What Does It Mean To Be a Product Manager?

Yeah, I think you could product manage a coffee shop.
I think I just have started.
Yeah, we're both very into coffee.
Hi, I'm Karl.
And I'm Danielle.
And this is Productly Speaking.
We're product managers by trade.
And here we explore the world of product management.
It's people and their stories.
We promise to keep it entertaining.
And maybe you'll learn something.
Shall we give this a go?
Let's do it.
Hi, welcome to our first episode.
As it's our first episode, we'd like to start by telling you how we got into product management.
Danielle, tell us a bit about your story.
Thanks, Karl.
I'm Danielle.
And through my journey in product, I've been both a designer and a product manager.
Like many product managers, I kind of tripped and fell into the role.
While I was a designer into it in Silicon Valley, a manager of mine who I will forever be grateful to suggested that I move from design into product.
And immediately something clicked.
I just haven't looked back since.
Karl, your turn.
All right.
So my name is Karl Abbott.
And like Danielle, I also tripped and fell into this role as well.
I think it's a fairly common story.
I was working as a technical account manager at Red Hat at the time and had a colleague approach me about a product management role.
We scheduled a time to talk and I figured I'd just be letting them down easy as I was happy with the role that I had.
But the more we talked, the more interested I became in the opportunity.
And long story short, the more I learned about product, the more I saw that it tied together all the roles that I'd ever had before.
And so I took the job and have been hooked since.
So that's my story.
Cool.
As we've both described it as like tripped and falling into product management, what do you think that somebody saw that encouraged them to encourage us into product management?
That's a great question, Danielle, because really, you know, product managers, you don't go to school to be a product manager.
And there's no way to teach somebody a product manager.
So how do you tell that somebody is going to be a good product manager?
I think that a lot of product management is having a good understanding of the space that your product is going to play in.
And I think that in both of our cases, we had an understanding of that space that the products we were being brought on to manage were going to play in.
And having that understanding of the area of the world that you're actually in, you know, knowing what the customers are like,
knowing what the customer problems are, understanding how people work with the technology, how they use it.
These are good foundational pieces for being able to be a product manager.
Would you agree with that?
Totally.
I think I remember, and this just shows you how meaningful it was, but I remember the day that my manager kind of grabbed me and said,
hey, I think you should start exploring product as a role.
I was actually not getting along with the product manager I had at the time.
So I was a designer.
We had a good working relationship, but I just didn't feel like I was making any impact.
And so my manager challenged me.
She was like, hey, present to the room what you think would make an impact and see if you can get the engineers on board.
Like, see if you can kind of hustle a team into existence if you think you've got this in your back pocket that could really impact customers.
And I pulled together this presentation and I got folks sat down in a room.
I had the VP of my organization in it, too.
And I gave a presentation.
It was really data led.
It was really clear.
It had the user needs.
And, you know, if we get this one button changed, this is the data increase that we'll see.
And as we were leaving the room, my manager was like, you nailed it and you shouldn't be a designer anymore.
I think you should look into product.
And I think it is just that analytical, being able to look at something from an analytical point of view,
but also being able to balance the needs of the customer and of the team so that you're really prioritizing the stuff that matters.
And I think a lot of that is naturally showcased in other roles.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah, my situation was pretty much, like I said, you know, I got invited to a call to discuss a role.
And I really did figure that I'd just be, you know, letting off the person who had invited me to the role easy and that, you know,
OK, I'll go listen to your spiel for 30 minutes.
But at the end of it, I'm like, well, I'm pretty happy with where I'm at because it sounded like a big role.
And it was a big role, but it sounded like almost more than I wanted to take on.
But as I learned more about it, I definitely got more excited about it.
I said, I've got to talk to the hiring manager now.
And the next thing I know, I'm talking to the hiring manager.
And they basically sold me on this role because it was doing product management on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team for the kernel,
which I'm not a kernel developer.
I've not written C code before.
I don't know these things.
But I do understand how the kernel is used by the customers of Red Hat and how that actually plays into the scenarios.
Being a technical account manager, I'd had the opportunity to see that in action and to see how customers use that and how they interacted with it and what problems customers would have with it.
So I knew that space.
And I realized as I went along that, yeah, it's a really unique blend of skills that you have to have to actually do it.
And I think that that's an important thing to understand for those that want to get into product management.
I mean, one of the reasons that product management is not taught in school is because the mechanics of product management are pretty straightforward and pretty easy.
We can sit here and talk about how to write out initiatives, how to write out market problems and epics all day long.
We can talk about how those things relate to each other.
But those are just technical technicalities of how to do product management.
That stuff's actually pretty straightforward.
That's teachable.
What's not teachable is the experiences that need to come together to enable a product manager to make the right decisions or to be able to make those gut instinct decisions in the role.
And so that's something that can be very, very diverse because Danielle and I are both in software product management, but you have product management all over.
I mean, you think about anything that's a product, you could have a product manager for that.
And so a software background isn't necessarily going to be what you need if you're designing the latest laundry soap.
But the latest laundry soap can still be product managed and that's a product.
You can still apply product management skills, but you're going to need a different understanding.
You're going to need an understanding of, you know, basically general household good commodities market and how that plays to really be effective as a product manager for something like laundry soap.
Do you think you could be a product manager in a service environment as in a lot of being a product manager is about having a product and you mentioned like we're in the software product industry and then there's like hardware products.
You know, soap is a really great example, but what if you're like, could you be a product manager of a coffee shop?
You could definitely treat the services like products and if you treated the services like products, you'd basically build it very much the same.
You would figure out what are the what are the customer problems that we need to solve with each of these services?
What features does the service need to have in order to actually address these customer problems?
And then what are the things that we need to actually build out to make sure that the features are there and are working and then you're going to be in a constant state of testing those features to make sure that they're actually landing with the customer base.
So, yeah, I think you could product manage a coffee shop.
I think I just have started.
Yeah, we're both very into coffee.
I mean, there's always going to be that customer who just wants a coffee.
They don't care that you're sitting there doing pour overs with V60s or Kalita waves and you've got all this great, you know, organic, fair trade.
Absolutely.
This was just roasted yesterday by some guy who does specialty roasting.
No, nobody cares about that.
They just want to come in and get a coffee.
So for the person that just wants to come in and get a coffee, you're probably going to have some type of medium roast on drip because that's pretty much what they're looking for.
Or at least stateside when somebody comes in and just says, I want a coffee, they're looking for something that's either medium or dark roast.
And the funny thing about dark roast, of course, just kind of dovetailing into coffee for a moment, is that the more you roast your coffee, the less caffeine there actually is.
So your lighter roasts are more caffeinated.
They're going to give you more buzz.
And the darker you roast, the less caffeine you're actually getting.
So if you think that that bold cup of coffee in the morning that you're drinking that's dark roasted has so much caffeine, you've pretty much roasted most of it out of there.
And that's why you can drink so many cups by one cup of light roast is a pretty good kick.
Well, today I learned I'm I think you and I definitely represent two different personas when it comes to coffee.
I am fully in the I'm going to show up uncaffeinated and need the quickest, milkiest solution to caffeinated that I can get before 9 a.m.
And you your coffee is a labor of love.
Yeah, it's a labor of love.
And it's always black.
There's nothing to add to it.
Milk wise.
Oh, man.
Living in the US, though, like half and a half.
I miss half and a half now being back in the UK.
That cream and sugar.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's a place for that.
And I love a cappuccino, which does have milk in it.
And so there is a place for it.
But, yeah, there's something to be said for actually getting it right in its purest form where you actually do get the fruity flavors and you get the sweetness that comes in that.
Because a lot of times what you're doing with the milk is you're trying to cover up flavors that just aren't great.
And to actually get the right flavors out of it is it's tough.
It's a it's a labor of love, as you say.
I think that's so fascinating.
Oh, everything in my life comes back to product management at some way or another, which is the reason that we're here and recording podcast episodes.
But as you're talking about like the purest form of coffee and what that means and then the different ways you can dilute that.
I just keep thinking that product management is so similar and engineering is the same as well.
Or I've had this conversation with engineers where it's, you know, well, the textbook says this or, you know, technically code shouldn't be older than five years.
And that's just not while it's it's our practice in its purest form.
It's just not realistic.
Yeah.
I mean, there's still a lot of banks running on COBOL software that was written in the 70s and 80s.
I know.
And like some of these folks that are fresh out of university or fresh out of their degree want to kind of come and hit up engineering and have the best coding environment they can have, which is applaudable.
But I just don't know if it's realistic.
And so I wonder if there's a part of that realism that plays into product management can't be taught because you do need that aspect of your life experience before you can apply product management thinking successfully.
Yeah, I think that's that's a great point.
I think you're absolutely right on that.
There is a certain amount of life experience that you have to have to to be a product manager.
And the more experience you have with a particular market, the customers that are in it, the problems that those customers experience.
You know, it's often said that you shouldn't fall in love with the solution.
You should fall in love with the problem.
And the if you understand those problems, you're going to be effective.
If you don't understand the problems, you're not going to be effective.
And that's just not something you can teach very easily in school.
School is so removed from industry in that regard.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think I fall in love with the problem, not the solution was such a mantra at Intuit.
It's really fun to kind of hear it played out in this conversation.
It's just it's a it's so critical.
And I think it like take it a step further as well of having true empathy for your user base, I think, really drives the distinction between a good product manager and a great product manager.
Because we can all sympathize and we can all look and say like, oh, it would be great if something did this, this and this.
But if you don't really fundamentally understand the problem or empathize with the people who have that problem, there's no heart in it.
And I think a lot of what we do is is about having heart.
You definitely have to have that drive to be able to get up and do it every day, because, you know, one of the things that a product manager has to do is they have to be able to manage so many different groups of people, often with absolutely no authority to do so.
It's all by influence.
So if you don't have that drive and that passion for the problems you're trying to solve, you're going to have a hard time leading by influence.
What if you, yes, I wholly agree.
What if your drive is for team cohesiveness rather than product?
Because there are so many different flavors of product manager.
And I think this is why I really enjoy working with you is because you're a slightly different flavor of product manager than I am.
Like you're so experienced with the tech and the environment we build in.
And then one thing that I really love is leaning into the team aspects, which is something that we enjoy and connect on in work is creating that environment where our team flourishes and also creating an environment where our user flourishes.
And sometimes you get product managers that kind of lean on one more than the other.
Yeah, so that's an interesting question because you're looking at your team flourishing.
I get confused as to what my team actually is as a product manager because my team is like everybody in the company that needs to come together to make the thing happen.
You know, there's a team of product managers and Danielle and I work at the same company right now.
But there's a team of product managers at that company that have to come together to kind of have a whole solution and a general company solution.
But then, you know, for each of the different areas that we work on, there's different teams of engineers that work on these things.
And there are teams of designers and marketers and all these other people that need to come together to the plate as well.
And if, you know, you talk about designing for the user and that's a key important thing and understanding that user is important and having the personas that you're actually looking at are important.
So having all of those teams kind of unify around that, I think, is actually pretty critical.
And if you don't do that internally, you're going to see some disconnects that you're going to have to deal with.
You're going to have one team talking about a user one way, another team talking about a user another way.
And what that looks like is a different company to the user in different interactions.
So they may come read your website and they get one picture.
They talk to your support team.
They get another picture.
They install your software and they see something different as well.
And maybe these aren't things that they can articulate necessarily, but they see the difference.
They see the disconnect and they can tell that the company isn't working together as a whole.
And when you do get everybody on the same page and working together, customers notice.
And they're not going to say thank you.
Thank you for doing that.
That's like the base level expectation.
They expect that you're all going to be working on the same thing to solve the same set of problems that they have.
But when the disconnect is there, you're often to hear grumbling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People are more likely or users are more likely to call out problems, which makes data really biased.
And we could spend a whole other session on just data.
And we could spend a whole other session on strategy as well, because you just touched on strategy, like making sure that you have all of the product managers in your org pointing in the same direction and having one common goal.
It is so crucial.
And people think it's really easy and straightforward because it's quite easy to say.
It's easy to say that we're all pointing in the same direction.
It's easy to pick a goal that we're all aiming towards.
But the devil is really in the details sometimes.
And having that strategy and alignment between various groups of people can be really difficult.
But, hey, Karl, you said just then of how many teams that you're managing.
How do you keep on track of your to-do list?
How do you make sure that balls aren't dropped when you're kind of reporting to and communicating with so many different people across so many different parts of the business?
That's an art that you have to learn as well.
I use a to-do program to basically try and keep my tasks that keep coming in because I get asked by lots of people for lots of different things.
And so I'll make a note of my to-do program that I've been asked for this.
If there's a deadline on it, I'll put that as the due date.
And then in the afternoons, I go through my to-do program and I make sure that I'm hitting all of those different points.
Some of it is mental gymnastics.
You've got to be able to keep a lot of different things straight in your mind.
I don't write everything down.
I write a lot down, but not everything.
And so there are some things that I'm literally just juggling in my mind and keeping going.
Also, I've learned to get started in it.
You have to build a level of trust.
You've got to come in and you've got to do what you say you're going to do.
You've got to come in and say, I'm going to do X, and then you've got to do X.
And the more times that you do this, the more trust that you build with people.
And once you've built rapport and a level of trust with all these different people,
you get to a point where if somebody asks you to do something,
somebody asks for your opinion on something and you miss it, you drop the ball.
Well, because that does happen, you're going to have so many balls at some point as a product manager
that some of them are going to drop somewhere.
If it's important enough, the person will come back to you and they'll ask it again.
And so oftentimes, people are going to help you make sure that you didn't drop an important ball.
Now, if you do that multiple times, that's when you start kind of letting people down
and you don't want to be in that scenario.
But the one time, everybody realizes just how busy everyone is these days
and how overwhelming the different modes of communication we have are.
We have chat.
We have email.
You've got a number of ways that communications could come to you.
And so it's expected that you might miss something.
But once it's brought to you the second time, you really ought to handle that at that point
and make sure it gets taken care of.
Right.
And having that trust with your team as well of that you're a good person
and you've got a lot going on.
So when you drop something, it's not because you didn't care
and it's not because you didn't care about that teammate.
So the trust should be there implicitly that we're all trying to do our best
and you should always be able to assume best intent of your teammates.
And then the communication needs to be there.
Like it should never be that somebody on the team is scared to approach the product manager
and ask or bug or nag.
Like the amount of messages where they kind of start with, hey, I'm sorry to bother you.
And it's like, no, no, no.
I'm your product manager.
Like you have like you are always welcome to bother me.
I'm here for you.
But that's very much like my style.
And I know it's fairly similar to yours as well.
Of that serve to lead vibe where it's like, no, I'm here to help you.
Like if you're a designer or an engineer or a marketing person or even a sales person,
you're struggling with something and it's through the product,
then you don't have to apologize for bothering me.
I'd much rather hear directly from people inside the company what's about to be a problem,
what's currently a problem, what's on fire.
I don't want to hear that directly from a customer if I can help it because I want the customers to be happy
and I want people to want to buy the product and enjoy the product.
I don't want to get caught off guard.
So, yes, it can feel like you're bringing a bomb to drop on my lap and sometimes you are.
But it's still very much appreciated that it's coming from an internal place and not from an external place.
And if it is coming from an external place, but by an internal means, then, hey,
at least you're telling me and giving me a heads up so that when I have to get into the situation with the customer
or the partner, I'm going to know kind of what's going on and what I need to do to manage that.
So, yeah, you may feel like you're ruining my day, but trust me, you'll ruin my day by waiting longer to tell me.
Yeah, it's a it's a kind of a standard management practice as well.
They teach in like leadership classes online and all sorts.
But if you're you should encourage your peers and employees to fail.
But when they fail, they need to do so in a safe environment.
And so I'd much rather have a member of my team say, hey, you're failing.
Then have a customer tell me or have the market tell me.
Right. Like I'd rather keep that in-house British thing.
Keep the dirty laundry inside like we don't hang that outside.
So I'd much rather hear it from the people that I can trust and rely on and that will show up for me tomorrow and the day after.
Then the customers who are going to tell me they found a bug or they're going to tell me that they don't like something.
And then they're going to leave and they're going to go to a competitor.
That's much worse for both me and for the company.
Yeah, it's a it's a scary spot to be in.
So your product managers are there to help.
They are not there to be barricades and to keep things from happening.
They're really there to help.
Yeah, sometimes we have to be the mean guy with a big stick.
Yeah, yeah.
You can't always be nice as a product manager and you can't always say yes.
If you say yes as a product manager all the time, you're going to find yourself failing very quickly.
Because one of the key things to product management, and this is a hard thing to teach, it's a hard thing to learn.
And I think that experience is how you learn this is that you can't say yes to everything.
And you've got to figure out what types of things you can say yes to.
And spoiler alert, it's a lot less than what you can say no to.
You can say no to a lot of things as a product manager and be OK.
The things you say yes to, you've got to really be ready to say yes to and know what you're committing to.
Because especially in an engineering-led company, this is a situation that comes up time and time again.
It's easy to think that you can code your way into a revenue situation.
Like if a customer is out there saying, hey, if you just implemented feature X, I would pay you so much money for your product.
It would be great.
And oh, it would only take us three weeks to build that feature.
Why don't we just do it?
And sometimes that is the right answer.
But you have to ask the question, how valuable is this to anybody but this one customer?
Like is this actually going to scale out and be usable by a bunch of different customers?
Or are we building a feature for one customer?
And if the answer is you're building a feature for one or two customers, then it's probably time to still say no.
Even though it's hard to turn down revenue and it's hard to turn down money.
Because now you're taking effort and you're putting it into something that's not going to expand.
If the answer is, yes, hundreds of our customers are going to like this feature if we build it, then it's a no-brainer.
Build it and all of a sudden watch everybody else adopt that and watch your product become stickier.
You have to design for the masses and not for just a few users in most general cases.
If you've got custom specialty software that's only for a handful of users, then that's probably a different story.
But when you're designing like big products that are going to have a wide user base, you've got to design for the masses as opposed for these edge cases.
Right.
If you want high growth, you have to make sure you're not alienating anybody.
Or making it so specialized that it doesn't apply to everybody.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, in product management, everybody's probably familiar with Mr. Marty Kagan.
And he has a book called Inspired, which is a great book.
It's a wonderful book.
It's the type of book you can read and get really excited about product management.
And a lot of people probably do go read that book and get excited about product management.
And there's a lot of good information in it.
But it also tends to gloss over a lot of the reality that's out there.
So, Danielle, why can't we just read the book Inspired and know enough to go become a product manager?
I mean, I think reading any product management book probably starts you on the right journey to being a product manager.
But until you've seen a few cycles, you don't really get into your groove.
And I think there's so many different flavors of product manager.
There's so many different types.
There's so many different places you could specialize in order to be great or in order to be good that you kind of have to throw yourself into it.
And no amount of reading is going to help you do that.
You do just kind of have to jump in at the deep end.
Dipping your toes in with a book or a podcast or a blog isn't going to move you forwards.
Not even ours?
They can't just listen to us natter on for a little while and be good?
Unfortunately not.
I do think you should always be – I mean, this is a personal opinion, but I think you should always be seeking to perfect your craft.
And so reading other people's perspectives on that craft or listening to other people's perspectives on that craft is only going to make you stronger.
But reading one piece of input is not going to give you the whole picture.
And you'd apply the same thing to user research or design research or design thinking.
You're never going to go to one person and ask them the feedback on your prototype.
You're going to go to 10.
You're going to go to 15.
You're going to put it out as a test.
You're going to get as much data as you can.
And I think reading is just a different type of data.
How do you feel about reading the book?
I feel like it's an inspiring book.
And then you get to the end of it, and you're like, yeah, I'm supercharged.
I'm going to go do this.
And then you actually get into the work, and you go, wait a minute.
The book didn't tell me how to do this.
The book didn't tell me I might run into this.
It's a great introduction to product management.
It really is.
And it's got some good nuggets in there.
There's some good data in that book.
It's a well-worthy read, but it's so far from the day-to-day reality that it's just that.
It's an intro book.
And speaking of things like that, the next question on our list is, why is Jenna Bastow
of ProdPad so good at writing webinar descriptions?
She's great at writing webinars.
Oh, my gosh.
Every time I see one, I'm like, I must go to that webinar.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Every time I see a ProdPad webinar, I'm like, that's it.
That's for me.
And it's, I'm definitely the target market and her marketing is on point and targeted
very, very well.
Gets me excited every time I see that.
And then we go to the ProdPad webinars and sometimes you actually do pick up really good
information.
And other times it kind of meanders on and on and you don't really get to the point and
you don't really pick up anything that you were hoping to pick up on.
So it is a trap to watch out for is, and I guess this is the other side of product management
is that you can market something so well and you can build such a story that you may
not have that story actually completed, or you may be selling something a little bit better
than what you actually have.
And it's possible through these means of story and through how you write to oversell what you
have.
Yeah.
Well, I think one of the tools in our toolbox as a product manager should be marketing.
And I think another should be storytelling.
The two kind of go hand in hand and take your pick of when to wield, which it is, it does
come down to as a knowing that both marketing and storytelling are a part of product management
and then being a product manager, reading things for product managers, you have to recognize
that a lot of it is storytelling and a lot of it is marketing and that while we're all
out here searching for that silver bullet, that's going to make us the best of the best
creme de la creme.
There's no, there's no such thing.
And you can apply that to everything.
There's, there's barely ever a silver bullet.
That's going to be the answer to the question that you've always wanted.
Unless it's 42 for my Douglas Adam fans out there.
But that's why, like I read these webinar descriptions and I'm like, oh my goodness, that's the question
I didn't even know I had in my brain.
And I absolutely need the answer to that question.
And while they're always great conversations, you never walk away with the silver bullet
answer that you were looking for.
And that is in the genius marketing and writing of the question.
And then also in the, in the nature of product management, there is no perfect answer.
Well, and it goes back to why you can't teach this stuff in school.
Yeah.
Because it's just, if you could give those silver bullet answers, which so many times they
promise they're going to give you the silver bullet as it is great marketing.
It really is.
It definitely gets you excited about that hour that you're going to spend listening to that,
that webinar.
But if there was the possibility to do that, then, you know, it would be teachable in schools,
but it's not.
And it's experience that, that really gets you that.
And you'll pick up on this little bit of information in that webinar that helps.
And maybe it helps you think about it and it helps you grow a little bit, but you're going
to have to do a little bit more and you're going to have to have more thoughts and you're
going to have to have more experiences with that before you truly start to go down that
path.
It's much like, you know, I do photography on the side and there is both an artistic and
a technical nature to photography and the technical nature of photography, you know,
the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO, all this type of stuff can be taught.
That can very much be taught.
It can be mastered, very easy to do.
But the artistic side, composition, you can start to teach composition, but to actually
tell a story using visual composition and to actually go out there and figure out how
to take the items that are in front of you and arrange them in such a way and to get
the color science just right, to actually tell the story that you want to tell with
a picture, that's not teachable.
And there's so many classes, it's the same story that try and say, oh, we'll teach you
all about this.
And when you walk away from here, you'll be able to see better.
You'll be able to compose better.
You'll be able to talk in this visual language a lot better.
And never have I ever seen a silver bullet in anything like that.
And it's very similar.
It's that artistic and technical nature.
And I think that that's pretty much the same as with product management.
You know, we can teach you the technicalities of how to handle all the data that you get
as a product manager and how to build a plan and how to actually put all this together.
But the artistic side of it, the understanding the market, the understanding the problems,
the understanding what actually needs to happen to solve those problems.
That's the difficult part to teach.
What's interesting hearing you talk about art, like some people just, they have this internal
hesitation.
I couldn't be an artist.
I'm not artistic.
I don't have that creative flair.
I don't have the ability to learn how to paint.
You could teach me how to take a photograph.
You could teach me how this paint works and the thickness and the application techniques.
But I just don't have that creative bone or I don't have that artistic bone.
When you apply that to product management, do you think it's true that there are people
who just aren't, they don't have the artisticness needed for product management?
Or do you think that anybody could be a product manager?
I think that, and maybe I'm going against what I just said a little bit, but some of that
artistic side can be learned.
Well, that's the expertise and the experience though, totally.
So you can sit down and you can learn the like product management by the book and you
can couple that with expertise and the experience.
But do you think there is just a pure innateness to product management that some people have
and some people don't?
I do.
I think there's definitely like, like with any creative passion, there's just either you
have this creative piece or you don't.
Uh, and it's kind of like that.
I do think with product management, I think you can learn a lot and you can get a good
ways without it, but you're, you're going to hit a wall without that.
And, uh, you're going to hit a wall pretty early on and you're not going to be able to
get through that wall.
And it's going to be very difficult to get through that.
So I do think that there are some people that just don't have the right skillset to be
a product manager.
And that's not a bad thing because there's, you know, a lot more roles in this world than
product manager.
And we need a lot of different types of people to make a product successful.
If you, um, I, I took product or pragmatic marketing training as part of my work at Red
Hat.
And they have like, I can't remember how many boxes it is, but they divide out all
the work of building a product into like 30 something boxes.
And there's no way that a product manager is going to cover all those boxes.
And they tell you that if you get thrown in a job where they expect you to do all the boxes
run because no single person can do it all.
And so product management is not even the entirety of delivering a product.
There's just so many different disciplines and mindsets that are needed to do the different
parts that even if you don't have what it takes to be a product manager, you can still
be involved in product somehow, whether that's marketing, whether it's engineering, there's
sales research, you know, market research.
There's so many different disciplines that come into actually getting products to market
that I wouldn't take that as like a, Oh, you're not good enough to be a product manager.
You don't have this thing.
You're never going to make it to be like, stay away from product or the product discipline,
because there are so many other skillsets that are needed in other roles in this discipline.
I also don't feel like it's for anybody else to tell you whether you can or can't be a
product manager.
Like, I think, I don't know, my experience is that when I moved into product management,
it clicked and everything made sense.
And I just felt like my career had found a home.
Before that, I did a degree in computer science.
I'd been a designer, I'd been a content designer, and I just loved and was passionate about each
and every one of those and all of my steps along that journey.
But it wasn't until I hit product management where I like settled into it and I felt like
I was me at work.
And so I don't think it's for, you know, somebody to tell you whether you would be a good product
manager or whether you wouldn't be a good product manager.
But if you try it and you don't get that feeling, then as you say, like there's another one of
those 30 boxes that's out there.
Because I think we've already touched on it, but it is so difficult to juggle all of these
pieces and to hold all of the emotions.
It's a really emotional role, right?
Like you're holding your team's emotions.
You're holding the customer's emotions.
You're holding the business's emotions sometimes, especially like the smaller the business, the
more impact that that revenue and those numbers have on you emotionally.
You're holding all of this inside.
And so like if it's not something that is the reason you get up in the morning, then
I think there's a question there that I would ask.
Yeah, that's absolutely 100% true because you do have to bring a lot together.
And it does get very emotional.
I mean, there's a lot of different people involved because you can talk about engineers,
you can talk about sales, you can talk about finance.
You can strip these out into department names and have these abstractions.
But at the end of the day, it's a bunch of people and it's a bunch of people that you
work closely with.
And so there's definitely that aspect to it.
And I mean, like I've said before, I mean, my own journey into product management, I had
to have people tell me, hey, you should be a product manager.
You should think about it.
And it's like not something I had thought about before.
So yeah.
Yeah.
I think sometimes somebody needs to like help you kick the door down or somebody needs
to bring the idea to it, especially because you can't, you can't do it in school.
So it's not like you're a 14 year old dreaming of being a product manager one day, because
that's not, that's not a school class you can take.
And so it is good to have those mentors or those people looking out for you that can coach
you into the role.
But if it's something that you feel like if you've had the idea yourself, it's something
you feel you want to try.
Don't let somebody dissuade you from that.
Well, if you are a 14 year old or you are at college age and you're looking at product
management as a career, there are actually MBAs out there that offer product management
as a specialty for that MBA.
So you can actually get into a product management based MBA.
And I wouldn't want to discount what you would learn in a product management MBA, but I would
say go get that and don't necessarily expect to go out there and be the next great product
manager right off the bat, you need to go get the industry experience.
So go get in a role that's going to allow you to get access and experience with that
industry for a year or two, and then start working on trying to put the product management
MBA into action and moving into product management.
Because I don't think you're just going to jump directly from one of these things at
school into product management and be too successful without a little bit of industry
experience to help get you kickstarted.
Yeah, so many of these great companies do rotational product manager programs, which
are just inspired.
They, I have a lot of mixed feelings on them.
But as Karl said, like it is a really good way to get experience and to get understanding
of lots of different things in a short period of time.
I know Intuit is two years long and you kind of do a year somewhere and then you do six months
in a different team and six months in a different team.
And it teaches group think sometimes.
So be aware of that.
But it also just exposes you to so much in such a short period of time that it can be a
really special method of getting that experience as well.
I didn't realize there were BAs in product management.
If anybody is listening and they want to come and chat, I would love to talk to you about
doing a BA of product management.
I miss college and university and I love studying and I kind of want to do it now.
Well, I mean, yeah, you could.
Yeah, there's definitely, like I said, MBA programs out there that have that as a discipline.
And I suspect they'd be globally applicable because I know we've got some stateside.
I don't know what the story is there in the UK, but.
Well, I heard it here first, guys.
I'm going to start training.
I'm going to enroll in a new course.
So on this, I think we've given a pretty good overview of what product management is,
why it's not taught in school and why you can't just read a book and be ready to come
do this job.
So, Danielle, did you want to close us out with our call to action?
Yeah.
Think about what skills outside of the normal scope of product management you could work
on learning to help improve your well-roundedness as a product manager.
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an American and a Brit natter on about product management.
I don't think you can call it nattering.
I guess, actually, we did stay on topic and it's not technically nattering.
Exactly.
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Thank you all again.
And until next time, cheerio.