A few days ago I passed my three year milestone in product management, and that seems like a good point to share some more lessons I’ve learned over that time.
Essential Skill: Curiosity
Being a product manager means being a curious person. You should be curious about a number of things, including:
- Your customers: It’s important to work with your customers, to understand their needs and wants. This is actually a lot like consulting and pre-sales engineering – you need to listen not only to what a customer says is their need/want, but you have to also be curious about their why; it’s the why that delivers the nuance you need to elevate these conversations from interesting to useful. Also, when I say “customers” here, I mean all consumers of your product – internal customers, external customers, partners, etc.
- Your business: Products don’t exist in isolation and in addition to being understood in the context of your customers, they need to be understood in the context of your business. So you need to be curious about what your business does and how it intends to shape itself over time. This is also important when you consider that your products will have dependences on other products and services delivered by the business.
- Your technology: Yes, it’s true that product management has a lot of business dependency (hence it’s a popular job for people who have done management training at University – e.g., MBAs, etc.), but particularly in IT, you need to embrace curiosity about the technology stack being used. This lets you better understand the product, its development processes, and your engineering teams. This doesn’t mean you should be able to take the place of an engineer or architect, but it does mean you should be able to engage in some level of technical discussion about the product (or the features you manage) with customers and other stakeholders. And perhaps most importantly, you should know enough to know what you don’t know. I.e., it’s always better to be able to answer, “I don’t know, but I’ll find the answer for you” than to give an incorrect answer because you misunderstood something.
- The industry: You’d have your head buried in the sand if you haven’t seen how pervasive AI topics have become in IT. But AI is just the latest in a long run of evolving changes in the IT industry. You don’t have to be an expert on every trend and advancement that takes place in the industry, but it’s important to stay sufficiently abreast of developments that you can understand how they’ll impact what you do.
- Processes: Yep, I’m going to mention processes as well. Products (especially in enterprise IT) aren’t just used, they’re integrated into workflows and processes within environments. So you need to be curious about what sorts of processes are going to be wrapped around your product or the features of the product that you’re responsible for.
- Yourself: To be a good product manager, I genuinely think it’s important you have a good sense of curiosity about yourself. How do you think and plan? What are your motivators? Most importantly: what are your biases? If you aren’t curious about these factors (and how to improve them), you’re probably not going to be able to adapt to change, and that leads me to the second lesson.
Embrace Change
There is no way to sugar-coat this: you must embrace change. Agile for instance emphasises the need to adapt to changing requirements in a myriad of ways, but the honest truth is that change will reach out no matter what you do to insulate yourself from it, so why not expect it and be prepared for it instead?
Block Time
It’s very rare for me to go into a meeting that I don’t anticipate getting some value out of. You’ll sometimes see posts on LinkedIn from self-help gurus and the like who suggest there are ways to run programmes of work without ever having a meeting, but I think these are typically edge cases. Regardless of whether they’re face to face, or remote, meetings (if used correctly) are a valuable way to drive intelligent progress and set a clear direction on what we’re doing.
But, like a lot of product managers I talk to, I do go into a lot of meetings. In 2023 I attended 1,315 meetings; in 2024 the number was slightly lower at 1,120 meetings – but when you remove time off and weekends that’s still a not immodest number of meetings per day.
A lot of the meetings I do, I (figuratively) walk out of the meeting with a decision made. But sometimes, I leave with action items. That’s inevitable.
What’s also inevitable is that if you don’t block time in your work calendar to actually work through those action items, you’ll either never get them done, or you’ll burn yourself out doing the action items in your own time. Neither is sustainable.
The only solution is to block out time on your calendar. There’s nothing wrong or incorrect about reserving a chunk of time multiple days a week to stepping through action items and so on. Or let me put it perhaps another way: if you’re in a role where you have a lot of meetings, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your only function is to have meetings. Carve out the time you need to do the things you need outside of real-time collaboration.
Use a Journal
Diarise, in some form, what you do. I maintain a daily hand-written plan of my day – regardless of how much of that is just a copy of my Outlook Calendar. Having discovered last year that I have aphantasia I know there are a few key reasons why this format works for me: by writing it out, I’m helping myself remember what I need to focus on, and it also helps me remember what I need to do next. I don’t visualise my calendar, so I need it sitting in front of me.
But there’s another reason why journalling your work is important (regardless of whether you do it electronically or by hand); it helps you reflect on what you’ve done and what you need to do. This feeds into the “curiosity about yourself” item I mentioned earlier – efficient people pursue self-reflection, and this gives you a method to do it.
And, also – at the end of a long week if you’re feeling frustrated or worried you didn’t achieve enough, it really is useful to be able to look back through everything you planned and did for the week and be able to remind yourself that you did in fact make progress. Especially in a changing environment.
Pace Yourself through Prioritisation
Unless you work for a small company with a single product, you’ll never run out of things to do. And like so many other jobs you might do, it’s important to pace yourself. Learn when to put your tools down and spend time with your family, friends and yourself. There’ll always be another task on your plate and trying to be a hero and clearing that task list every day just won’t work in product management. Instead, make sure that curiosity you develop includes digging into and understanding the priority of everything you’re doing, so you can down tools knowing you made progress. It’s the only approach that’ll work.
Embrace Calm
No-one will gift you with calm. There’ll be change, there’ll be unexpected events, and sometimes there’ll even be chaos. As part of that self-curiosity, learn what you can do to snatch moments of calm to help pull back from the stress.
For me, grabbing even five minutes to listen to music can be a boon if I’m having a hectic day. Getting outside and walking for 30 minutes (remember, block your time if you need to) can be highly restorative. Even journalling helps me claw back some moments of calm. Work out what works for you and embrace invoking those tools daily to develop the habit of letting yourself let go of stress.
Finally: Ask Questions
Essentially, this is a corollary of the first topic – curiosity. But it merits being called out as a key thing to do. Ask questions. Whoever you’re talking to, be prepared to ask questions. You’ll never find all the answers through quiet learning and introspection, so hone your question asking skills. (And your note taking from the answers, of course.)