My Journey into Product Management

Product Management is one of those great career fields where there’s no single path to entry. I believe this is because of how Product Managers have to wear many hats and fill many roles. Product Managers have to be able to hang with Designers and Software Engineers but don’t have to be experts in those fields. Product Managers also have to be able to context-switch on the fly. One minute, you’re discussing go-to-market strategies with marketing, then pressure testing UI and UX with Design, and finally discuss solution architecture, sometimes all in the same meeting.

My own journey into Product is not one that I would have predicted. Unlike a lot of other Product Managers, I don’t have a tech background. I was never a Business Analyst, or Product Designer… nope, I was a program manager, instructional designer, and facilitator for training program. Yep… it’s not often I hear that someone made the jump from Learning and Development into Product Management.

I’ve worked for Financial Service companies for the bulk of my professional life. I actually got into Learning and Development because I enjoyed coaching and teaching others. On my own dime, I even went through a professional learning and development certification program. I conducted needs assessments, designed training programs, and delivered content online and in person.

It was actually in one of these roles that a Director for a product that I trained users for asked me the most random, unexpected questions I’d ever been asked, “have you ever thought of being a product manager?” Honestly, I’d never even thought of that. I assumed that Product Managers were essentially the unicorns of unicorns. People that were fluent in Design and could also pick apart failings in a tech stack. But the more I learned about Product Management, the more I realized, it wasn’t that much different from what I was already doing, which is why, I think, the idea was even floated to me.

I was intrigued by the notion that I could be doing essentially the same actions I did when determining what kind of training solution was warranted, but in a way that brought new technology solutions to life for customers. So, I took a leap of faith and moved from a comfortable role into a role where I never have any answers, but am expected to learn, build, ship, and deliver solutions to problems I don’t even know exist yet.

And that’s the cool part… that a kid who grew up working in retail, trained others how to do sales and operations, who built computers from scratch in his spare time, is now working at a major financial services company, and building cool solutions with some of the most talented designers and software engineers. I mean, who wouldn’t love that, right?

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