My Learnings as a PM
How I got into PM and what I learned in 5 years
Speaking of fools, April 1st is Fool’s Day. But this year’s Fool’s Day also marked my 5 years in Product Management. Just as with learning to swim or to ride a bicycle, I can tell with certainty that there’s no way to learn the art and science of Product Management except by the first-hand experience. Others’ experiences, however, did help me learn Product Management more efficiently and effectively. Product Management is hard. So here I am — paying it forward — sharing my story and my learnings from my 5 years as a PM. I hope it helps someone starting on their journey to the amazing world of Product Management.
Year 0
Early in my career, I didn’t know what Product Managers were and what they did. In my past life, first as a Software Engineer and then as a Solution Architect, for over a decade I always played in the “solution space” — how can I design the most simple, scalable, and supportable solution to a given problem. But interacting with my customers often got me curious about the “problem space” — why was the given problem so important, who was it so important for, and what other possible solutions were previously considered before deciding the current one. Leaving my “solution space” and venturing into the “problem space” was unfamiliar to me — it was solely owned by the “Business,” and “IT usually had no role to play there.” On a random Fall weekend in North Carolina, during a casual but long phone call with an old friend in San Francisco, and as we discussed the role PMs play in Silicon Valley, I realized that Product Management was my true calling. The next few months, I spent reading countless essays on Product Management by maestros such as Marty Cagen, Ben Horowitz, Sachin Rekhi, Rich Mironov, etc., and networking with any Product Managers I could find on LinkedIn, often cold emailing them and requesting a quick call so I can learn from them — per Bismarck’s advice. Each article, response, and phone call helped me paint a better picture of what PMs were and did. Nothing else more succinctly summarized the role and importance of a PM in building successful products and therefore successful companies than this essay by Mat Balez — Product Manager You Are A Janitor. In nicer words, a PM is a “jack of all trades” and is responsible for building and driving products to their success. Certainly, not the CEO.
I knew that building products and driving them to success was exactly what I was looking for. Now, I only had to find PM opportunities and convince companies to count on me to be one. Easy as it sounds, but most of my several dozen applications were either unreturned or the few hiring managers that talked to me preferred someone with existing PM experience — I couldn’t be a PM without having been a PM. My stars finally aligned as Beyoncé and Bruno Mars began performing during the Halftime Show at Super Bowl 50. I received a LinkedIn notification that a long-time friend and mentor had just accepted a Product Executive role at a mature cybersecurity startup in Silicon Valley. I called to congratulate him, expressed my interest in Product Management, and convinced him to take a chance on me. It was a stroke of luck that they had recently acquired an early product meant for developers and were seeking a new PM that deeply understood both software development processes and software developer’s needs. So he connected me with a few other executives and other leaders in the company that I managed to convince as well. And finally, on April Fool’s Day, I moved to the Valley and became a PM.
My Key Learnings
A PM is a cross-functional leader responsible for 5 Ds:
1. Discover opportunities by understanding market, customer, and user problems
2. Define what to build, why to build it, and who to build it for
3. Drive cross-functional actions to get it built
4. Derive its adoption by highlighting its user value
5. Deliver business value and its overall successTo be successful, a PM needs to be good at 4 activities:
1. Observe
2. Analyze
3. Imagine
4. CommunicateA PM is not the “CEO of the product”. Both CEO and PM have a huge vantage point, access to a variety of data, and hence cross-functional context. But unlike the CEO, who manages top-down and executes by positional authority, a PM needs to execute by influence, persuasion, data, & context. Thus, the PM role requires exceptional people skills, often exceeding those required of a CEO. So PM can be a good training ground for future CEOs — also why most post-acquisition startup CEOs end up in the product org.
There’s no defined path to be a PM. So most hiring managers want a PM who is already a PM. You just need to keep trying harder and perfecting your pitch to convince someone to take a chance on you. It may be easier to convince someone within your own company or someone that knows you well to give you a break into PM. Use your network.
Move to Silicon Valley. There’s no better place to be a PM. If not for its infinite opportunities and networking possibilities, move to simply increase your odds at serendipity.
Silicon valley is a mindset, not a location. -Reid Hoffman
Year 1
I started as a brand new PM but I was, after all, an Engineer-turned-Architect-turned-PM and was wired to solve a problem one-customer-at-a-time. In my first few weeks as a PM, I began wanting to solve every new problem by every single customer that complained or every sales representative that demanded that one thing for making their sale. This resulted in my Recency Bias and Focussing Illusion that got me shifting the team’s priorities constantly. Often I also got too deep in defining and designing how to solve a problem. Put simply, while my new title was a PM I was still mostly operating like a Solution Architect. Clearly, my team was overwhelmed and got increasingly frustrated with me being that kid in a candy store. Luckily for me, the Engineering Leaders intervened and advised me to stop being reactive to every issue and be intentional. I needed to unlearn to learn and learn to unlearn.
I enrolled myself in a few courses at the Pragmatic Institute and LinkedIn Learning so I could learn the hard skills of Product Management. I learned the importance of getting out of the office to talk to customers as often as possible. I learned important frameworks to conduct customer interviews and organize their learnings. I learned how to prioritize what features to build. I also learned other PM skills such as pricing, positioning, and launching products and features. In a few months, I had stopped running like a headless chicken and was instead focusing on building key features that solved problems common to a lot of customers and our business. I began analyzing data to inform my decisions. From one such deep data analysis, I found a huge opportunity to improve product utilization and increase revenue significantly by revamping the pricing model and simplifying how it was sold. The product relaunch was a success and it not only helped me in confirming the product/market fit and gaining the escape velocity for my product but also instilling confidence in me as a PM.
My Key Learnings
PMs should stay in the “problem space” (what, who, why) and curb the temptation to venture into the “solution space” (how). Define the problem well and trust your Engineering team to design the solution well. If you’re just using your engineers to code, you’re only getting about half their value.
Solution Architects solve a problem for a single customer at a time. But PMs need to solve aggregated customer problems and at scale.
Beware of cognitive biases such as Recency Bias and Focusing Illusion when prioritizing the problems to solve. Use prioritization frameworks to decide which problems to solve and what features would fetch the biggest bang for the buck.
Nothing important happens in the office (NIHITO). Get out and talk to customers. A lot of them. As often as possible.
Being able to sell the product easily is as important as building an easy product. PMs need to focus on both. Just as you experiment with various features to see what sticks, you need to experiment with various positioning and pricing models to see what sticks.
Find champions that believe in you and your product. Both among your customers and your Sales team. Nothing gets people onboard more than customer accolades and sales success. Success is the best lever to influence your team to execute and deliver more success.
Year 2
Learning 1-to-n product management was relatively easy; I now needed to learn 0-to-1. In talking to dozens of customers, we found a unique problem for a new user persona that needed a completely different solution. This was an opportunity to build a brand new product, from scratch. Building it required a completely different mindset as I had to navigate through a lot of unknown unknowns. Given the many constraints, I needed to define the simplest product that worked end-to-end — the minimum viable product (MVP) — and get people, both internally and externally, excited about it. Luckily, we had top-down buy-in for it and were able to carve an amazing team pretty quickly.
We were operating like a new start-up that had just raised its seed funding. Twice-a-day stand-ups (where we actually did standing up), day-to-day action plans, and bi-weekly demo days that our CEO also attended to ensure we were laser-focused and working at full speed. Any problems or new constraints had to be solved within hours, not days. Everyone challenged one another and stepped out of their own zones to solve each other’s challenges. I had never seen such an amazing team and teamwork before. It was all-hands-on-deck. No wonder we were able to build and ship an amazing product, from scratch, in just 100 days.
Our beta users loved it. Now we needed to sell it, too. We had challenges doing that — our marketing team hadn’t marketed to this new persona before and our sales team hadn’t sold to them before. So we took the easy route of marketing and selling it to the existing buyers. It was the Overconfidence Effect or Confirmation Bias or Ikea Effect, perhaps all three. Such short-cuts usually result in short-circuits. While our launch was a success and created a lot of market buzz, it fizzled soon after. We tried to iterate a couple of times but couldn’t attain the escape velocity needed. I learned the hard way that 0-to-1 is so much more difficult than 1-to-n.
My Key Learnings
It is extremely difficult to sell to a buyer that is not the user of your product. Avoid it if you desire fast outcomes. But if you must, expect a much longer cycle so you first create fan users that can eventually influence the buyers. There are fewer enterprise products that have done it successfully. Short-cuts usually result in short-circuits.
Beware of other cognitive biases such as Overconfidence Effect, Confirmation Bias, Ikea Effect, etc. when building a brand new product. Just because some like the product doesn’t mean others will. And just because others like the product doesn’t mean it will sell.
Most new products fail and only some succeed. Accept this truism but keep trying. Learn from every failure and try differently next time.
Year 3
Product failures are hard. As we were too focused on building and launching the new product, we had slowed down on our existing product. Imposter Syndrome kicked in as I often wondered, “Am I a good enough PM?”
Luckily, I had an amazing support system in my manager and my team. We decided to pause the new product and refocus on the existing one to put it back into orbit. As the product began growing, so did the feature requests from our customers and the Sales team. This is usually a good problem to have. But as with all products in the world, I didn’t have infinite resources to build it all. My leaders advised me to “be strategic.” A lot of PMs overly misuse the word strategy — “Strategically strategizing the strategies!” But real strategy is hard. After taking additional courses on LinkedIn Learning and Youtube, and reading a couple of books I learned to define and communicate a clear product strategy. I began fine-tuning it by socializing it with everyone and getting them aligned. We shifted our strategy, positioning, and GTM from products to Platform. It helped us connect the dots and tell a better story. I learned positioning, GTM, and AR/PR as we executed the Platform strategy.
My Key Learnings
Learn to deal with imposter syndrome. Stop trying to measure your competence based on what — and how much — you know or can do. Don’t fear being exposed for not knowing enough. Get comfortable saying, “I don’t know” but also follow it up with, “let me find out.” Refrain from apologizing for simply asking a question.
Be strategic. Strategy is hard. Learning it not only requires good vision, analysis, and structure but also a lot of patience. Focus on differentiating your product from the competition. Build a unique product and play in the market segment where it will be most valued. Avoid expanding your peripheral strategy too much. Strategy requires saying no way more often than yes.
Product positioning and GTM are extremely important. To quote Zig Ziglar, “Every sale has five basic obstacles: no need, no money, no hurry, no desire, no trust.” Good positioning and GTM help you overcome these obstacles.
Year 4
I thought Strategy was the hard part, but executing it felt even harder. Getting everyone aligned on my strategy was challenging. It was like herding cats. I had to focus on my soft skills and be really good at persuasion, negotiation, decision-making, and executive communication to win support from everyone. So, just a week before April Fool’s again, I started taking classes at Berkeley Haas to improve my soft skills. I learned to be politically savvy. I also had the opportunity to mentor other PMs on my team. I realized that I was learning exponentially as I was teaching others. On a friend’s recommendation, I also joined SVPMA to meet and learn from other PM leaders in the Valley. It was here that I met my own mentors that taught me how to excel in my PM career. I realized that I had to explore new opportunities outside so I can experience and learn from new challenges.
I began preparing and applying to my shortlisted companies. Interviewing made me vulnerable to my gaps but it also helped me improve myself even further. As I prepared for my interviews, I also began creating my own frameworks and mental models. I used my interviews to validate my frameworks, network, and learn from the people that were interviewing me. This was a pivotal year for us as a company because we were acquired by a much larger company. We ended the year with a superlative growth rate for the company and record renewals for my product line.
My Key Learnings
Creating a good strategy is one thing, but communicating it effectively and aligning everyone for execution requires a lot of time, effort, and patience.
PMs must master the hard skills but should also polish their soft skills. Persuasion, negotiation, decision-making, executive communication, and political savviness are essential to be successful as one grows into PM leadership.
Mentoring others is a great way to sharpen your own skills. It forces you to resynthesize, refine, and replay what you already know in a way your protege can understand effectively. Mentoring also builds deep relationships and a support system to count on.
Join SVPMA or a local product meetup around you. You will meet and learn from other PM leaders. This is when Bismarck’s “learning from the experience of others” becomes real.
Keep interviewing often even if you aren’t actively looking for new opportunities. Interviews make you vulnerable and help you identify your gaps. Use them to improve yourself. Interviews also help you network with people that were unreachable before. There’s always something new to learn from everyone you meet.
Year 5
I switched my job just before April Fool’s Day. Just as the Covid-19 pandemic struck and brought the world to a stand-still. With all the lockdowns and not much to do, I used it as a year of infinite learning — I spent hours listening to podcasts, reading books/blogs, watching product videos on LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and Youtube, and interacting with interesting product people on Twitter. I was also able to pursue my executive business certification at Berkeley Haas. I met some amazing people in my class and learned as much from their own stories and experiences as from the class itself. Bismarck again. Work in my new company was picking up. I was learning new domains, facing new challenges, and meeting and learning from new people. But all my past learnings were helping me be at the top of my game. We ended the year pretty well, despite the pandemic. That’s when I began planning to write and pay it forward. For, if my past learnings helped me so much I’m confident they would help others. (Watch this space for more.)
My Key Learnings
Be an infinite learner. Learn from everyone and everything. The more you learn, the more there is to learn. But the more you know, the more successful you can be as a PM. PM is, after all, “the jack of all trades.”
Pay it forward. Help others around you. Share your learnings with the community. It is a profoundly gratifying feeling.
Got feedback? I’m all ears, looking forward to hearing back and learning from you.
Want a checklist of my learnings? Here you go.
