How I Became a Product Manager
I get regularly asked the question, “Clement, how did you become a product manager?”
You might expect that my response would look something like this: I tell you about how I always wanted to be a product manager, then I discuss every step of my master plan, and finally I describe how I made steady progress towards the goal.
Spoiler alert: that’s not how my story turned out.
My story is a bit different, as I never planned to become a product manager. After all, when I was a college student, I never knew that product management existed!
There’s nothing wrong with planning ahead. That said, I know lots of people who thought they wanted a particular job, sacrificed many years doing things they didn’t like doing, got the job that they wanted, and then found out that they actually hated the job.
To help you navigate towards a career in product management, here are seven principles I’ve used to structure my professional career, and how these principles enabled me to turn pain into opportunity and to successfully break into product management.
Run with it
Dream big
Make luck happen
Keep an open mind
Embrace problems
Get your hands dirty
Lean into discomfort
By leveraging these principles, I was able to pivot from majoring in molecular cell biology into my first full-time job as a management consultant, then into user research, and finally into product management! It was a long and winding road, but it’s been an incredibly satisfying path.
Principle #1: Run With It
When I graduated from high school, I was paralyzed by all of my potential choices. I had good grades in lots of subjects, and I had lots of careers that I wanted to explore.
I seriously considered becoming a software development engineer, because I wanted to create software that made people’s lives easier and happier.
But, I also really wanted to become a biologist, because I wanted to create new treatments and medicines that would grant people longer, more productive, happier lives.
Yet, I also felt drawn towards business, because I wanted to create systems and platforms that provide great products to consumers and great jobs to employees.
I couldn’t pursue all of these passions at once, and so I became paralyzed with indecision.
I spent months trying to figure out which passions to sacrifice. I spent sleepless nights trying to guess what my future path should be.
My parents noticed that I was sleep deprived, and gently asked me what was wrong. I shared my struggles with them, and they gave me truly fantastic advice.
Here it is: “Clement, just pick something and run with it. If you really love other things instead, you’ll pick them up along the way anyways. And if you don’t pick them up in the future, you probably wouldn’t have liked it in the first place.”
At first, I didn’t believe my parents. I assumed that my major would define the rest of my career, and that I needed to pick the perfect one right out of the gate.
But then they told me stories of their friends who chose some major and wound up taking a different path to a dream job, full of impact and satisfaction.
They also reminded me that they believed in me and supported me, and that I would find my own dream, but only if I picked something first. So I did. I focused on biology as my major, knowing that I’d be able to pick up other disciplines later if I wanted to.
My parents gave me the confidence to move past my indecision, and to commit to a choice. After all, commitment enables us to focus, and focus opens new doors for us.
Here’s a thought exercise to illustrate my point.
Tell me a story - any story you’d like.
It’s hard to come up with something compelling, right? That’s because my question is too open-ended, and it’s too difficult to make progress when you don’t have constraints.
But if I told you to come up with a story about a cowboy who only eats apples for dinner, suddenly you have many more ideas.
That’s how constraints work! I’m so happy that I constrained my choices, picked something, and ran with it, because that’s what let me move forward in my life.
Principle #2: Dream Big
In my first year in college, I took on an unpaid marketing internship for an education startup to start learning about the professional world.
My internship was actually quite straightforward. All I had to do was to write one Facebook post and one tweet each week to promote our upcoming book release. My fellow interns loved it, because it was an easy job, and they’d have something to put on their resume in the future.
But I wanted to do more than social media marketing, because I wanted to make an impact. That’s why I started brainstorming one afternoon about how I might be able to do more with my internship.
Suddenly, I had an idea. What if I did research on how others promoted similar educational books? Could we increase our reach and our impact that way instead?
From there, I looked into related books through Google search and through Amazon. For each product, I analyzed their marketing strategies. By doing so, I noticed an interesting insight.
The books that were really popular didn’t just have social media presence. They expanded their reach by working with bloggers who promoted their product.
I then analyzed these blogs, where I found that each blogger wasn’t just selling a single book, and that their posts were more than just product marketing.
Each blogger was dedicated to a specific cause, such as parenthood, or the organic movement, or vegetarianism, or childhood education. They promoted products that fit their cause, and they didn’t promote products that were misaligned with their cause.
So, without my manager’s permission, I compiled a database of blogs that we could reach out to, where our book aligned with their mission. From there, we could ask whether they’d be interested in writing an honest review on their blog.
I spent a couple of weeks pulling together this information and structuring a presentation for my manager. I then walked my manager through my proposed strategy, and held my breath.
I don’t know what I was worried about - they absolutely loved my work!
When I presented this strategy to my manager, they were surprised by my thoughtfulness and thoroughness. They were eager to recommend me to future employers, because I had turned this overlooked pain into an opportunity for success.
Through my internship, I had gone above and beyond. I didn’t let the responsibilities of the job constrain me from tackling real pain. As a freshman, I’d come up with a powerful outreach strategy that enabled the company to establish its niche.
Dream big dreams, and dare to do more than what other people tell you to do. You’ll find new passions along the way, and you’ll gain valuable skills that no one would expect you to have.
Principle #3: Make Luck Happen
In my second year in college, I initially secured another unpaid internship that I was really excited about. I’d have the opportunity to teach sustainable cooking to fifth-grade students!
But, due to unexpected circumstances, I would no longer be able to move forward with the internship.
I felt absolutely devastated. I had no internship but summer had already started. I felt so jealous of my friends, because they all had successfully secured summer internships.
I cursed my bad luck. I felt paralyzed for a week, and I felt so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed.
Yet, staying in bed wasn’t making the situation any better. Complaining and whining made me feel good, but it didn’t change the situation at all.
If I wanted to do something with my summer, I’d have to take charge of my own destiny.
Thankfully, I happened to be working as an academic tutor for Aspire Education during the school year, as a way to help my family with financial support. I figured that I could find ways to provide value to the nonprofit over the course of the summer.
I pitched Aspire’s executive director on letting me work alongside him as an unpaid strategy intern. I highlighted my track record as a tutor, and I laid out the case that my analytical skills and my customer empathy could easily be transferred towards corporate strategy.
I was lucky - he gave me the chance to work for him, and that summer wound up being one of the most fun and impactful experiences I’ve had.
I had the opportunity to look behind-the-scenes at how he made executive decisions. We revamped our internal accounting processes and we updated the way that we evaluated employee compensation at Aspire. He let me lead a task force of other summer interns to launch a new line of services, and these services enabled us to bring in incremental revenue while also enabling us to help disadvantaged students prepare for standardized tests.
Did it hurt to lose my initial internship offer? Absolutely, yes.
But, if I hadn’t lost that offer, I would have never had the drive to seek a better opportunity.
Life happens, and life is unexpected. We can either take charge of the situation, or we can lament our fate. I personally found that complaining did me no good, and I’m glad that I took the initiative to find other opportunities.
Principle #4: Keep an Open Mind
Many of my college friends were focused on securing prestigious jobs, because a prestigious job could help unlock other doors in the future. And, one of the most prestigious jobs available at the time was management consulting.
I followed their lead and aimed to secure a management consulting internship in my junior year in college. My reasoning ran this way: regardless of whether I enjoyed my internship or not, I’d have something valuable on my resume, and the consulting role would open up new paths for me in the future when I applied for full-time roles.
I poured in dozens of hours to secure a paid summer internship, and I wound up receiving multiple offers at various companies. Out of all of my offers, only one of them was a management consulting internship - but hey, better than zero!
From there, I rounded up friends, family, and mentors to help me decide on which offer to accept.
All of my friends (who were still college students) told me to take the consulting internship, but my mentors all told me to optimize for learning instead.
In other words, the whole objective of an internship is to learn as much as you can: about the role, about the company, and about the industry. My mentors encouraged me to take a shot at something that I might not have the chance to do again, and to keep my mind open to new possibilities.
With their advice in mind, I selected a totally different internship. I decided to work as a corporate strategy intern at a manufacturing company.
My friends thought I had lost it - how could I have given up such a prime opportunity to get management consulting on my resume?
And, manufacturing sounded like a boring industry to get into - why not do something more interesting?
But, funnily enough, through my corporate strategy internship at Flex, I had the opportunity to do some truly amazing things that I would never have had the chance to do as a management consultant.
Over the course of the summer, I evaluated 3D printing technology to determine whether we could use it to build out medical devices and prosthetics. I visited factories and assembly lines, and I went to 3D printing workshops to grill vendors on their capabilities.
On top of that, I organized our first ever Global Innovation Conference, where I had the opportunity to lead interviews with senior executives about the future of global manufacturing.
Because I kept an open mind, I had the chance to explore fascinating technologies and high-impact problem areas.
Through my internship, I did wind up confirming that I didn’t want to work in manufacturing in the long run. But, I also learned that I enjoyed tackling both strategy and collaboration, and these interests hinted at a potential future career in product management.
Principle #5: Embrace Problems
I did get a return full-time offer from Flex, due to my outstanding performance as a summer intern. But, I wasn’t keen on specializing in manufacturing.
That’s why I accepted my full-time offer from Applied Predictive Technologies (now called Mastercard Services) to serve as a business consultant. There, I would handle 4 separate responsibilities:
Partner with client-side senior leadership to identify strategic initiatives
Use APT’s proprietary analytics software to validate the impact of these initiatives
Clean and load trillions of transaction-level data points into APT’s databases for analysis
Train client-side end users on leveraging the APT platform to run their own analyses
The APT analytics platform is incredibly powerful, as it was built by PhD statisticians. But, that very strength was also its core weakness, because the end users of the platform weren’t PhD statisticians themselves. The platform was intimidating to use, and clients regularly ran into problems with how to set up their analyses.
I had to provide tech support for my clients for hours every single day, so that I could teach them how to use our software. At first, I resented this responsibility. I wanted to focus on conducting more interesting analyses, rather than telling our customers what buttons to click next.
But over time, I stopped resenting the situation. Instead, I became intensely curious about my end users’ various needs, and I started to wonder how we could do a better job with the software itself to address their concerns.
I had embraced the problem. I wanted to find ways to make my users’ lives easier, while also helping my fellow consultants spend their time in higher-impact ways.
I started compiling all of the feedback that we were getting from our end users, and I routed this feedback to our product team. I worked alongside product managers to test out new proposed interfaces that would make our platform easier to use.
By doing so, we successfully launched a new generation of offerings that drastically decreased the number of inbound support calls that our consultants were receiving.
Because I embraced the problem instead of running away from it, I started to become more excited about product management as a potential career path.
Principle #6: Get Your Hands Dirty
Due to my experience as an informal user researcher at APT, I found that recruiters were reaching out to ask me to help them with their user research initiatives.
One particular company, Movoto, asked me to join them as a full-time user researcher so that we could better understand a new market segment. I eagerly accepted, as I found that I truly enjoyed learning about my users and their needs.
But, quickly after I joined, I started to notice that we weren’t taking good meeting notes at Movoto. Nearly every meeting would begin with 20-40 minutes of discussion about “what did we cover last meeting”, and we weren’t making progress as quickly as we could have.
So, I decided to step into the gap and to start taking meeting minutes. It wasn’t my job, and it wasn’t particularly fun to do, but it provided significant value to the attendees and to our company’s executive leadership.
In other words, taking meeting notes was valuable dirty work. By taking good notes, I could then assign clear action items and deadlines to specific individuals. And by holding others accountable, I enabled our teams to do better work.
People started noticing that the meetings I attended were more productive than the average meeting. So, executives started to invite me into their meetings to help them take notes. Then, they started asking me to organize the agenda for their meetings.
Due to my critical role in facilitating high-impact meetings, my executive team started to trust me as a key advisor. They sought me out to talk through various strategies and initiatives, and this additional context helped me do better work as a user researcher.
By gaining all of this critical business context, I also gained significant influence in the organization. This influence gave me the opportunity to pitch various ideas and initiatives to our leadership team.
One particular pitch required that we hire a new product manager to ship new products for our “incubator”, where we spun up experimental business lines. But, unfortunately, we didn’t have any spare product managers available at the time.
My management team decided that instead of hiring a new product manager, they’d promote me instead into product management.
After all, I was the one who had convinced them to launch this new product, and so they knew that I had the right business context to succeed.
In reflection, I’m highly certain that if I hadn’t started doing the dirty work of taking good notes, my executive team would never have noticed my product management skill sets. But because I consistently went above and beyond, they trusted me to tackle a role where I had no prior experience.
And that’s how I became a product manager for the first time!
Principle #7: Lean Into Discomfort
I had never been formally trained as a product manager, so I didn’t know the first thing about what processes or tools to use. I felt very, very uncomfortable in my new role.
I decided to lean into my lack of expertise, and to do my best to learn as much as possible. I scheduled lots of 1:1 meetings with engineers and designers so that I could serve them as best as I possibly could. I dove into product management blogs and books, seeking to bring myself up to speed as quickly as possible.
By doing so, I quickly developed a strong foundation on which to ship valuable products. I pushed myself to master new skills as quickly as possible, and I kept myself uncomfortable by setting ambitious new goals with each iteration.
Did I feel like a failure and an imposter? Yes, absolutely. I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, and I kept worrying that I’d make a terrible mistake.
But as long as you’re constantly learning, it’s okay to fail. I held myself accountable for taking on more responsibility over time, and that gave me more and more hands-on experience with shipping a variety of products.
I started to enjoy being uncomfortable, because I started to get familiar with it. When you’re uncomfortable, you get a rush of adrenaline as you look forward to exciting new frontiers ahead.
Because I stayed uncomfortable, I grew my products into multimillion dollar businesses. I never felt comfortable enough to rest on my laurels, and so we pushed onward to deliver more and more value to our customers every single day.
Summary
Take your journey one step at a time, and enjoy the process. After all, you never know what new experiences you’ll find ahead of you. If you resent your journey, you’ll quickly burn out.
I used first-principles reasoning to pull together a robust framework for my career. This framework enables me to focus on creating value for others, which then enables me to make a positive impact on the world.
If you’re interested in becoming a product manager, one of the most helpful things to do is to start from first-principles reasoning. What sorts of pains are out there in the world? Which of these pains would you be best suited to tackling as a product manager?
If you’re not sure about the answers to these questions, consider booking a coaching session with us, and we’re more than happy to set you on your way!
