Slave to your experiences
In the past few years, I’ve spoken with scores of folks eager to transition into Product Management and connected with several founders having a hard time finding the right candidate. Below is my synthesis on how transition has become harder for highly experienced people in Silicon Valley.
First, the landscape is extremely competitive, each new startup and each new company is carving out a business opportunity in a hyper-crowded space. (For exampe: Just do a quick search for Lumascapes for Business Intelligence or Productivity tools). In many cases there are a dizzying number of existing solutions.
Second, startups and large companies are more than ever under pressure to make money. As a founder or founding team, if you raise money you have a gun to your head to deliver on all the promises that were made before being funded.
Because of the above reasons hiring managers are looking for Product Managers that can hit the ground running. They want to hire PM’s who have the domain experience and have made a bunch of mistakes and learnt from them. The belief is that people with exact skills will be better able to guide the engineering teams towards the right areas versus investing in candidates who aren’t an exact match.
This creates a catch-22 for people who are highly experienced but have become “slaves to their own rich professional experience”. The path from their current role to an exciting new product role is foggy.
There are a few ways forward:
- Join a large company (with 5000+ people) in your current role that is growing. Use your relationships to move laterally into a PM role. Be aware that you cannot optimize for both title and salary. Only embark on this journey if you are clear that the PM title and the PM work is your primary objective.
- Join a Zombie startup (with 8+ years of existence) you will get a title and get to work on a product with a soft product/market fit. There will be challenges in terms of resources, the quality of the engineering culture and you might question the product strategy. Go in with a primary focus to learn but don’t be critical of the company and it’s means.
- The final way but the most risky, is to start your own company!
Thirty years ago, established companies spent time training their employees (for example G.E.), twenty years ago companies didn’t train people but supported candidates wanting to transition, right now its each (wo)man to her/himself!
Happy to talk about specific situations and chart out a path forward that works for you.
