Diversity in Product: Nancy Wang
Hey! I’m Nancy— it’s great to meet you, and thanks for taking the time to read through my writing!
I think my life is best classified as a random walk: I’ve been fortunate to try all kinds of opportunities so far, like serving as an RA for freshmen in college, contributing towards my town’s roadmap to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, and now creating automation features for your favorite spreadsheet app, Excel. What connects all these experiences and drives me in my work is being able to bring people together to accomplish something great.
Big thank you to Clement for his unwavering support, meticulous feedback, and for inviting me to share my thoughts on his platform. If what I write resonates with you or you want to chat, don’t be a stranger— please feel encouraged to reach out and say hi!
We’d love to hear about your journey into product management. How did you become a PM, and what were some of the challenges you faced in securing your first PM role?
It’s funny to reflect on this question and realize the sheer amount of luck that got me here. I got my first formal role in product management after learning about it while interning at Microsoft, but change any of the decisions I made up until that point and I could be living a completely different life!*
The biggest challenge for me was realizing a role like this existed in tech. Maybe you have felt this way too— this realization that you’ve been acting as a product manager all along and didn’t know there was a job title for it. I think the field of product management is so new that the ways people become PMs and how “PM potential” is evaluated are still being defined. Yet the impact of a PM is unequivocal in shaping the ways today’s products are designed, and by extension, how we build the infrastructure of our future. My goal is to do all I can to raise awareness for product management in traditionally marginalized and underrepresented communities, so that they too can have a say in the environment we live in.
*If you’re curious about the whole backstory, feel free to check out this article.
What are some ways hiring managers can make that first PM role easier to obtain for people who don’t look or think like them?
Take a chance on people! Something I’ve observed about successful product managers is that they aren’t the ones that know the most, but are the people who are willing to learn the most. The interview process should reflect that, from the ways we recruit candidates to how we decide who gets the job.
Concretely, these are a few ways hiring managers could recruit for more diverse candidates:
Remove the computer science/MBA/bachelor’s degree requirement. Conversely, if those requirements are essential, identify reasons for why they’re relevant towards the success of product managers at your company and question whether there are proxies to measure the aptitude of your candidates.
Meet potential PM hires where they are. I’ve started seeing companies advertise their jobs at diversity-centered conferences like Grace Hopper and Tapia. While this is a first great step, by making it your sole strategy for diversity recruiting you assume that your next hire has the time and resources to attend the event. If we want to hire people who don’t look or think like us, we need to explore ways to make job openings more accessible to people outside our immediate communities.
Rewrite job descriptions to be more approachable towards potential candidates. Technical terminology in PM job listings often involuntarily excludes people who don’t know what product management is from applying. On top of that, one common complaint I hear even from existing PMs is that a product manager’s role could vary dramatically depending on the company. To reduce ambiguity and create clarity in job descriptions, we could cut out tech-specific jargon, provide examples of projects the PM might work on, and interview existing PMs at the company.
You just shared a bunch of ways that hiring managers can make it easier for people to get into product management. But what if you’re the person looking for your first PM role?
As counterintuitive as it may sound, simply understanding the ways the current hiring pipeline is broken can help you immensely in landing a role in product management. That’s because once you understand the problems hiring managers face, you can focus your recruitment strategy towards the most valuable actions that fill those gaps—just like a product manager prioritizes which features to build based on the problem space.
With these issues in mind, here are a few concrete steps you might take as an aspiring PM:
Demonstrate aptitude in technology. Wait! Didn’t I just say that hiring managers should remove the computer science requirement? Before you go out and sign up for another degree, realize why this requirement exists—for the most part, companies want to see that you have a grasp of today’s technological trends and how technology gets built. Getting a degree may be one way to show you know these things, but you can also build your technical muscle with some of the steps suggested in this HackerNoon article.
Connect with companies and people you admire. The benefits of this are three-fold: first, you can confirm from talking to people whether their work is something you also want to pursue. Second, by specifically focusing on people and companies you like, you’re more likely to get to know more people and opportunities that exist in the community you want to be a part of. The tech industry is much smaller than it looks and I’m a firm believer that our success comes largely from the cultivation and strength of our relationships. And third, everyone likes positive feedback—if someone’s doing great work, don’t be afraid to let them know so they can feel motivated to keep going!
Learn the vocabulary of a product manager. The most immediate benefit of this is you now can decode what all those job listings mean when they say you will be “working cross-functionally” or “contributing to the product roadmap”. More importantly, however, knowing product management terminology enables you to talk about your previous experiences through the lens of a PM and communicate in the same language as your interviewers.
Looking back on that first PM experience, what advice would you give yourself?
I’d tell myself that sometimes, the best way to learn isn’t through advice but by trying new things and failing. In fact, I made a pretty serious mistake early on in my career—one that escalated to senior leadership!—but I learned from it and now am here to pass on the tale.
Here’s the story: I was given the responsibility of marketing our team’s feature, and I, as a big fan of memes, decided to use a creative way to do it. Unfortunately, what I thought would be a fun laugh that would hopefully go viral became a post that I’m pretty sure is now in a corporate manual somewhere for what not to do when trying to market B2B software. The point is: I flubbed pretty hard. I thought my entire career was over.
But it wasn’t, and now I not only know what not to do and why I shouldn’t do it, but also what I can do and what I can try next. So remember this: Advice can get you far, but learning from your experiments is what enables you to grow. While it can feel risky, don’t be afraid to take that bet and see where you land.
Product management can sometimes be an isolating role. What are some approaches you’ve taken to get support?
I love this question because the isolation of product management was a big surprise to me when I first started in this role— and it’s important to recognize it doesn’t have to be that way.
I first want to talk a bit about why product management felt isolating. Coming out of college, I was used to working on assignments that (1) had a clearly defined problem (2) contained all the information you needed to solve that problem and (3) had a right or wrong answer. Now, imagine joining the workforce and realizing that not only do you get to figure out the problem, but it’s a problem no one’s solved before and you don’t have the complete information for how to best solve it. On top of that, no one else knows what they’re doing either!
Ultimately, it felt a lot like this:
Jimmy Craig, https://theycantalk.com/
Fortunately, I came to realize this meme isn’t wholly accurate, with huge thanks to the people I’ve met and learned from over the past year. So now for the second part of this question, how did I get support?
The most important step towards solving any problem is to make sure you’ve defined the right problem space, and solving the problem of feeling unsupported is no different. To me, feeling supported meant:
Gaining the trust of my feature crew
Building confidence in taking calculated risks
Having role models in/outside of product
Once I pinned down my specific asks, I was able to find help both within my community, to get advice from people I could trust; and outside of it, to broaden my perspective and explore different modes of thinking. Concretely, this meant:
Writing down and sharing my thought process with my team before executing on a decision
Learning from the insights of product leaders. I’m a huge fan of Twitter for this and also love going to my local library—ask me for my list of PMs to follow and books to read!
Reaching out to people who spark my curiosity
If there’s one thing you should take away, though, it’s this: even when you are feeling most lonely, people are out there rooting for you! The quote from Dumbledore comes to mind: “help will always be given to those who ask for it”. Share your vulnerabilities— it will make us all far stronger, kinder, and wiser.
What do you find frustrating about being underrepresented in product management?
What’s most frustrating to me is when people fail to recognize why representation matters in the workplace. You might’ve heard of the study that shows teams consisting of people from diverse backgrounds perform better than those with people sharing similar experiences, but I think we could be doing a much better job of demonstrating why this is the case.
People learn different behaviors and mannerisms depending on their culture, life experiences, and appearance. As a woman, for example, I know I’m more likely than a man to apologize when creating trouble for others. As an Asian American, I’ve learned to prioritize group relations rather than pushing my individual agenda to achieve a goal.
I want our backgrounds to be seen as strengths and not liabilities. But over the years I’ve read countless articles telling me that I should say sorry less (say thank you more) and speak up more (hold back less). It was only later, through reading books like Chris Voss’ Never Split the Difference and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that I realized that actually, admitting your wrongdoings and actively listening to others are superpowers. It is not lost on me that in both cases, I only realized that my ways of doing things were also considered leadership traits when they were championed by men. In both cases, I felt as if I were asked to conform to one way of leading a group, when in reality, there’s no one way to be a leader.
Diversity doesn’t mean anything if we don’t value why we’re bringing these diverse voices into the workplace. I’m speaking from my experiences as an Asian-American woman, but after answering this question I wonder about all the overlooked talents of my colleagues. What are we missing by not recognizing innate leaders for who they are?
From your perspective, what’s one thing people should be more aware of?
Your best inspiration for how to be a product manager may come from outside the field of product. For example, I was recently reading Dr. Eugenia Cheng’s How to Bake Pi (highly recommend by the way; imagine a baking and math crossover, with recipes at the beginning of each chapter. What more could you ask for?) and noticed how product specs are incredibly similar to mathematical proofs. For starters, the goal of a proof and that of a spec are the same: to convince the reader that something must be true. That got me thinking, how could the structure of a proof help me structure my specs?
In a proof, you typically start with a set of givens which form the premise of your argument. In a spec, you can think of this as the context for the feature you’re proposing to build. For both a proof and a spec, it’s important to list these assumptions right at the beginning to ensure everyone has a shared understanding— Dr. Cheng points out that if there’s disagreement about the conclusion of a proof, it’s often because the initial set of assumptions was either incomplete or incorrect. That's why it's so important to share context with key stakeholders and make sure everyone's aligned from the same baseline information, whether that's quantitative data, customer feedback, or business trends.
After listing your givens, the next key ingredient of a successful proof is your deductions, which show the logic you take to get to your conclusion. This may manifest in the goals and requirements section of your spec— in other words, based on the context you’ve been given, what decisions could you make about what to build and how you’ll build it? In both specs and proofs, your deductions help your reader understand how and why you reached your conclusion.
Hopefully now that I’ve provided the context and deduction for this claim, you’re convinced that the structure of mathematical proofs can help you write product specs. Either way, the key takeaway is: Make sure to prioritize time for exploring outside of product management. You’ll be surprised at what connections you find!
What’s the best way for readers to reach out to you and stay on top of what you’re doing?
I want to give shoutouts to my friends in product, for whom I’m so lucky to have crossed paths with: Jason (@jasonshen on Twitter), Phyllis (@impostorphyllis on Twitter), Athena (https://athena-xcy.medium.com/ on Medium), Ned, Kallie, Chenying, Aysha, Aayush, and Clement. I also want to express my immense gratitude for Rohan and Anu, for reading through drafts of this article and being unafraid to share their candid thoughts. I couldn’t have made it this far without you!
To find me, you can:
Check out some of my writing at the-writeous-nancy.medium.com
Follow @oldnan_andthec on Twitter
Or shoot me a note at nancy@nancy-wang.com :)
We’re always looking for new perspectives to highlight, to bring more diversity into product management! If you have someone you’d like to nominate, please send us an email at admin@productteacher.com, we’d love to hear from you!