The modern career isn’t a ladder, it’s a video game. I liken it to The Legend of Zelda.
You begin the game with a wooden sword (undeveloped hard skills), a tiny shield (basic soft skills), and you wander around the forest until you find clues to advance to the next level. The only thing on your side is that you have full health (you’re young). Sometimes you die (get fired). But you always get the chance to play again.
On this journey you may decide that you want to keep going down the first functional area that you start in, but I think that’s wishful thinking. You will probably wear many different hats during your career.
Product managers come in all shapes and sizes, but they usually build their knowledge in one of three functional groups: UX, marketing, and business. Each of these areas impart unique knowledge to the would-be product manager.
User Experience to Product Management
“I’m tired of researching and designing, only to have my work go unused. I want to make executive decisions about what goes live to our users.”
– Despondent UXer
I have witnessed many UXers (including myself) get burned out from endlessly researching and sketching things that ultimately never see the light of day. Practitioners of this skillset work in the ideal world. They are Platonists at heart.
But what happens when you delete that 100th Miro board? When do you sit down to reflect on a prolific career—prolific only on paper? You may come to an inflection point where you decide that your best skills are to be used in taking what the UX team dreams up—the big, bold, future-oriented ideas—and rationalizing it, practicalizing it, and making it palatable to an audience the tie-wearing bureaucrats who have the power to kill your project’s funding. Making it real. Less Plato, more Aristotle.
Yet, the UXer is not perfect. He or she may lack subject matter expertise and fail to understand how the business makes money. Sure, it’s possible to design the best user experience, but what about the business? UXers tend to ignore business goals at the cost of the user. Their idealism places them at odds with the realities of how companies make money. UXers need to let these feelings go.
UX people who move to product management have a huge advantage because they are process-oriented and design-oriented professionals who have the skillset to lead an experiential vision in their products. They bring the ideas to life through compelling images, sketches, and prototypes. They speak the language of the customer and build solutions around them. Moving to product management allows them to translate their design skills into a pragmatic, execution-based philosophy that will pay dividends.
Strengths of UXers:
- Experts in researching and synthesizing large quantities of information
- Can quickly sketch wireframes and build prototypes
- Strong eye for design and aesthetics
- Skilled at developing user-centric solutions
- Know how to talk to users and build personas
Weaknesses of UXers:
- Often lacks subject matter expertise and domain knowledge
- Usually don’t understand the intricacies of how the business makes money
- Usually lacks competitive business research and ignores business trends
- May be familiar with technical and implementation side of things
- Insulated from organizational and political headwinds
Marketing to Product Management
“I’m tired of selling the steak and not the sizzle. I know enough about our customers to build products they are going to want to buy.”
– Grizzled Marketer
Marketing is a very broad field which has been the subject of ridicule, angst, and denigration by the public at large. I believe most of this stems from the supplanting of “sales” with “marketing” in activities that clearly are sales. Dear telemarketers: you are really in telesales. Multi-level marketing organizations are really sales organizations. Companies that pay college kids to sell knives door to door? Not marketing.
When I say marketing, I’m talking about the very focused business goal of attempting to understand what your customers want and identifying ways to satisfy it. The 4 P’s of marketing—product, price, place, promotion—are a good start to that discussion. It’s no surprise that in some organizations, product and UX fall under a marketing organization.
Here’s a test. To attribute Jim Foxworthy’s comedy:
- If you report on “attribution” … you might be a marketer.
- If you analyze a “campaign” … you might be a marketer.
- If you regularly use the word “revolutionary” (and you don’t own a musket) … you might be a marketer.
The problem with marketing, in my view, is that it aims to get people to respond to specific stimuli, whether it’s a paper mailer, email, TV, videos, or social media. That response is used to drive specific business goals, such as lead generation. This gets customers into the sales funnel, and you make a conversion. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I have found that technically minded people may get bored in marketing because it often does not address the underlying problem of the customer. It’s getting the horses to walk to the water (and drink it). No easy feat.
Marketers themselves come from a wide swath of experience. Generally, they may not be familiar with agile or modern software development practices that product managers need to know. They also may lack technical aptitude regarding front-end and back-end web systems. They may lack design skills due to their outsourcing of this work to specialists on their teams.
Yet, the weaknesses of marketers are outshined by their strengths. Marketers are usually skilled communicators who know how to put new ideas into action, a highly praised skill in product management. The very best of them are visionaries who can react to trends in the marketplace. Since they spend their careers monitoring group psychology and trends, they are better suited to identify what products consumers want to buy. They have an analytical side and are usually comfortable writing and reading reports, and generally understand how the business makes money. On balance, marketing is a great field from which to springboard into product management.
Strengths of Marketers:
- Highly skilled communicators who know how to position new ideas
- Receptive to market trends
- Usually acquainted with basic business concepts
- Can run an effective campaign and provide analysis
- Know customer segments inside and out
Weaknesses of Marketers
- May not be familiar with agile process
- Lacks technology and implementation knowledge
- Limited technical aptitude and vocabulary
- May find the rapidity of the design process uncomfortable
- May lack design skills
Business to Product Management
“I want more responsibility at my company. I have enough understanding of the technical aspects of the business to lead product development.”
– Flustered BA
When I reference the “business” side of the business, I’m talking about people who spend their days immersed in financial reporting, managing P&L, handling the minutiae of business processes, resolving technical issues, and analyzing problems. Business analysts are the first people to come to mind, but they are not the only people who can migrate to product management. Business-oriented people can make excellent technical product managers because they have a very detailed understanding of not only how the company makes money, but how the systems are designed.
However, business analysts who migrate to product management will need to augment their strong analytical skills with a robust UX and design team because they likely don’t have the design chops needed to explain themselves visually. BAs may even be ambivalent toward good design. Moreover, they may lack creativity in problem solving because their jobs are focused more on deductive, rather than inductive, reasoning. This has the potential to make them drive towards user problems to clinically and distantly, where they lack marketing understanding and how to sell effectively.
Yet, a clever BA can supplement all of these weaknesses as long as he or she remains aware of them. They are typically expert communicators who know how to get to the point of the matter; I have witness extremely talented BAs diagnose and fix the most vexing technical problems we have ever encountered. A talented BA is someone you want on your team. Furthermore, BAs are usually organized and methodical. These are the people with 50 tabs in their spreadsheets who can uncover every possible permutation of an outcome. They often come with business expertise and can tackle the details of any given problem. Their overall competence and subject matter expertise can give them an excellent foundation to be product managers.
Strengths of BAs:
- Expert communicators who get to the point
- Organized and methodological
- Can document, diagnose, and uncover a myriad of issues
- High technical and business understanding
- Comfortable with detail-oriented tasks and responsibilities
Weaknesses of BAs:
- May lack creativity in problem solving; too deductive
- May approach user problems too clinically
- Limited understanding of marketing principles
- Not trained in big-picture strategic thinking
- Likely ambivalent toward design and aesthetics
None of the Above?
I get it, many of you interested in product management may not have any of these backgrounds. That’s okay; you too can break into the field. You may be coming from a technical or non-technical background. You may be a software developer or a customer service representative. You may not know where to start. I have a few ideas for you:
- Get close to websites. Websites are an interesting convergence of visual and technical fields where you can inch your way into understanding larger issues of technology by asking simple questions. Why is this design just so? What is an API? What is a front-end? How do users log in? Because everyone is using them, virtually all the time, it’s a great segue for you to get exposure to technical issues. Talk to a developer. Heck, you can even right click “inspect element” in Chrome and click around. You may be surprised what you discover.
- Learn the lingo. Part of the respect you must earn will come from your ability to speak the same language as your peers. Like any field, there are certain terms of art that continually resurface in conversation. If you were joining the military, I’d tell you to learn its alphabet soup of acronyms. Product management, especially agile product ownership, seems to reinforce terms like: agile, value delivery, customer proposition, transformation, acceptance criteria, definition of done, A/B testing, prototyping, backlog, competitive intelligence, story, epic, feature creep, ideation, Kanban, KPIs, MVP, OKRs, personas, roadmaps, retros, scrum, story mapping, and wireframes. This is just a start.
- Make friends. Many product managers are just like you. They started nowhere and got somewhere. Talk to them.
So you want to become a product manager? Product managers come from many different disciplines, but they usually build their knowledge in one of three functional groups: UX, marketing, and business. Each of these areas impart unique knowledge to the would-be product manager. Learn to use this knowledge to your advantage as you navigate a career move into product management.
