Introduction to Product Management
The highest influx of questions I receive is around a career in product management. From students to my peers from b-school; from designers to sales folks — everyone is intrigued to learn more. In complete honesty I was in the same shoes a few years back, hence I genuinely admire the passion for each reach-out I receive. Following blog is a summary of all the things I have learnt. I hope it helps all aspirants and incumbents with a different perspective on how to approach their career towards it.
PMing is the “in-thing”. It is a wonderful opportunity — it allows you to build, sell, express yourself, take ownership, work alongside smartest people, on the hardest problems. But by any stretch of imagination, it is not the “be-all, end-all” role that existing practitioners would make you believe!
More as you read along.
Product Management — a brief history of time
Product Management is not new. The terminology is. Ever since industrial revolution, products have existed. And so have managers who decide what the product should look like, GTM, price, so on. Thus, product management is as old as the history of products itself. Only that, as product families get mature the role gets unbundled into respective functions across — R&D, manufacturing, design, sales and marketing. Only when we understand the history, can we put the current trend in perspective.
For the rest of the blog, will narrow the focus towards a tech PM (or a PM in a tech company). It is important to understand, like erstwhile PMs in automobiles, retail, infrastructure, this role is also under evolution. Following would be my summary to build a long term career in tech.
A. User Empathy: Understanding people is a skill. Understanding that same people behave differently under different contexts is a power. Unwavering focus on building what user wants is a super power. Having user empathy and translating them into products that users love also requires problem solving, storytelling, & program management. However, it is important to not confuse the trees for the forest. Truly exceptional products across all industries are borne out of love. A unique and undying love to create magic is a common theme across all great product managers I have learnt from. While problem-solving, analytical thinking, storytelling are critical skills, please do remember after a level, they will stop being differentiators. Your own unique way of understanding users and making elegant, simple products that people will love is the only thing that would stand out. Simplifying products and understanding people are life-long investments.
Pause for an important note: Strategy, business, management are secondary skills. Only two primary skills are selling and building.
Selling well is user empathy. And with user empathy as the bedrock, building consists of the following three hard skills.
B. Design: Design involves graphics, user interfaces, user interactions, colors, copy, flows and most importantly feels. Typical design team may consist of designers (UI, UX or both), and researchers. Design is the language through which humans experience the product. Design is not just aesthetics, but it is a deep excavation in the human mind, triggering senses that the user themselves are unable to explain. Design is reverse engineering the human emotions, and triggering them at will via product. Learn design by reading on design philosophy/ psychology, following great teams/ individuals, deconstructing great products you love and most importantly practicing.
C. Development: Engineering is not just code, but a complete stack of technology. Architecture (e.g. monolith vs API), language (Node vs Java), Environment (Native vs React), Databases — each are choices. Engineering teams consists of front end engineers, back-end engineers, architects, infra/ platform and testing teams. For context, just front end is manifested very differently across android, iOS, and web interfaces. If engineering is a hindrance in your product management journey, start by learning. And do not worry, it was the same for me. Learn engineering by watching youtube videos, taking online courses, learning from a friend/ colleague, coding basic APIs, and best if you learn no/low code tools. Understand your developers better professionally (what they do) and personally (why they do). Winning the respect of your devs is the highest RoI activity a PM can do. Great thread on building relations with devs here
D. Data: Only area of product development I was relatively comfortable with thanks to my long lineage in analytics. I can go endlessly. By data I mean the entire spectrum of:
- Tools: Excel →SQL →Python
- Techniques: Co-relation →Regression →Neural Networks
- Complexity: business analytics →data analytics →data science.
Data teams consist of data engineers, analysts and scientists. Data grounds all product managers to promise lands they promised. Data is needed for building hypotheses, doing A/B tests, surfacing users insights, and creating delightful user experiences (think TikTok recommendations). Understanding data well makes you efficient and sharper with decisions. But they can also be a crutch if you are just beholden to just data for decision making
In my dictionary, great PMs excel at user empathy, and are proficient in at least one hard skill, and are conversant on all dimensions. If you are neither conversant in any of the above, no stress — always a good time to start.
If you are an existing and young PM, I would advise you to continue building further proficiency in data, design and engineering. In the long evolution, there will be no generalist PM, it is a short term bug. The future will belong to the specialists. No sooner do designers start appreciating data, or engineers taking interest in talking to stakeholders, or data scientists wanting to write PRDs, market value for generalists will start tanking. The coolest companies of the future will not hire us off b-schools. Do not believe me → Ask folks in the valley what is harder getting into FAANG or the hottest series C company?
Finally, if you are a designer, engineer or data scientist that believes product management is a redundant layer, you are not completely wrong! But PMs do provide a very important function. They make decisions, and each time they do, they risk their neck on the line. It is this virtue that makes them so lovely!
Always open to discussing more on product management. Reachable at sachin@probo.in.