This post originally appeared as an article on LinkedIn.
I knew I wanted to become a product manager about three years before I became one. I had come a long way, and had a few careers since my art school days, but thought that my boss’s job — product management — seemed more interesting than mine! The job involved solving big, complex problems, and no two days seemed the same. All of these things were exciting to me. I love solving problems and I thrive on doing different things everyday and trying to do them well. I was even more interested when I realized that being a product manager involved three skills that I already knew how to do: defining problems, building relationships and managing my time. I wasn’t formally taught any of these three skills but I have learned them in other jobs and with other life experiences, and you can too.
Defining problems
Product managers combine a number of factors, customer pain points, business goals, technical feasibility, research, data and user-experience, to prioritize what a development team should build within an organization. This takes skill at defining and weighing problems. You have to be able to balance all of this information to make a clear-cut decision about work priority and scope.
If you’ve read anything about product management before, you will have no doubt heard that the most important piece in solving a problem is defining the problem first. As cliche as that sounds, it’s 100% true! Most humans prefer to tell you a solution for the problem that they’re struggling with. I think it’s just human nature — we see an issue that is getting in our way and think, how can I fix it as quickly as possible?
As a product manager, it’s your responsibility to dig deeper and find out what problem the customer actually has. I started to really learn this when I started writing stories for that job that I mentioned above (stories are product manager-speak for the way we write problems on a ticket that the development team uses to create solutions from). I had never written stories for a product before, but it fell on me to figure it out. I started writing them with an explicit solution in mind because I’m a human and that’s what we do. The UX designer was not impressed. The UI designer was not impressed. They didn’t want to be told how to solve a problem so I learned — by trial-and-error, by getting feedback from the designers and engineers and by simply Googling “how to write good stories,” to word my stories to represent the problem the customer was experiencing, and not outline a solution.
Defining problems is a skill that I will probably be honing for the rest of my career. It’s damn hard. It’s so important to learn how to see a problem without offering the solution if you want to be a product manager because chances are, you don’t have the best solution in mind! If you define the problem properly, the brilliant minds you (hopefully) work with plus a collaborative intent, will create the best solution.
Relationship building
The ability to build relationships could be the strongest skill a product manager needs. You need to be able to talk to anyone: CEOs, customers, engineers, designers, marketing, even the random guy on your bus with an opinion. You need to ensure that they are heard and have trust in you to make the decisions that you need to make. The customers, and potential customers, you talk to, will give you the best information about what you need to build. They’re the ones that will help you define the problems and test your solutions so that you can make sure you’re coming up with the best possible one.
Again, relationship building is something that I didn’t learn in school, or at work for that matter, I learned if from my dad. My dad had a degree in Physics (which he paused at one point to travel the world for two years in the ’60s) a certificate in heavy duty mechanics and owned a diesel truck repair shop for most of my childhood. As a teenager, I’d sometimes cover the phones, write up work orders, organize the parts room and, of course, make the coffee. I didn’t learn all that much about diesel truck repair, but I did learn how to talk to anybody. I listened to my dad talking to customers that needed work done, customers that couldn’t pay, customers who were stranded on the side of the road in the dead of winter, owners of trucking companies, guys working the supply desk at the parts shop, students that came to work for him and so on. He could talk to anybody! I’d listen to how he’d talk about politics with my friend’s dad and then listen to how he’d drop a couple of well-placed swear words in a conversation on the phone with a customer. He was always himself, but he also knew how to relate to people and build trust by speaking to them the way they wanted to be spoken to. It was a skill I couldn’t help but admire.
This is one of the greatest lessons in being a product manager. You have to be able to build authentic relationships with people — you have to have empathy for them, their lives and their problems. You have to build trust and be worthy of that trust. If your customers don’t trust or feel empathy from you, they won’t tell you their problems and those are the ones you really want to solve.
Time management
The final skill on my list if you want to get into product management is to learn how to be organized and manage your time. As a product manager, you will wear hundreds of hats: business analyst, project manager, therapist, copywriter, design critic, quality assurance technician, user-experience tester, interviewer, team lead, listener, presenter, and on and on and on. Everyone on your team will need to talk to you when you’re busy with something else, you’ll have to make decisions, you have to approve things and you will have so many meetings sometimes that you won’t know what your own name is at the end of the day. The absolute best thing you can do is learn to manage your time and manage it well. Block off time in your calendar, set recurring reminders, write to do lists, whatever it takes to carve out time to do the deep thinking and research the job requires. You need focused time and you will not get that unless you give it to yourself.
I learned time management in art school of all places. In my last semester at art school, I got an internship organizing the graduation exhibit for our grad class. It required organizing 70 free-spirited art students to submit applications, descriptions and photos. It needed a catalogue. It needed curation, lighting, plinths, nails, space for performance, not to mention an opening party with snacks and flowers. I started to work backwards. If the show was in late April, when did I need all of the applications in? When did I need to put posters up calling for submissions? When did I need to get them printed? Where would the submissions get sent? When would I need to finish the layout of the catalogue? When did I need everyone to submit their work description and images? I plotted this all on a calendar, in my paper notebook (it was the mid-2000s), listing the requirements, the dates and supply lists. Taking this big task and breaking it down into smaller do-able chunks made it manageable.
This lesson has applied through my whole career. I’ve figured out better ways of managing my time, started using digital to do lists and calendars, but the principle is the same: Your time and especially your energy are finite, if you don’t plan how to use it, you will never get the big chunks of time to do the actual work. However you do it, figure out how to get uninterrupted time to define those problems, do the research and set yourself and your team up to build great stuff. (I talk about time management and productivity stuff for PMs on this blog a lot recently, in case you want some practical tips).
Most of the product managers I meet or know don’t have any formal product management training. At Jobber, we’ve all had a mix of careers before becoming product managers. I think that anyone who learns how to define problems, build relationships and manage your time well can be an excellent product manager. Right now, product management seems to be something that you work your way into, that you choose to pursue, rather than something you are trained for. If product management is something that you’d like to pursue, no matter the path you find yourself on, work on these three skills and read as much as you can. Even if it takes a few years like it did for me, you’ll find your way there.
Kate Moore Hermes 