ISSUE #3 - MARCH 1, 2022

Breaking into product management

How can someone become a product manager? Is a software engineering background necessary? What are the fundamental skills that make a great product manager? How to get some product management experience if you have never worked in the field? Find the answers to the above questions in this post!

Product management is a relatively new craft as we know it today, in the sense that it has been around for only a couple of decades. Although there are many online resources around this subject, there is not a university degree for product management. I have observed in various settings, such as during lunch talk with colleagues, or during Q&A sessions in conferences the following: The question “how can someone become a product manager” comes up frequently. It is usually followed by questions, such as “do you need to have a software engineering background” or other questions similar in nature.

The goal of this article is threefold:

Sort out those questions.
Describe the fundamental skills that will make a great product manager.
Recommend ways that can help people with no experience in product management familiarize themselves with the craft, acquire some experience and ultimately land their first job.

How can someone become a product manager? Is a software engineering background necessary?

To begin with, let’s take this elephant out of the room. A simplistic definition about the role of the product manager: The person that identifies the users’ problems and its main objective is to come up with the solutions to those problems. Those solutions are the product. So, no, an engineering background is not at all necessary if you want to become a product manager. Being a great product manager is not about your background, but about the skillset (we will talk about it in the next section). I have seen exceptional product managers with backgrounds completely irrelevant with software engineering. Their backgrounds were teaching, physics, you name it.

Having said that, your background might be helpful in certain cases. For example, an engineering background might be very valuable in deep tech products, as it might allow you to familiarize yourself faster with the product and certain complexities. The same way a marketing background could prove to be useful in case the product you are working on is related to that space. But in no way the background is a prerequisite for the job.

Actually, I have seen the background working as an obstacle in some cases. For example, it is a common pitfall that folks with engineering background are getting carried away and instead of focusing on what is the right solution to their users problems, they are trying to dictate how the solution is going to be built, simply because this is what they are more familiar with. Obviously, this is something that can create great friction within the team, not to mention that this is not the job of the product manager.

Fundamental skills that make a great product manager

There is a combination of soft and hard skills that are extremely important to be mastered, if someone wants to become a great product manager. At the beginning of your career in this field, it is far more important to examine if you possess the set of soft skills necessary. The reason behind it is that developing soft skills is way harder than developing hard skills. Hard skills can be acquired with courses or by practice. In contrast, soft skills can be extremely hard to develop, as they might be contradicting one’s character.

Below, I am writing down the skillset that, in my opinion, will prove to be invaluable at the beginning of a product manager’s career and they should be used as a foundation to build on:

Hard Skills

Depending on the career stage that you are at, there is a different set of skills that are more important. At the beginning of your career as a product manager, the most important hard skills that you should have are as follows:

Basic Business Competencies

It is very important to be able to understand basic business concepts. Such concepts include: revenues, profits, budgeting, cashflow, P&L. Also, understanding how those interact and affect each other is equally important. After all, this is a business you are working for and the goal is profit.

Reading Numbers

Aside from being able to understand basic business terms, it is equally important to be able to read a set of numbers. Being able to identify anomalies, patterns, correlations or have an understanding of relative quantities is extremely useful and will help you make informed decisions based on data.

Be exceptional in research and analysis

You need to be able to do extensive, world class research in everything. Your market, your users, your competitors. Your data must be enough in quantity and credible in quality, so that you can make the most educated decisions possible.

Writing

This is going to be a big part of your day as a product manager. A great amount of the communication with your team will be happening in writing. From specifications to documentation, your writing will need to be structured, clear and understandable by everyone.

Basic understanding of technical concepts

Although as I said a technical background or writing code is not a requirement, some basic understanding of technical concepts is helpful. It is going to allow you better understand on a high level what is feasible or not, as well as, how your product works. To make this clear, we are not talking about deep tech knowledge. But mostly to be able to understand on a fundamental level things like, what an API is and how it works, what is a database, what we mean with the terms “front-end” and “back-end”, how “front-end” and “back-end” communicate. As long as you just get the above concepts, you are on a good path to be able to communicate well with your engineering peers.

Soft skills

Empathy

As we saw before, being a product manager is all about identifying your users’ problems and figuring out the right solutions to them. As a result, being able to empathize with your users and get yourself in their shoes is a critical part of being a product manager.

Business Acumen

It’s not enough just to be able to understand customer problems or business concepts. You need to be able to find the “fine line” between those two. This is quite tricky, as you must always advocate for your customer, but also you should never forget the business side of things.

Analytical Thinking

This is maybe the the most important soft skill for a product manager. Frequently, you are going to have to deal with vague problems or complex concepts. Being able to break everything down, see every item from different perspectives, analyze them and work through them is necessary.

Communication

Being a great communicator is an essential skill for a product manager. Every day, you are going to be talking with many people of different specialities and seniority levels. Such people could be your users, your peers, your team, senior management. In many of those cases, you’re going to be in a position that you’ll have to say “no” (which is also quite connected with prioritization). It is extremely important to be able to articulate your views in a manner which is understandable by everyone. Every person is different and so should be your approach when interacting with them.

How to get some product management experience if you have never worked in the field?

In my case, breaking into product management happened as a coincidence. When I was looking for my first job, I was mostly applying for growth marketing related positions. Recruiters were frequently asking me if I would be interested in product management, as my background fitted well. However, at that point I had no idea what that meant. Eventually, the company that hired me as a growth marketer, gave me the opportunity and that happened organically. We were a really small team, which meant that no matter what your role was, you would be dealing with various things. One of those things for me, was that I was involved with sales, talking to prospects. That meant that I had a first hand exposure to potential users’ requests and objections. Since product management did not exist as a role in the company back then, I was one of the people that was transferring those insights to the team. Once we processed them, eventually some of them would become part of our product roadmap. Does that remind you of anything?

Long story short, once the company grew, I formally switched to that role and of course I had lots of ground to cover. It took reading (a lot), practicing what I read, asking more experienced people and ultimately making myriads of mistakes until I could feel confident to call myself a “product manager”. Obviously, I fell in love with the craft and pursued that career path since then.

However, not all people are as lucky as I was. So, here are a few things that you can do to get your first experience as a product manager:

Read, read, read

There might not be a university course, however there are tons of resources out there that talk about product management. Read about product management, management frameworks, latest trends in software engineering, psychology. All of those subjects are relevant and are going to help you grow as a product manager. At the end of this post, I am attaching a few of my favourites. The more you read, the more you familiarize yourself with the job. Also, keep in mind that product management is a craft that is constantly evolving. So, get used to reading, as it is a habit that will follow you for the rest of your career.

Create a project of your own

While reading is good, I am a firm believer that there is nothing better than practice. So, go out there and create a project of your own. Something simple and contained. How to do this?

Think of a small problem that you are facing every day. It does not need to be a million dollar idea. Remember, your goal is to gain some experience, not to make money (although that would not be bad). For example, it could be a basic meeting scheduling tool. Or an app that helps you remember where you parked your car (that is a quite frequent headache for me).

Write down the specification about how you want this app to work and behave. Additionally, create the wireframes or designs of how you imagine that this would look like. You may use free tools like Miro, Figma (there is a free plan) or Canva that can help you with this.

See? Up to now, you are half-way there and you have not spent a single penny. Now, you need to get into business. Ask a friend who is a developer to help you build this. You do not have one? No problem, one idea is that you can hire a freelancer to help you with that. You can use tools like Fiverr or Upwork to find one. If your project is indeed really small, it will not cost you much. And if someone tells you that it is too big, then just build only a small part of the functionality. You just made your first trade-off as a product manager by the way.

In any case, jokes aside, the money you are going to spend are really insignificant compared to the experience you are going to gain.

And here are just a few things what you get out of that:

You created a project end to end.

You identified a problem and thought of a solution to it.

You used a couple of tools that you will be using often as a product manager.

You interacted with a software engineer and talked about an idea of yours. You explored ways together on how this can be built. Probably, you also understood that what you think about and communicate as a specification, is not necessarily what the other party perceives.

Bonus: You have a small project to show for your CV, which brings you a bit closer to getting your first interview as a product manager.

All of the above are things that you are going to be dealing with on a daily basis as a product manager.

Look for an entry level product job in a product-led company

Lastly, you should be looking for a junior product job in a product oriented company. Not an agency, not a consulting firm. Not that those companies are bad or anything, but your goal is to familiarize yourself with the full product lifecycle. So, look for positions such as Product Analyst, Associate Product Manager, Junior Product Manager, QA Tester, QA Analyst, or even customer support agent. All those are roles that are close to the users, which mean that offer you a quicker path to product management. But even if you are in a completely different role, that should not discourage you.

If you are already working in a product company, make sure that you inform your employer about your career aspirations and your goal, so that they can also help you in that direction. If they are not happy to help you, then look for a new employer that will be willing to.

This is it. I hope this helps you kick-start your product management journey. Below you can find a list of blogs, reads or resources, that I have found to be very useful: