From How? to What and Why?
Early July this year, I completed a year in the field of product management at Flipkart. I have always been a curious individual and moving into product management has only rewarded that behavior. That curiosity, along with the lockdown has increased my content consumption for all sorts of articles/documentaries/blogs/videos to its peak and I realized its high time I start creating some content to balance it.
So after procrastinating for 2 months, I finally started writing this blog post with “The Social Network” OST in the background to catalyze the process of typing my not so fluent thoughts.
To be honest to myself, I was an above-average engineer and I used to like writing code (Still do!). As a matter of fact, I was one of those developers who would try to follow the best design practices, micro-service architecture, and all the philosophies that exist in an ideal world like KISS (Keep it Simple Silly!), DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself!), the goal of 100% unit test coverage and even nice documentation.
But why I loved coding had very little to do with these intricacies or complexities. For me, It was probably the easiest way to be able to “create something”. I remember how I used to run queries on the production server (Don’t judge me! I did use Slave) just to gain insights to know if the user is using the product the way it is supposed to be used, how many new users started using my feature, are they dropping out after some steps. I would try to talk to my peers and stakeholders and say “Oh, why are you still doing this! This can be self-serve” and then try to build something which will help them. It didn’t take me long to realize that who was doing these things for the very product I was building. Hence the idea to move into the field of Product Management came somewhat organically to me.
Though like any hypothesis, this had to be validated and like any other human, I googled! I found a lot of articles about the glorification of product management as a career choice and all the hardships one might face as a product manager. How you act as a mini-CEO of the product, how you are responsible for making the product successful no matter what, how you should be at the front when the product fails and how you should put the team in the front when the product succeeds. And all I could do was ask myself: “Is Dhoni a Product Manager then? 🤔”
It took me 6 months to convince myself whether this role was carved out for me and whether I was carved out for this role. And once I was convinced, it took 6 days for the leaders at Flipkart to find out a way that would make such a transition for me possible.
In this post, I want to focus a lot more on those 6 months. These days transitioning into a product manager role has been made a lot easier with programs like APM, internal job switches, etc. Also in the end isn’t this the essence of product management right? validating what(s) and the why(s) before implementing the solution.
So here are some key tips I would like to give any engineer who is contemplating a move to product management.
Research (but with a pinch of salt)
The internet is flooded with articles as to why product management is one of the sexiest jobs in the universe, how a product manager is a superhuman who is behind every great launch, how should an ideal product manager be, what an ideal day of a product manager’s life looks like and so on. On the other side, you might also see articles saying how you are accountable for the product failure if anything goes wrong, how stressful it can be, etc.
While they will have at least some truth inside them, I would suggest consuming them with a pinch of salt. By now you might have already seen the Venn diagram (find some even more interesting Venn diagrams about product management here) as to how a product manager sits at the intersection of UX, Tech, and Business. Little do they tell you that these three functions have far more complicated Venn diagrams themselves. So I would say research with the objective of broadening your horizon and not trying to narrow it down to something.
To start with, you can find a great bunch of curated resources here
Lastly, regarding the theory of an ideal product manager, his ideal day, and so on. I believe an ideal product manager is like an engineer who swears by doing test-driven development, whose code is devoid of any bugs, all his first builds are successful and his code has never thrown a null pointer exception. In short, he is an illusion but that doesn’t and shouldn’t stop you from working towards that.
Network
Talk to people, especially other product managers. Initiate conversations. While the so-called “developer cocoon” might prevent you from that, it is probably the first thing you will have to unlearn if you are to make such a move.
This is also an opportunity to hone the art of “asking the right questions”. Try to know about their aspirations, how their own transition was, what does their work looks like, what do they like about it, what they don’t, etc. Talk to PMs from different backgrounds, different levels of experience, and most importantly who are handling different types of products.
Trust me, if you do it right, you will hear a lot of diverse stories. For me, this was a point where I realized how product management roles do not have a fixed set of boundaries and expectations and the title is more of a namesake. It’s what you are going to do that will matter.
Build Curiosity
As simple as this might sound, this will eventually form the base of your product thinking and design thinking. Develop a keen eye for the products and services that you use, the headphone you listen to songs on, the mobile application you use to pay your bills, the backpack you carry your stuff in. Think about how can you make them better. More importantly, try to think why would you want to improve that, which user need are you trying to address, and if you improve that what can be potential ways to measure the success of those improvements.
While you are at developing a general curiosity, also try to internalize and formalize this thought process. You can also try reading case studies and taking up courses that abound now to build a more structured approach towards this.
Build Products
This is one thing I regret not doing enough before making my move. Learning things is one thing and building a product is a different story altogether. Till now no matter if you are an engineer, an analyst, or any other individual contributor, chances are, your responsibilities will be highly prescriptive in nature.
Any type of product management will involve defining problem statements, defining MVP, stakeholder management, and various other skills which can be only learned by getting your hands dirty.
The most effective way of doing that might be to talk to some product manager who can mentor you on some tasks of his own product. This might be an easy or a difficult thing depending on your network and circumstances.
Besides this, I would highly suggest you build your own product. It might be a small chrome extension, an android app, or something else. But the key is to not just build it but to hustle for it, get the customers for it, define the best experience for it, make it more user-friendly, and taking it to the next stage. This will not only help you learn some of the most essentials skills but also demonstrate a sense of commitment which will help you make a stronger case for yourself for the role of a PM.
Don’t Fret
Your career, your work will occupy a big part of your life. Moving into a different role is a process of exploring and re-inventing yourself. It’s okay to dip your toes before you dive in, it’s okay to take time and make the move when you feel ready. Everyone will have a different career trajectory and everyone runs on a different clock. And considering moving from engineering to product management, it will never be too early and never too late. So enjoy the process of building yourself for your next role.
To summarise, if you plan to move to product management, you are going to spend a lot of time defining the what and why of your initiatives. This exploration phase right before you decide to move is nothing less than an opportunity to treat yourself like a product and start asking the right questions. Trying to find answers to these questions will also prepare you for the challenges you are definitely going to face as a first-time product manager. But that’s a story for another day.
-vh!
I hope this helps some budding minds to find the right direction for them. If you want to connect with me to discuss anything in detail you can reach out on https://bit.ly/34mPJFt
