Can a Technical Support Agent Become a Product Manager?
Product management is an attractive career path, and getting into the field is harder than ever. Does a tech support agent even have a shot?
Why is product management an attractive career? For starters, product Managers generally have attractive salaries. Built In lists the average Product Manager salary at $128,820. An article on Product School’s blog claims it may be slightly less than that, but it’s still a significant increase for many technical roles, especially support roles.
If the salary isn’t enough to motivate you, there’s also the degree of autonomy. Product Managers work without a lot of direction and oversight. That offers a lot of flexibility in how you structure your schedule and handle your work.
What does it take to be a good product manager?
Luckily, many of the skills you build in technical support translate well to product management.
Curiosity and Problem-solving
As a technical support agent, you’re curious about customer problems and deeply investigate to get to the bottom of the issues and find solutions. Product Managers do this as well, but in different ways. Instead of solving problems one customer at a time, you’ll solve bigger problems that impact an entire user base. You’ll also go beyond simple solution-finding to providing additional value.
Ambiguity and Structured-thinking
There’s a lot of ambiguity in product management. You never start with all the pieces to the puzzle; so it’s up to you to find as many as you can and then choose a path forward. In technical support, you’re used to approaching problems with structured thinking. If you don’t know something, you have a process for troubleshooting or finding information. That’s a key skill in navigating ambiguity.
Customer Focus and Empathy
Technical support is very customer-focused and the best agents have a high degree of empathy. The same can be said about product management. The closer you are to the customers, the easier it will be to discover their needs and pain points.
What are the trade-offs for a Technical Support Agent?
There’s always a downside. In this case, it’s all about time management, feelings of accomplishment, and subject matter expertise.
Accomplishment
When you directly support customers, you get the instant gratification of solving their problems in real time. As a Product Manager, there’s no real point at which a problem feels solved.
You’re planning upcoming projects while current projects are in progress. You’re negotiating scope and leaving pet projects on the backlog to optimize for overall value. Releases feel anti-climactic. Metric measurement is ongoing. You have to create your own achievements.
That can be difficult for high-achieving technical support agents. You’re used to having clear indicators of success, so you’ll have to adjust and find ways to feel accomplished.
Time Management
Additionally, there are no scheduled breaks. You may not have set start or end times for your work day. Having a flexible schedule is nice, but it’s easy to end up with back-to-back meetings all day or work overtime to get everything done. As a Product Manager, you may need to look for in-office roles if you struggle to manage your time. Otherwise, you must proactively schedule breaks, lunches, working hours, and focus time.
Subject Matter Expertise
In technical support, you’re the expert. You know the product you support backward and forward, and your customers and coworkers can count on you to be a font of knowledge. In product management, you do have to develop some expertise with your product, but there will always be a lot you don’t know.
You won’t spend every day troubleshooting issues with customers, so you will have to refer customers to your support team if they need troubleshooting. You also don’t usually develop or design your product, and you will have to refer coworkers to your designers and developers for some questions or get the information from them yourself.
The key here is that you’re not valued for your knowledge but for your process and skills. As a Product Manager, you will rely on other people’s expertise the way a technical support agent relies on troubleshooting guides and internal knowledge bases.
How do you get hired as a product manager?
If you’re still interested in product management and think you’d be a good fit, it’s time to think about your transition strategy.
Internal Transition
By far, the easiest way to transition into product management from another role is by changing roles within your current company. Being an internal candidate with a non-product title makes you a lower risk than an external candidate with a non-product title.
But, keep in mind that being an internal candidate may not give you a leg up over external candidates with actual product management experience. You’re also likely to get a lower compensation offer. It’s widely acknowledged that most companies do not budget as much for merit raises, promotions, and internal hires as they do for new hires.
External Transition
If you don’t see any way to become a Product Manager at your current company, external transitions are difficult but possible. It works best if you know someone at the new company who can refer you and vouch for your skills, experience, and work ethic.
For companies, hiring is all about minimizing risk. Demonstrating that you have the right experience for the job goes a long way toward minimizing risk for the potential employer. Having an advocate within the organization goes even further.
Pit Stop
Sometimes, you’ll need to pick up a few extra skills to become a viable candidate for Product Manager roles. Technical support doesn’t give you a good idea of the business side of product management. You may need to take some business classes, build and market your own product, or transition into a marketing or business analytics role first. Look at job posts and evaluate your skill set against the requirements to find those gaps.
Hirable Qualities
A Product Manager’s value is in their impact and processes. Demonstrate your impact as early as possible by including any metrics or key outcomes you drove on your resume. Talk about them in your interviews. Explain your process for getting from idea to impact, problem to solution, and ambiguity to decision. The people in charge of filling the role need to know you can get results and replicate those results for their product.
What should you take away from this?
Product management is a highly sought-after and competitive career path. You might feel like you can’t compete if you come from a technical support background, but a lot of your skills transfer very well.
This advice is based on my own transition into product management, knowing others who’ve made the same transition, and success stories I’ve read in product management groups like Women In Product.
Please take from this story what best aligns with your situation, and keep your head up.
I would like to thank Tremis Skeete, Executive Editor of Product Coalition, for his valuable contributions to the editing of this article.
I also thank Product Coalition founder Jay Stansell, who has provided a collaborative product management education environment.
