The Accidental Product Manager
How to find your footing in the exciting world of Product Management
Product managers occupy a strange place in our digital world. Unlike others on a product teams whose specialized skills often take years to develop in a focused and concentrated way, PMs come from all over. Maybe they were once one of these specialists who wanted a more strategic or cross-functional role. Maybe they were former business analysts, project managers, MBAs, or ops people. But for all these ‘maybes’, and no matter how we got here, there is much more in common among PMs than I think people tend to recognize.
Many others have written on what great product managers do, the varying responsibilities of a PM in different types of organizations, and how to play to your strengths depending on your path. That’s not my goal here. My hope is to help you see a connection from wherever you’re coming from to where you want to be.
Attributes of Great Product Managers
Emotionally Intelligent
One reason I enjoy talking with other product managers is that they often are deeply emotionally intelligent. They’re intuitive and analytical, emotional and thoughtful. They’re more AND and less BUT. They’re likely to enjoy facilitating meetings and participating in Product Design/UX work because it connects them to the problem they’re trying to solve and the users they’re trying to delight. They’ve probably dabbled in books and courses on Design Thinking, people analytics, modern management practices, and other elements of the work that are really about managing people more than things.
Related roles, fields, and experience: HR business partners, early-career managers, social work, teaching, improv comedy, drama/theater.
Communication Pros
PMs are likely to have many different tools for effective communication, ranging from storytelling to data visualization to long form writing. Add in some powerpoint, video, spreadsheets, memos, blog posts, and that’s just a small sample of the different kinds of communication formats they have to be masters with. Pair communication with emotional intelligence, and you get strong negotiators too — a skill essential for navigating competing stakeholder, user, and team interests.
Related roles, fields, and experience: fundraising, internal communications, M&A, marketing, social media manager, management consulting, internal communications.
Curious about Human Behavior and Psychology
A recent article I read had a great reading list of books for product managers and a sizeable chunk was dedicated to the space of understanding how we think and behave online and offline. Classics like Thinking Fast and Slow, Hooked, Nudge, Predictably Irrational, and Freakonomics from the realms of behavioral economics/psychology and habit formation are all great. PMs lean toward these books not because they offer directly applicable tactics for creating great products, but because they help us better understand how habits form, how we can engage different aspects’ of people’s heuristics to guide them through a series of choices, and more. Admittedly, this is cautious territory. Like Harari, I’m concerned that we’re not too far off from being able to “hack” human choice too well. But that’s a topic for another time.
Related roles, fields, and experience: social science researchers, behavioral scientists/economics, anthropology, user research, ethnography, psychology, adult learning.
Data-Confident
Maybe this falls in the ‘no duh’ category, but PMs’ confidence with data will become ever more important as exponentially more data flows from applications and the digital ecosystem. Product Managers don’t need to be steeped in quantitative research methods and be able to devise their own quasi-experimental studies, but they often come with solid quant skills and knowledge (even if they’re mostly self-taught).
They need to be able to sit with DBAs and engineers to understand their needs about the data that flows through the applications, ensure there are systems built in to the applications they create to capture useful event data, and crunch a fair amount of it themselves. They need to be able to use data to track the application’s impact and know what questions they can ask of the data (and which they can’t). In short, their data skills need to more broad than deep— they need to be able to use data to communicate, analyze, and make decisions. Not an easy combo and it takes time to develop.
Related roles, fields, and experience: finance, MBA programs, operations, MPA programs, engineering, fundraising ops/analysis.
A Manager’s Mindset
Product Managers don’t just manage the product — they need to be masters of influence, conflict resolution, and are often skilled coaches. While there are certainly plenty of technical areas where PMs need to be strong, they often sink or swim on those that were once considered mere ‘soft skills.’ Research is clear that these skills, especially for those in management-like roles matter perhaps more than anything. Building trust, inspiring, motivating, creating a feeling of inclusion and commitment, are foundational to the success of a product team. And yes, that’s the PM’s responsibility too.
Related roles, fields, and experience: HR business partner, MBA programs, leadership programs, management experience, HR ops.
An Entrepreneur (or Intrapreneur)’s Mindset
At some basic level, many product managers are also entrepreneurial in spirit. Maybe they’re even former founders or people who have started major projects, initiatives, and formed groups around them to accomplish an audacious goal. They have the tenacity to push through challenges, have a sense of responsibility to take one for the team when needed, and can inspire through clarity of vision and mission. Not everyone needs to have a huge appetite for risk, and I think that’s a common misperception. Intra-preneurs can be most successful when they can work within the risk-tolerance bubble of larger organizations. You have to have hustle (and a fair amount of cat-hearding and selling skills too).
Related roles, fields, and experience: founders, sports captains/athletes, initiative-leaders, team-formers, change-agents.
Closing Out
Who is a product manager?
Product Managers come in all shapes and forms and from different places precisely because there’s no one path that can bring all of those attributes into focus. And I think that’s a good thing — I’m encouraged that we are a diverse group (at least in terms of our experience, it’s still a heavily white male field).
As Product Management becomes more popular, better understood, and better taught, I anticipate how people become PMs might look more like it does for product designers, developers, and those with more focused and specialized skills. But maybe not. Precisely because the mix above comes from skills and expertise that can and should be developed across a wide range of experiences and domains, PMs might remain in the specialized-generalist category. These are sometimes referred to as T-shaped people, and that feels pretty spot on to me.
What’s next for our profession?
Growing computing power paired with AI and Machine Learning are transforming how we build apps (e.g. code-free development, AI-generated content and experiences). PMs might just be in a unique position where their range of skills make them a strong partner for whatever automation and AI-human interaction is ahead.
My hope is that you can see yourself in product management from many different domains. It is a qualitative, quantitative, and deeply human endeavor. It is problem solving through discipline, strategy, and creativity while culture- and people-centric in its approach.
