Completing 3 years of Product Management: how being a PM professionally has shaped me personally
A casual reflection to kick off the year
‘Head above the clouds, feet on the ground’ - clicked by me at Mauna Kea, Big Island, Hawaii.
I recently completed 3 years since I shipped my first ‘product’. The product was the redesigned Twilio status page where we’d made some changes to the information architecture of the content presented, optimizing for higher transparency, granularity and visual clarity. I wasn’t a PM back then, I was a Sales Engineer who was looking to make the transition and found myself a leader in the company who took a chance on me by throwing me straight into a project over the December holidays. Try before you buy, I was told.
I, along with the leader and a couple of engineers got cracking and shipped our shiny new status page in the first week of the new year. I remember the exhilaration as we flipped the switch with confidence, having exhaustively tested in the days leading up to the launch. It was a high many a sales win hadn’t been able to give me.
In the 3 years since, I’ve learnt a lot about succeeding as a product manager - some of it the hard way, by struggling or making mistakes, other stuff through the wins, by thinking critically about ‘what makes this great’. Product management pushes you to think really deeply about problems, and at that level, you can’t help but get in your own head and start thinking about your life the way you think at your job. You’re constantly obsessing over things such as value, impact, economics and decision making hygiene as you navigate your overall growth journey.
This post explores how being a PM has shaped my personality over the years. My PM peers reading this may relate, aspiring PMs may get a peek of and be intentional about how they want to grow through their PM career and if you’re the spouse or relative who has to deal with a PM, well, first of all, lucky you! We’re a special breed. I hope hearing my experience will help you understand and empathize with them more.
Embracing the scientific method in every aspect of life
I love that being a PM allows you to have so many identities, but this is my favorite one - being a scientist. Perhaps the best life skill to get out of a PM career is truly internalizing and applying the scientific method as you reason about life. I’ve learn to systematically break down any life problem into smaller, constituent parts that can be tackled independently, to seek and demand data to substantiate arguments, to have an experimental mindset and to synthesize information quickly into a path forward. Now, these qualities may not be an asset when it comes to dinner-table conversations with your family, and your patience with fragile egos may run extremely thin :) But I truly believe that this perspective improves the quality of my life and minimizes my struggles, and the impact is multiplied when I’m able to educate someone by giving them a simple framework to reason about things.
Becoming more strategic as a decision maker
This is a very intangible quality. How do I know I’ve become more strategic? When I reflect on the past, year over year, I realize I am clear on priorities and getting to the most important things. Decisions, in retrospect, turn out to be the right ones. I operate with more control, goals and an outcome-oriented mindset. I am able to visualize a future and move with confidence towards it. I am able to think not one, but 2-3 steps ahead, identify risks and nip them in the bud before they materialize. I am less surprised or overwhelmed going through life (there are exceptions, such as a global pandemic that came out of nowhere). Are these things no other career can give you? Of course not. Does being a PM uniquely set me up for success in this regard? Partly. Because my job requires me to constantly exercise this muscle. So do the jobs of consultants, business professionals, MBA students, doctors, or people in leadership roles in general. But my mom, for instance, is a professional creative who operates more strongly from intuition rather than strategy.
Sweating the details, becoming a professional-grade planner
An occupational hazard for a PM is how pedantic and detail-obsessed it makes you. Not everyone goes into a PM role with that natural quality (I didn’t), but somewhere between sweating the exact font and language for your UI page or writing requirements for a corner case, this characteristic gets the better of most of us. And once you build a positive reinforcement loop around excessive planning, organizing, and project-managing at work leading to good outcomes and being labeled ‘great execution’, you extend that system to your personal life (I call it system, my family calls it being nerdy). I admit to spending an inordinate amount of time creating perfectly color-coded spreadsheets and trackers for everything from planning social events in the summer to my upcoming wedding. Habits can be more debilitating than freeing sometimes, but there’s never a dull day a colorful spreadsheet can’t light up ;-)
Developing a higher degree of empathy, even towards adversaries
Having customer empathy is a baseline requirement for a PM. It’s also much easier: you want customers to use and love your product, you need them to pay you money, you want them to say nice things about you. There’s incentive. As you rise up the ladder as a PM, you realize you’re measured even more strongly on the experience you create for your internal customers - your team and stakeholders - in working with you. So you push through your internal boundaries and make friends with people who make you feel psychologically unsafe, annoyed or frustrated. I struggled with this a lot earlier in my career, but with time, my job caused a transformation in me. I learned to push through people’s exteriors and seek what’s inside - what drives them, what are their hopes, dreams, aspirations, struggles? To see adversaries as people who are navigating the same matrix as you, is to break barriers, cross the chasm and reclaim control over your narrative. I have been surprised how many of the people I disliked on first interaction became my strongest partners, champions, and friends in some instances, over the course of my career in R&D and sales.
Pushing everyone around you to be a better communicator
Good PMs ask good questions to get to the root cause of issues. Sometimes we’re part of amazing R&D cultures who follow great frameworks such as 5-whys and blameless port mortems - assume best intentions while still focusing on growth from mistakes. Applying such techniques in relationships outside of work is not always easy - we’re humans with emotions, expectations, circumstances, sometimes differing values. But my job has made me a better communicator, facilitator and negotiator. My partner (also a PM) pushes me to communicate better with our families, when things are not aligned. I, in turn, push him to be more communicative of his needs and foster a psychologically safe environment for the same. We’re measuredly vulnerable, assertive when needed and demanding when the situation asks for it, always striving to be respectful and grow as leaders for our families.
Eating the humble pie
Finally, I wanted to wrap this with the most important and profession-agnostic quality of all - humility. I’ve never had a job that demanded I throw my ego out the window more than this one. I just had to do it in order to learn and grow, especially when it comes to picking up technical knowledge fast, which can be vastly different project to project, even within one domain or product area. I am constantly faced with how much I still don’t know, about our technology, about my customers, the business, the market, etc. And I constantly have to push forward among ambiguity and unknowns, suck a little lesser everyday and then one day, magically, end up having built something with widely-accepted value. The entire experience is unique, extremely humbling and validating, and keeps me excited, grateful and coming back for more!