Product Management, a different creature!

Doubling up on my Data Scientist role, I did a stint as interim Product Manager for our product team. Here are my thoughts on Product Management and my observations on what it takes to succeed in high uncertainty environments (aka startups). And the million dollar question: how to hire a good Product Manager?

A Data Scientist’s roundtrip to Product Management

Startup life can be quite unpredictable. I hadn’t imagined when I joined as a “Data Scientist” 1.5 years ago that most of my time would be spent doubling up as Product Manager. Particularly, when in all truthfulness, I didn’t understand what kind of value a Product Manager ACTUALLY brings.

That was still the case when I was formally given the “interim” PM role for one of the core product teams in April 2019, following a global short-term product strategy shift and org reshuffle. Data Science-related work eventually re-emerged as a priority (yay), but that moment was proof that possessing a positive attitude, an eagerness to learn and generalist skills can be very advantageous for one’s career - particularly when business circumstances are uncertain (aka startups).

Since then, a bunch of “unknown unknowns” I had about Product Management became “known unknowns” and some even “known knowns” (that’s enough Donald Rumsfeld for one day). Throughout this journey I am grateful to have worked alongside high-performing, communicative and product-savvy engineers who took great pride in shipping quality products - that made my interim role much easier!

Observations about Product Management

Be warned; my views are clearly shaped from my own non-comprehensive experiences and research. Here is a loose collection of my observations:

1. Very few teams are really product teams;

   By that I am referring to the concept of the Empowered Product Team popularised by Marty Cragan in his book “Inspired”. Here is a concise list of relevant FAQ’s by the author. Whilst my current team is strongly autonomous, I’ve definitely worked in less empowered ones in the past.

2. The Product Manager role is a full time job. Actually more than that;

   The cliché states that a PM is and acts as the CEO of their product. I find myself agreeing with it; to truly excel in this role, you need to be focussed on your customers, your product, your team, your business, the market and the competition. And other things. Once you break that down, it’s A LOT of work (as I discovered).

3. A key to success is embracing uncertainty and not looking for immediate gratification

   As alluded to above, I see a PM also as a kind of an in-house entrepreneur. Being able to break down uncertainty without pathologically hating it is very important for one’s mental health! Also, if transitioning from an individual contributor role, the dopamine hits from getting your PR merged, deploying a fix or getting a high F1-score from the first model you tried training are not there anymore. Gratification is a longer game for PM’s.

4. Colleagues: it’s all about your team;

   Sharing a common goal with people where everyone is bought-in, motivated and feels rewarded by contributing to that goal is an amazing place to be. If you achieve that, never jeopardise it! Nurture and cultivate your relationship with everyone (and especially the Tech Lead)

5. PM is not an exact science; jargon complicates things unnecessarily;

   I’ve discovered that PM jargon is overpowering. Surely, there are some practices/methodologies for shipping products that have been successful in some types of organisations and subsequently been given fancy names. But naturally, these cannot be implemented in the exact same way across different organisations. I’ve seen that teams and businesses eventually adopt what seems to work best for their own circumstances and dynamics. This might be my lack of experience speaking, but I don’t think that, for example, there is a deterministic template for defining “OKR’s” to different businesses, or that most “Kanban” teams actually practice Kanban. I feel that all these theories serve as inspiration to identify what works best with the constraints your business and your colleagues. So, naturally these words mean different things to different people and when I hear a lot of jargon flaunted about, I become uncomfortable.

6. Everyone seems to be complaining about JIRA, but few dare to challenge the status quo;

   That does say quite a lot already about this much maligned, but very successful, piece of software. That being said, I’d love to see how Basecamp would work one day!

7. Hiring the “right” Product Manager for your team is darn hard.

Hiring Product Managers

As mentioned above, a PM role is most definitely a full-time job. With me not willing to go down this path just yet, the time arrived to hand over the baton to a full-time, seasoned Product Manager! Only the matter of hiring them now. - and I thought that hiring Machine Learning Engineers was tricky…

In the past months, initially with the help of PM colleagues, I’ve set-up job specs, interview processes and take-home tasks, and had the chance to interview many talented individuals.

Here is my take, at this point, on the traits a PM must possess to have a chance of succeeding in an uncertain environment:

1. Experience shipping new products;

   This is more important than knowledge in the domain your business operates in. The domain knowledge can be gained fairly quickly, but learning how to ship and manage successful products is a longer process. To relax constraints, I believe individual contributors such as engineers, data scientists or product owners who have been part of empowered product teams can also be good candidates.

2. Sharp thinking;

   I think this is pretty self-explanatory. Being able to think on one’s feet and connect the dots quickly is probably the top attribute for the “CEO of the product team”.

3. Communication, communication, communication;

   I find precise communication very important, as the field is rife with jargon. Engineers and data scientists are alienated by product managers vending buzzwords. The ability to communicate with integrity with the team is a crucial factor for cultivating a team of missionaries, rather than mercenaries. Additionally, given the breadth of daily interactions PM’s have with stakeholders, dependency teams, and clients they should be able to adapt and communicate effectively at all levels.

4. Enthusiasm and curiosity;

   Self-explanatory again, I think. A PM who doesn’t demonstrate enthusiasm about their product won’t take their team far. Also, having a compulsive curiosity to learn, try new things and share the knowledge is in my eyes a necessary personality trait (also applies to Data Scientists).

5. Hands-on attitude;

   PM’s need to know their product inside-out and be able to interrogate its operation and performance at any time. I would go as far to say that the PM should be able to spin up basic prototypes and mocks of products.

   tl;dr: Product Managers are probably the most important roles to fill in a young business

   I’ll eventually write a summary post about my take on how to ship successful products, when I’ve experienced a few more trial & errors! The next one will hopefully be about Data Science stuff.

   Thanks for reading!

   PS: I’m currently reading INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. I am finding it very good - a little bit verbose for my taste though. Would love to have recommendations on good Product Management resources - hit me up on Twitter!