my product, I know these hardships are worth it.
Being a product manager does not mean wrapping yourself in the fact that you have “manager” in your title. You certainly have to take photos. But you also have to be accountable for all of your products. If a user does not understand your product, it is your fault, not the marketing group’s. If your product came at the wrong time, it is your fault, not strategy’s. If the user cannot find the button, that is on you, not the designer.
And if a user has no use for your product, that is entirely your fault, not theirs.
Author: Rohini Vibha
Source: the productcoalition website