6 pieces of advice for a new product manager from a slightly less new product manager

Nine months ago I started my first full time job, joining LinkedIn’s Associate Product Manager (APM) program. The APM program is rotational, meaning I and the other folks in my cohort rotate across a few teams before joining one full-time.

I recently finished my first rotation, spending nine months on Careers, the team at LinkedIn that helps people get hired. Next up is Content Experience, the team at LinkedIn that helps people start, join, and participate in conversations on the platform through articles, posts, and video in the Feed.

As I ramp up on my new team, I’ve started reflecting on my first full time experience as a product manager (PM), and wondering what advice I’d give to someone starting out as a PM. Then I realized something: general advice usually misses the mark. Sometimes it can even be harmful. Different people need to hear different things at different points in their lives.

So, rather than give general advice, I decided I’d give specific advice to one of the few people I know well enough to give advice to: myself. What would I tell my (much) younger (and far less wise) self? I think I’d say something like this...

Dear Lachlan,

Hello from the future. I’m writing you, as you begin your first rotation, having just finished it. I know unsolicited advice can be annoying, but hopefully you’ll give me a pass since I’m you. Here are 6 things I’d recommend you do (or don’t do).

1. Relax, learn

Right now you’re feeling excited and nervous, but mostly excited. You know how lucky you are to have this job, and can’t wait to begin. That’s great. Enjoy the feeling of starting something new. You’re about to meet some amazing people and learn some fascinating things.

You’ll continue to feel that excitement well into your first rotation. But as is the case for anything shiny and new, that excitement will wane as the novelty wears off. At the same time, those butterflies in the belly will sometimes present themselves as their less fun cousin: anxiousness.

There will be times when you feel overwhelmed. Times when you’ll wonder if you’re smart enough or experienced enough. You’ll wonder if you’re right for the job, and if the job is right for you. You’ll succeed and you'll struggle. Sometimes, when you succeed, you’ll look back at the times you struggled, and feel relief at knowing those times are definitely behind you. Then you'll struggle again. The truth is, you won't ever be completely free of making mistakes or having doubts, at least not in those first nine months. But over time, you will experience them less often and less intensely.

My first piece of advice is to relax, and learn. Accept that you will make mistakes and believe that you will survive them (I am proof you will). Resist comparison and focus on learning. There will be moments when you feel like the world’s greatest product manager, and moments when you feel like the world’s worst. If you can untether your happiness from those feelings, you can save yourself some frenetic highs and painful lows. You’ll also have more headspace to focus on what matters: learning.

2. Move fast, don’t sweat the typos

So you take a lot of pride in your work. You like all the i’s to be dotted and all the t’s to be crossed. You like every argument you make to be deeply considered, and each potential rebuttal to that argument to be preemptively countered. That impulse has served you well so far. In school, you’ve been rewarded for going the extra mile on papers and programming assignments. Well, things are about to change.

Being a good PM, as you’ll soon learn, is mostly not about you or your work. Not really. Now and then you’ll have the opportunity to stand out individually with a great product strategy or phenomenal presentation. But even then, whatever you present will be the product of collaboration. In general, you’ll succeed by helping your team succeed. You’ll win when your team, and your users, win.  

This has lots of important implications. One is that the majority of the work you produce is a means to an end. The specs, decks, and tickets you write are successful only to the extent to which they help your team make progress in helping your users. They don’t matter in and of themselves. Clarity, thoughtfulness, and comprehensiveness are important, but only insofar as that clarity, thoughtfulness and comprehensiveness help your team.

Let’s make this real. You will want to spend hours and hours on your first product spec. You will want to write multiple drafts, and make sure every word is perfect. And, unless you stop you, you will do that. (Spoiler: it still will not be perfect.) My second piece of advice: don’t do that.

Don’t sweat the typos, don’t worry so much about the formatting, it’s OK if not everything you produce is MECE. (In fact, if it is, that’s a red flag, you’re probably not moving fast enough.)

Moving “fast” isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes you should sweat the typos. But most of the time, it’s a good heuristic.

3. Keep track of the big picture

You’re about to own one of the most technically complicated products at LinkedIn. You will soon learn what a JYMBII is, and wince every time you hear the word “relevance”.

Your team will be the job recommendations team, and your task will be to help LinkedIn users discover more relevant job recommendations. This will be an exciting and daunting challenge. Your first instinct will be to dive deep into the weeds and not come up for air until you understand everything. You will want to do this because A) you’re curious, B) you think you need to to be a good PM, and C) you are afraid someone will ask you a question about your product and you will not know the answer.

Your determination to know how the system works will pay some dividends. You’ll learn a lot about machine learning, and become the go to person on the team for questions around the core algorithms responsible for helping millions of people discover and get hired for the right jobs.

But unless you catch yourself, you’ll also lose sight of the big picture, time and time again. You’ll focus too much on how things are, rather than how they should be. And you’ll spend too much time tracking down technical details and not enough time thinking strategically.

Also, no matter how many docs you read and whiteboarding sessions you have with your engineers, you will be asked things about your product that you don’t know the answer to. Andrew Ng will not save you from this (still take his course). That’s ok.

My third piece of advice is to keep track of the big picture. The details matter. But you will represent yourself better, and be more likely to focus on the right things if you do.

4. Minimize surprises

Surprising team members on their birthday: good. Surprising stakeholders with requirements at meetings: bad.

This one, like a lot of advice you’ll hear as a new PM, is impossible to do all the time. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, things will come up that prevent you from giving partners a heads up before you’re in a big meeting with them.

But my fourth piece of advice to you is this: as often as you can, minimize the number of surprises you throw at your partners. This will help you in a handful of ways.

When working on a team with dependencies, minimizing surprises will help build trust with partners. The more trust you build between you and your partners, the faster you and your team can move and the better your work will be.

When giving feedback, letting people know immediately that they’ve done something that bothers you or that you disagree with will prevent partners from doubting your sincerity. It’ll also make it more likely that they’ll be similarly upfront with you, which will help you learn and grow faster.

The more surprising or unpleasant the change, the more important it is that you minimize the surprise. There will be a time when you work with data science to reimagine the success criteria for your team. This will surprise some people, and it will be key that you over communicate with your team and partner teams about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Minimize surprises.

5. Make less important decisions quickly

This one is related to some things I’ve said above, but is still worth calling out. Every day, you will make a ton of decisions. Some of those decisions will be important. The vast majority will not be. Make those decisions quickly.

The more general principle here is probably something like proportion the time you spend on a decision to the importance of that decision. But, given your temperament, it will be easy for you to see the value in being thoughtful about big decisions. So, my fifth piece of advice centers on the other end of that spectrum: Make less important decisions quickly.

One of the things that will make this challenging for you, is that you will often need to make decisions with incomplete information, without the time to think through all the implications of that decision. You will say to yourself: “I need more time to gather information and consider all the implications of this decision.” Don’t listen to you. Well, listen to me/you now, don’t listen to you/us then.

If you take the time to deeply consider each and every choice, you will have way less time to focus on the stuff that really matters. Every minute you spend agonizing over a rarely seen line of copy or obscure edge case is one less minute you can spend doing more important and impactful work.

6. Invest in relationships

You will be told this again and again. In fact, one of LinkedIn’s core values is “Relationships matter”. Take the advice. It will make you more effective and happier.

My sixth and final piece of advice is the most obvious and most important: invest in relationships with the people you work with.

One of the reasons you should do this is that it will make you a lot more effective. Building relationships with your coworkers helps you and them know, understand, and eventually trust each other. That trust will allow you and your partners to move more quickly, and build better products.

Another reason you should do this is that it will make you happier. Working with friends is a lot more fun than working with colleagues. You won’t be great friends with everyone. But being friendly with everyone, and cultivating a few real friendships, will make each day a little brighter.

You’ll do a lot of this naturally, but as more immediate work piles up, you will need to consciously carve out time to continue investing in those relationships. Do that. You’ll be glad you did.

Wrap up

If you remember one thing, it’s this: Eat, Pray, Love. Wait no that’s not right.

Here’s the thing. After your first ninth months, you will still be figuring this stuff out. That’s ok. Remember to have faith. Have faith that the mistakes you make will help you grow, and that growing pains are inevitable but survivable. Remember it is a privilege to have these “struggles”, but still allow yourself to have them. Finally, have fun, and always wear sunscreen.

Cheers,

Lachlan

PS: Sell your Facebook stock on Tuesday, July 24, 2018. You’ll thank you later.