On Becoming a Product Manager

I joined PayPal three years ago as a software engineer and was lucky to work with some amazing people. The experience not only helped me grow technically but groomed me to evolve in all directions and visualize the bigger picture.

Six months ago, I shifted roles and became a Product Manager at PayPal. It has been a great ride. I can confidently say that I have matured as a person and have learned how to push my limits.

There are phases of your life when you want to totally disconnect, put your head down and just work. The utter satisfaction and learning curve from your work is enough to fuel you to run faster. That’s how I would like to summarize my last six months.

There are some very interesting observations and lessons that I picked up along my journey.

Perception of time

I realized the true value of time when I found myself juggling between meetings, answering product questions, and attempting to maximize the output from each hour. I have now learned to drive meetings better and achieved a better sense of my inner clock. My daily outlook calendar sprinkled with meetings kept me on my toes and kind of forced me to manage my time better till it became a habit. The whole experience made me a more disciplined person in my personal life.

I have also learned to value my time more than ever. Whenever I get any task, an opportunity for discussion/argument, or a temptation, I first ask myself if it is worth my time. This has really helped me filter the noise and focus better.

Prioritization

Product Management eventually boils down to cut-throat prioritization. You will have hundreds of requests pouring in. You will have your own priorities for the product, customer feedback, creative ideas from the team, and everything else you can imagine. Your job is to find order in the chaos.

I spent a great time in my initial days thinking about the short term benefits, long term outcomes, impact analysis, customer satisfaction. I followed few frameworks such as the RICE model and so on for short and long-term planning. I did this many times, over and over again until this became a part of my gut and I could do it faster, even subconsciously.

I know people who can take decisions in split seconds and will have solid reasons for doing so. Their subconscious is trained to do lightning speed calculations and choose the best possible path.

Exposure

The scale at which you operate, expectations from you, goals, and scope of work changes dramatically. You become part of bigger conversations, bigger decisions and get exposed to a lot of information and varied perceptions. All these single pieces together give you a high exposure.

I was put into a contractual discussion with an external company a week after I joined and soon after that I had the entire revenue sheets of the product in front of me to understand. There were moments when I was talking to 4 different dependant teams on a joint call in an attempt to get my product work prioritized in their roadmaps and resolve conflicts.

When I look back, I feel lucky to have those experiences which made me what I’m today.

Thinking 10 steps ahead

Your engineers will give you the best engineering solution, designers will give you the most appealing UI and call center teammates will tell you what customers have been asking for long. While each of the pieces is perfect in their places, as a Product Manager only you will have the idea if a feature is a right fit for the product, if it’s the right time to prioritize that bug fix, the right time to include the feature request or what will work and what will not.

How a proposed solution will impact legal clauses, impact revenue, customer satisfaction, customer call volumes or even the company’s brand are some of the things that only you would have insight into.

Bad Product Managers go for instant success and metrics that makes them look good while great product managers know and do what is best for the product in long run even if it means taking the hit on themselves for a short term.

Great product managers think holistically and visualize the consequences from all possible angles. They would have already thought of backup plans in case the strategy backfires, budget for their product gets reduced, priorities shift, or if the enthusiastic engineering team fails to deliver on time.

I would say this is the single best advice I have received from a very close friend and mentor who is an expert at this. I consciously alert myself and try to use this model. I still have to learn and I will keep doing it, till it becomes my second nature.

Proactiveness

Proactiveness is a true yardstick that separates average product managers from great.

As a product manager can you think about the changes coming in and anticipate the blockers and timelines well in advance and clear them even before your engineering team starts the work? This is an extension to the 10 steps ahead thinking formula.

If an upcoming feature leads to change in accounting, impacts revenue calculations, changes the way call centers answer the customer, or even impacts how other products in the organization behave, can you lead the communications well in advance, factor in the time taken by those teams to make changes on their end and fit it properly in your roadmap?

How many times were my engineers and designers blocked completely because they were waiting for my inputs was a strict personal KPI that I had kept to consciously make myself more efficient and proactive?

The next level of proactiveness comes when you totally up the game for yourself. Do you know the pulse of your org, company or the entire industry? Do you see opportunity for your product amidst the changes happening in the organisation? Can you think beyond the normal work and gauge how can your product add value in ways never thought before?

Well, I’m still trying to up the game for myself and this will be a good challenge for me in 2017.

Communication

Communication fills in the largest portion of PM’s life. It’s not just showing your flair at speaking or writing but more about articulating the problems and requirements very clearly and ensuring that the people on the other side have understood properly. It becomes vital especially in large organizations where the same information changes hands rapidly.

Communication is also about the kind of messaging you are giving to your customers via product experience, help docs, emails, or even by training the team-mates at call centers. As a Product Manager, you are responsible for orchestrating the entire communication and ensuring that consistent message from all channels reach people.

Assumption is a sin and as a Product Manager, you should never assume anything. I have faced the consequences of assumptions and have learned my lessons the hard way. Once a team I was talking to, implemented a solution much different from what I had initially asked. This was after five to six scoping and clarification calls. It was a genuine confusion but cost us an extra sprint of the wait. It’s not enough to just properly communicate the idea but one needs to take the extra effort and ensure that the folks on the other side have properly understood. Leave no room for assumptions for anyone.

Growth

As you step into the shoes of a leader your thought process around growth evolves.

Earlier growth was more of a personal affair. I cared more about my hard skills, optimizing my code, learning new technologies, or improving the product performance.

Now it’s more about making a meaningful impact in the lives of my customers with my product and expanding the list of people my product touches.

I now care more about the growth of my product, team, and people working on my product.

Am I setting the right vision for the product and inspiring my team with the vision?

Is my team feeling excited about working on this product and the roadmap ahead?

Am I properly distilling the customer feedback, combining it with my vision, and framing it into the right challenging problems for the team to solve?

Am I helping my team grow? Am I contributing to their success by understanding their aspirations? Am I setting my team on a path to success?

Yes, I’m not directly responsible for their growth and no I’m not stepping into the shoes of a people manager.

The important thing to remember is that you are not working with swags, resources, timelines and numbers. You are working with humans and the right motivation, synergy and trust goes a long way in delivering winning products. True leadership is about helping your people grow and bringing positivity around.

If I have to summarise and say what really worked out for me during this time, I would really like to stress one single thing — “trust”. This may sound trivial but it actually makes a lot of difference.

The assurance that you have the comfort to experiment adequately, freedom to fail, and the belief that people around you will save your soul when things go wrong, gives a lot of breathing room to move fast and try out things. I was lucky to have great bosses and peers who trusted me with my actions and gave me full liberty to operate. The steep learning curve and positive expectations really helped me.