Product Management: Tips For Moving From Good To Great

Link to the recording and Q&A notes for the AMA session on “Product Management: Tips For Moving From Good To Great” on 1/13 at 9:30 AM PST. Hope you enjoyed reading and listening to it! If you have questions, comments, or thoughts please comment on the newsletter!

In this AMA session Blair Presley, Product Management: Coach, Consultant, Researcher, and Podcaster, and I discussed this topic in depth.?

Special thanks to Blair Presley for sharing her experiences, career success, and some awesome insights on building your career path from good to great product manager.?

Thank you very much to the audience for your participation and asking great questions and making this an engaging session! In case you missed asking questions Blair Presley and me in this session then feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn with your questions.

Here are the highlights from the conversation:

<Madhu> Tell us about your career journey, some tips that helped with your career success, and what do you do when you are not working?

<Blair> Well, taking a step back in time, I pivoted into product way back in 2011 when I landed in the product after a layoff. I had been working in the business to business sales before I was laid off on a Friday morning. But luckily, I had my first product management interview that same afternoon and got that role 30 days later.?

So I became an associate product manager in 2011 working in the healthcare space. Since then, I have bounced around a ton of different industries including concrete and building materials to animal health, to luxury kitchen faucets.?

In 2017, I started teaching product management which I came to love. My head was just knee-deep into PRDs and roadmaps and backlogs that I didn't look at the rest of the industry to realize how the world of product management had really changed.?

People were having a difficult time given how competitive it was and that became the beginning of me saying, I actually want to pursue this space of coaching and leverage some of my hard-earned skills and lessons to help people make the switch.

I decided in 2019 to pivot into full-time coaching and that's where I've been ever since; spending most of my days in the office on Zoom, on calls, and messaging with clients to help them leverage their transferable skills like project management, customer success, consulting growth and marketing backgrounds.

When not coaching, I try to pursue a number of hobbies including crocheting and puzzling. But when not doing those things, I’m writing my dissertation as I'm a doctoral student at the moment, researching product management.?

So the long and short of it is I've been in product management for a while and I love the career so much that I spend most of my time helping people to get into the product too.?

<Madhu> In your opinion, what are some of the core competencies that every PM should have?

<Blair> To be a great PM, you don’t need to have a particular framework like coding or mastery of a software solution.? Sustainably, what you need is curiosity; you need to be the type of person who doesn’t accept a thing just as it is; you should be curious enough to understand why something functions in a particular way.?

Through that, you can demonstrate curiosity through an interview process where you ask questions and turn it into a bidirectional conversation expressing your curiosity as opposed to telling people that you are a curious person.

But once you're on the job, being curious about why things occur or why certain things happen the way that they do is one of the important things as you grow. So, whether you are on day one or 12 years in the role, curiosity is really important.?

Another relevant thing is the ability to envision a world that has not yet been created. For instance, if your role is to make things or create solutions that have value for both the business and the user essentially to make things better, you have to be able to imagine a space that is not yet true.

You have to imagine what that could be and then rally a team and influence them to follow your path or collaborate to create a path. That's not one of those hard skills where you have to take a class to be strong in becoming a visionary. It's a space that you want to demo that you've done before and that you can do similar to that.

The third competency you need are soft skills; how do you express diplomacy? How do you do a bit of listening to your internal teammates so that you understand what their goals and their objections are and how you can create solutions that include them so that you're not isolating your team as you grow?

<Madhu> So those are the things that are most relevant to me; curiosity, vision and then the continuous development of your soft skills. They are very critical for the success of being a pm. Besides, you can read some of these competencies on; how to be successful in 90 days as a senior PM if you're joining a new company. (link )

They aren’t things that people need to do or focus on super early but rather they are tools of the trade that you will pick up over time.? Another point to focus on is adaptability wherever you go or whichever team you join.

<Madhu> Are these competencies applicable to any domain whether tech or non-tech products?

<Blair> Tech to non-tech, my philosophy is that you don't have to get too locked into the widget but rather get locked into being a great product manager. So whether it's tech or non-tech, you need to make sure that you possess the skills to take in the idea from literal ideation to launch and to post-launch if necessary.

For example, when I was on the corporate side interviewing for a product manager role that ended up becoming a product or rector role, I remember they wanted me quite frankly, but they were still trying to test me in the interview process.?

And so their question was, well, Blair, you don't, you don't have the technical knowledge for this product, how can we be comfortable that you will be technically strong for this product? I was a little cute with them admittedly and said well if you are looking for an engineer, you got me.

For me, that doesn't require knowledge or deep knowledge of the product because we can learn the product. No one was born knowing the product straight away. But what I can do is take an idea from launch to development and rally a team to get it from development to launch and then iterate upon it by basically reminding them of what the job description said and knowing that is agnostic of the widget.

So once you learn your soft skills or refine your ability to work with others and influence others, you have to be mindful of the power that you have in that because if you're not careful, that power of influence can become manipulation.

Personally, I've seen it happen unfortunately more times whereby others have been good at influencing but they do it in a manipulating way that no longer serves the user or their business and so it becomes kind of self-serving.

At some point, you find that you’ve developed a strong skillset that if your core isn't right, can be to the detriment of others. Therefore, just like developing that skill is very much important, how you use that power is even more important.?

For me, product management became so much easier once I channeled those powers for good, not just in terms of space but in operations and sales. Product management for me became easier and a lot more fun once it was, let me talk to Brenda in project management or to Laquita in customer success or Caitlin in accounting.

<Blair> What do you need to transition into Ai?

<Madhu> Surprisingly, I did not know this long time back that there could be non-tech roles in Ai. But there are different things one could do to start, for instance the core competencies are a must for a pm. So to start with a general PM path in the AI space, you need to take some Bootcamp courses and understand what AI is all about.?

With an AI product, you can take from zero to one and launch it since you don't need to be a machine learning or engineering expert; you don't need to be a researcher or a data scientist. You can do that just by taking a few Bootcamp courses.?

Udemy has the course and they have a nice project to work on which gives you some hands-on experience, the core of it and they also expect you as a PM to talk the same language.

Once you start feeling comfortable in Data and AI space after that if you are interested in the technical side of it, you can further take a data science course from any top University of choice. That will help you define the product features or build 0 to 1 products. Although you don’t have to do that, in case you're joining an early-stage or mid-size startup then there may not be a lot of people, as a PM you are expected to have more technical ownership. At larger companies, you can have a general PM role having strong product management fundamentals, and basic tech knowledge to work in the applied AI, data science, or data products space.

Moreover, if you are aiming for MAANG companies then depending on the team you are joining if it is more on platform/infra side then using you get higher salaries and they expect you to be knowing a little more wrto the high-level architecture of the full stack, how the machine learning platform works and how you convert or fill the gap between what business needs and translate them to the machine learning technical requirements.?

You can start with a simple data and AI Bootcamp course and then work towards building a career path as PM in that space. You can consider transitioning to the same company or finding opportunities where people know your strengths and are willing to invest in growing you in your career.? Eventually, as you grow you can build more knowledge then you can apply for companies where eventually there is a background fit to keep growing in your career..?

<Blair> What do you wish you would've known when you were pursuing a product job?

<Madhu> Well, first is core competencies which I think I didn't do a great job on but I did excel in analysis and self-reflection; on what my strengths are and what opportunities I need to fill. However, I was trying to boil the entire ocean. As a PM, there are 25 different skills and I was trying to get all those skills working.

The focus was something very important and so if I had to go back and redo this whole exercise, I'll focus on the core competencies and compare them with my strengths and where the gaps are.

Second, I had not thought deeply about the different characteristics that are important to me and how to prioritize that accordingly. So for the longest period, my aspirations were too high but I realized that I didn't have to be so hard on myself and again, I could have thought of a little easier path to get there.

<Ques from audience> When would be a good time to approach you about coaching?

<Blair> With product management, it depends since there are certain folks that I speak to who may take a little bit longer. We need some experience that we can comfortably and confidently use to transfer into the product. So that's something that I handle or recommend on a case-by-case basis and there is no broad stroke where you must have three years of experience.

Generally, what I look for is someone who has skills that are very similar to what a product manager has done. This is someone who has the skills and functions of a PM. Although some clients think that they need all the skills to consider the transition, it's certainly not the case.

<Madhu> What are your final thoughts in terms of career tips or frameworks?

<Blair> You need to recap or just take an audit of the skills that you already have today and recognize that you don't need all of them. All you need is some perseverance, some curiosity and some consistency. For instance, I had a podcast interview with someone from a company that was looking for people who are transitioning into product and what skills are necessary.?

She echoed many of the same things that I believe and share today relative to curiosity. But one thing that she mentioned that I thought was interesting was resilience. Fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of that resilience is built through life as well as in the interviewing process.

When trying to pivot into product management whether by coaching or by yourself, you are going to have to grow your resilience.

<Madhu> One last thing I would've done differently, I wish I would've known Blair much earlier. I felt hiring a coach is very important during transition to PM or after pivoting to PM role. So, if you have any questions you can send them to Blair or me. You can also listen to Blair’s product management podcast which is available on Spotify, Apple Music and on Amazon.

You can follow me and Blair Presley, Product Management: Coach, Consultant, Researcher, Podcaster on LinkedIn for future talks.

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