Making your Product Management job work for your Product Management career

Is your job working for you? Your job is supposed to serve your career as much as you are expected to serve the job. Given the current market situation where even the most 'stable' companies are laying off their employees in droves, anxiety about what the future holds is natural, resulting in a tendency to cling to a role which may not be contributing to your career growth. The good news is, a career is bigger than a job, longer than a year (even unfortunate ones) and your intrinsic value is deeper than a title you hold at a point in time.

Here are some of my learnings and observations for Product managers from steering my own career over the last 15 years, through both 2008-2009 and the current market turmoil.

1. A 25% growth in skillset is > 25% growth in total compensation. I am guilty of falling for the 'shiny object' of higher pay without looking deeper to understand if my new role will offer me new learnings or will be purely an application of my previously acquired learnings and knowledge. Unsurprisingly, every time I felt I was not 'stretched' enough, I quit. In the current atmosphere, it is crucial to be self aware of your skills and talents as those are not tethered to a job or a company. Take a weekend where you sit with yourself and take a stock of your 'true professional equity' or the investment you've made in your self to grow your knowledge and skillset. Every time I did that, I realized I was ready for a level up or take on a new role, which in the longer term has served me better than a one time bump in pay.
2. Target both depth and breadth of skill development. After you've taken time to introspect and get a better understanding of your intrinsic value, you'll realize what you bring to the table and what more you need to learn to become a truly well rounded Product owner with strong technical knowledge of how things are built and a sharp business acumen of what and why to build something. As I have always maintained, PM discipline is more than backlog grooming or sprint planning. I see PMs as business owners who look at the product as a business with its own P&L with an understanding of the contribution it makes to the company. This thinking guides better decision making through robust tenets that look at the lifetime values and DSI (downstream impact) as opposed to product or feature related metrics in isolation. In my next post I will go deeper into the technical and business skills that are table stakes for anyone looking to break into more 'Senior' product management positions but to enumerate a few, here's what I believe is a good list to start-

- Technical skills: a) Basic understanding of system architecture and design. Differences between client-server architecture and a service based architecture with evolution to micro-services and the need for federation b) APIs and their applications. Understanding basic use cases of APIs like data access and encapsulation c) Fundamental knowledge of databases and synchronous and asynchronous calls d) most common tradeoffs in system design like latency/accuracy and costs. Honorary mention - data analysis and manipulation skills, which I believe are good to have and a basic SQL crash course usually suffices to gain elementary knowledge for PMs as most organizations have dedicated BA/BIE resources who setup, maintain and query data clusters for their teams.

- Basic business acumen: a) Understanding the fixed and operating costs, revenue streams and cash flows are absolutely fundamental to looking at a product holistically as a business. b) The next layer is going deeper into the customer lifecycle which includes key business metrics like customer acquisition costs by acquisition channel, engagement metrics and retention rates. If your organization tracks the lifetime value of a customer, it will encompass all of the above but unfortunately in my experience, very few companies have a good handle on their CLTVs. c) Market sizing and go to market (GTM) strategy. As a product owner you will often be asked by senior leadership to estimate the addressable market and the segments to serve. This warrants a complete post in itself but on a high level, understanding the customer needs that your product/solution addresses and the customer segments that are willing to pay for the solution such that they'd prefer your product/solution over other alternatives are good starting points. Bonus points for understanding product differentiation strategies in competitive markets and placement (distribution), pricing and promotion for targeting the right set of audience d) Market research. Fundamentals of quantitative and qualitative research tools and when to deploy which technique takes knowledge and skill that comes with experience. I will also append experimentation under this section as it is absolutely critical for anyone looking to grow as a PM. In my experience, PMs are not expected to instrument or design experiments and simulations but are expected to own the objectives, success criteria and interpret the results to make a go/no go decision.

3. Think in terms of a 5 year roadmap. Exceling in creating vision and roadmaps for your product or feature area? great. Now create one for yourself and remember a bad manager is just a red light not a dead end. Something I often tell my mentees is that a career roadmap is not a ladder and does not have to be linear, you may need to make lateral shifts or even take a step back to catapult faster in the future, but there has to be a good reason to do that. And the reason usually is broadening your repertoire of skills. The catch? Candidates (mostly women!) often shy away from applying to a job that is not a 100% match of their past experience and skills but I will say this as a hiring manager myself - there are companies and managers out there who are willing to mentor and teach their team members if the team members have the right attitude and willingness to learn. Go hit the apply button for a position where you meet 50% of the requirements and tell the hiring team you are willing to do what it takes to learn the remaining on the job as a part of your 90 day onboarding plan.

4. Empathy lays the foundation of strong relationships and relationships get the job done and sometimes gets you a job! Companies are nothing but a bunch of people and people have memories and emotions. Good work and people who know how to take everyone along in highly matrixed organizations, never go unnoticed. Count on your former manager, peer or leaders to tap on your shoulder when the right opportunity arises. Conversely, don't be coy to reach out to your network if you see an opening that meets your checklist. Talking about empathy, PMs who take time and effort to hone their technical skills have a better grasp of the feasibility and technical limitations of the solution they are expecting the engineers to build and can better empathize when the teams ask for changes in deadlines or scope. At the end of the day, empathy is looking at the world from the other person's periscope and teams with high degree of empathy tend to have higher employee satisfaction and overall productivity. To that end, I am a big fan of a 'day in life of ..' experiential programs and encourage my teams to participate in those. Don't find one running in your organization? Start one! Sometimes it takes 1 mechanism or 1 tradition to bring about a positive change in the culture. 'Culture eats strategy for breakfast' - Peter Drucker.

Happy Holidays

Shivi

PS: The photo used as the image was clicked by my 6 year old while driving through Nevada last month.

This is the first issue in the series of work and life related articles I plan on penning down as my small contribution to my professional community to help grow people's careers. Careers, that they find fulfilling and feel more in control of. Let me know if there is any topic you would like to hear about next.