The Product Management Unicorn

I've had a great career.

I've worked not just for companies and managers I've admired, but I've gotten to work with a lot of awesome products and in many exciting parts of a business. From leading business reviews with C suite clients in customer facing roles on the front end to managing ETL and building dashboards in the trenches of data pipelining on the back end, I've seen so many facets of a business and product has got to be my favorite (so far).

I wanted to mention a few advantages of the role because so much of the time, we might be so focused on a role or job title without seeing what else might be out there for us. I write a lot about data and analytics and wanted to shed some light on the ancillary roles that are also very data driven. Product is an especially interesting one because it attracts people from so many different disciplines and the role itself brings the inner unicorn out of anyone that has the privilege of filling its shoes.

You're not an engineer, a customer success manager, a marketer, a project manager, a salesperson, a data analyst or an entrepreneur per se, but a wily mix all of seven. Not only do you need to embody the mindset of these different roles, but you often have to be the centralizing force that balances all their priorities. If this scares you, it's probably not for you. But if you're excited about the prospect of a mercurial role you can't quite pin down that will enliven all your days with mystery and challenge, requiring something new of you at an almost constant pace, it might be just the right fit.

Beyond all this, it's important to remember a career is a marathon not a sprint. The way I look at it, I'd rather push myself with every new role, develop new aspects of myself and use my career as a tool for self excellence. For me, this is preferable to the predictability of a role that's relatively easy, doesn't require much from me and doesn't teach me anything. If this sounds like you, read on.

So here's my product top 5 and what makes a product management unicorn:

1. Curiosity: You're not just curious about how to improve your product, how to get more people to use it or how to find the best market fit, but you're embodying curiosity in everything you do. You bring that curiosity to your meetings with engineering, product marketing, marketing and leadership, and you're quite literally co-creating a product with these major stakeholders in your company. You create the space where you can have conversations about your products potential and you're able to facilitate brainstorming sessions where every seat at the table feels heard.
2. Methodology: You're then take those beautiful, creative and curious musings and add in definition to validate them using some methodology. Everything from how the development cycles (agile/scrum/waterfall) run to what prioritization method you're going to use (RICE, Kano, MoSCoW) to which KPIs and OKRs you're going to track are all part of the definition that must come with the boundlessness of ideation for any business to take great ideas and turn them into actionable, trackable successes. You play a massive role in this.
3. Empathy: A direct channel to customer feedback, internal resources, communications, leadership and any roadblocks that impact any of these groups, you are the eyes and ears of the product. Empathy is a crucial skill not just for understanding your customer's needs but for understanding the needs of all the impacted teams and anything that's getting in their way. You're also not directly managing any of these teams, so your ability to galvanize these impacted groups toward the wellbeing of your product is a direct result of your influence. You're going to need major empathy and relationship management skills for that.
4. Vision: You own the product roadmap, the release schedule and feature prioritization. You don't only see the past and the present of the product but you also must see where it's going. After all if you don't, who will? Many people can be a product manager, but the truly exceptional ones are able to capture the vision for that product, as well as product market fit, and expand it so that it may reach it's full potential. They are true evangelists and this focused vision is a skill that will set apart those that can do the job from those who are great product managers.
5. Value: This is perhaps my favorite element of product management. Ultimately, we're all in the business of selling. The success of your company and, by extension, your work as a product manager, all ties back to the value you are able to communicate and give to customers. The better the product messaging, product interviews, feature prioritization and executive support your product has the better it will sell. The invisible hand of the market wants what it wants and it wants it yesterday. If you are able to capture the interests of the market, are adaptable and can deliver solutions to those interests in a reliable way, you will be rewarded.

For those out there that are looking at fulfilling careers that push us to increasingly greater heights, I hope you'll consider product management. I've worked with many amazing product managers in the past and it's been a real blessing for me in my current PM role. I often think of Larry Smith's Ted Talk "Why You Will Fail To Have A Great Career", a diamond in the rough please listen to it if you haven't, you won't be sorry. Larry suggests we should all be striving towards the highest expression of our talent, and those of us with many passions may be able to find a home for ourselves here in product.

In my belief system, a great career is one which offers you new opportunities to expand in a way that feels exciting, fun and meaningful. Even the independently wealthy need to occupy themselves with something that connects them a sense of purpose, lest ennui takes hold.

And that's not good for business.

Happy to connect with anyone interested in collaborating or discussing the intersection of data and product! Feel free to leave any comments about areas of PM that you'd like me to expand further for future articles.

Irene Bratsis

Data Product Manager @ BEEKIN

Regional Lead @ Women in Data

Organizer @ Women in AI