The Key Skill For Success In Product Management

SUCCESS TAKES TIME

Product Management career entry and long-term success can be challenging. Careers are long and can be filled with ups and downs. Like many, I’ve read the articles and seen the videos of the ten or so genius tech founders we all hear about repeatedly. However these overnight hero stories can hide the long path that many of the rest of us take to build successful and fulfilling careers.

I’ve held product roles for 14 years across 5 companies in Silicon Valley. In that time, I’ve been lucky to work for some of the great technology companies in iteratively better and better roles. Building endurance across each role was the key skill that helped me to develop my career in PM. Pressure, experience, and time all work together to build this skill.

ENDURANCE FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS

Endurance matters when you hit resistance. When things gets tough this competence will help you tremendously. This can be applied to many aspects of life. When it comes to product management, the nature of this role means you’ll need a healthy amount of endurance to persist and succeed.

I had been thinking about career endurance while listening to a podcast featuring Steve Harvey, a comedian with a long history of successes. In the podcast, he described the unseen history of his career challenges. His commitment to pursue a career in comedy lead to homelessness, and he ended up living in a car for three years. Eventually his big opportunity came and he took off from there. He credits his failures on the way to success. Most people give up too early. It takes time and more than a few failures to perfect your craft, teaching you what not to do as you learn.

“You only learn this business when you’re failing.” Steve Harvey

I like this Steve Harvey quote because at some point, we all fail or hit hard times. Over a career, you’ll probably experience it several times. Some may be smaller or larger, but at a minimum you will experience friction. Failure teaches you how to get better, and it also builds your endurance. As you build endurance, your ability to move forward and progress improves.

In my product roles, I’ve seen and lived how the sausage gets made within organizations large and small. It’s a messy process getting product out the door with changes in timelines, resources, people, priorities, managers, business climate, customer needs, and more. Endurance is necessary because PM is a challenging role for many reasons.

Firstly finding PM roles can be challenging for reasons of supply and demand. You are competing for a relatively small number of roles. Secondly, building product itself is challenging. You will be faced with the messy challenges of sausage making on a daily basis.

LIMITED SUPPLY REQUIRES HUSTLE

I’ve previously written about how to find your first PM job. That article focused on how to expand your skills, and use your existing company connections to get your foot in the door (because you’re already on the inside of that particular door). This is a common challenge for people looking to make that transition into product management.

What I didn’t focus on was the fundamental challenge presented by the nature of the role. PMs are highly leveraged compared to many other roles. Most companies simply don’t have a lot of them; especially when the company is small. Many companies may only have a single PM per 5–9 or more engineers. When seeking a role, even with years of experience under your belt, you will often not find many listed on company job sites. This can be quite different than engineering or sales roles which are often in steady demand.

To illustrate, here is a quick analysis based on some publicly-available data from Yahoo! Finance and LinkedIn self-reported job titles. Product manager job titles are only 1.76% of the entire employee population on average. If you’re breaking into product management, you will have to hustle to find an open role and match yourself into it.

INTERVIEWING IS A MARATHON

One year ago, I landed a great product role with an amazing company. This culminated a one year job search after having been laid off by a startup a year earlier. I decided to share this since professional profiles don’t often reveal the ups and downs we all go through.

Twelve months is a long time to interview. In that year, I applied to 146 roles, interviewed with 71 companies (times multiple people per company), and drank a lot of coffee. Good PMs are data-driven, so I built a Sankey chart of the search activity that year to visualize the process.

Even with a long history in enterprise product roles, finding the next role was not easy. At the end of the year, I received a single job offer, which I happily accepted because it was the right job for me. Interviewing both requires and builds stamina. You will hear ‘no’, or hear nothing frequently. In all that time, I only declined to continue the interview process with two companies due to poor fit. This left 68 companies I unsuccessfully went through the interview process with. For what it’s worth, the source of the role I accepted was a personal referral for an unlisted position.

Interviewing takes endurance because it can take a long time, but more importantly because every person you speak with in my opinion is an interview. The external recruiter, outbound talent scout, the internal recruiter, the coordinator, the manager, the interview panel, the receptionist. When any single person can put in a bad word on your candidacy, you must always be on your game. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t look like an official interview, or if you’re tired, or if you’ve heard, “so tell me about yourself” for the 12th time this week.

BUILDING CHALLENGES

After you have that PM role, it is still challenging. It takes vision, research, preparation, presentation, and so much more. Your peers, the engineers that work with you, and management won’t always agree with you. You don’t simply decide what to do and tell people to do it. You bring evidence rooted in the direct, primary research of the voice of the customer. You bring second party research. You bring your intuition and experience. With all of this you will still need to advocate for what you believe is the right thing to for your product and your customers. You will face resistance. That resistance will make your decisions better by being confronted with push-back and clarifying questions. You will repeat this process over and over.

BUILDING ENDURANCE

Endurance is the outcome of pressure, experience, and time. That process isn’t always enjoyable, but getting to your career goals isn’t a straightforward path without challenges. The good news is that endurance can be built intentionally, and it does not need to include suffering horrible managers and terrible company cultures. It will mean facing discomfort and working on your weak areas however.

Here are some career-centric ideas to actively develop grit.

1. Volunteer for a work task or project outside of your normal comfort zone. Do what it takes to learn that area and deliver work you’re proud of. Build up the breadth of your comfort range.
2. Do something (safe) that terrifies you. E.g. Public speaking or public singing. You don’t have to be good at it to benefit from it. The experience will build that muscle. Do it more than once until you lose that feeling of nervousness. It might take many attempts to start feeling comfortable.
   E.g. Five years ago I met my wife at a Beatles karaoke night in San Francisco. I grew up on that music and know most of the songs by heart. I had zero intention to ever sing and did not do so that night. A month later we again went to this show, and I anxiously bolstered the nerve to do a song to make an impression. It was my first ever song behind a microphone, and it was shaky. I was very happy to get it over with.
   Five years later we still go and enjoy this show. The point is, it terrified me for over a year and a half, but I kept giving it a try nearly each time we went because I love the music. It was only after three years that I reached a level of comfort where I felt fine to simply jump up and do a song. I did get better over time, and I do still occasionally pick a song out of my range and mangle it. These days, I am comfortable behind a microphone. This has also been very helpful for me professionally since I do speak in front of customer and partner groups frequently.
3. Develop a new feature idea for your product that wasn’t assigned to you. Do the research, develop a point of view, validate the ideas, tune the proposal, and present it to your team. Hear the positive and negative feedback. Learn to hear ‘no’ and keep going, iterate, back up your ideas, and if necessary, accept that the feedback may be correct. In a long career, you will hear ‘no’ a lot. Keep going if you’re still convinced this is the right thing to do.
4. Take a job at a startup with fewer than 20 employees. Leave the comfort of the big company with support staff, known customers, known growth trajectories, clear processes, wifi buses, etc. You will have to figure it out and make it happen every day. Startups are risky, so this is an extreme example.
   Having worked for two <10 person startups, I can confirm that these are unwieldy, high-pressure experiences. You will grow faster and go grey faster at the same time.

SUCCESS IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF FAILURE

Success is the result of failures and achievements over years. Those who keep iterating and don’t give up are more likely to reach their definition of success. For me, product management is a very satisfying career. Despite the challenges in the role, I love creating products and teams that solve problems and make customers’ lives easier. The value in endurance is that while you will face friction, challenges, and setbacks in your career, this will help you keep going so you can develop your way to success.

References

(1) Oprah’s Master Class: Steve Harvey, http://www.oprah.com/own-master-class/steve-harvey
(2) Ken Norton, A Certain Ratio, https://www.kennorton.com/newsletter/2017-03-27-bringing-the-donuts.html
(3) SankeyMATIC by Steve Bogart, http://sankeymatic.com/build/

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, email luke@lukecongdon.com.

Originally published at lukecongdon.com on January 26, 2019.