13 years as a Product Manager: some lessons learned

My unusually diverse resume tells me I’ve been doing product management for 13 years now. Wow, really?

I’ve learned a heap of stuff in that time. Here goes.

Lesson #1: Product Managers come from many different backgrounds but we all share a love for building great products.

It’s fair to say that like many others, I fell into product management accidentally. In my case, in 2004 (after a few years of software development when ASP Classic was still a thing and .NET was shiny and new) I was lucky enough to land a job as a ‘Producer’ (of web pages, I guess!) through a friend at Yahoo! in London. Bear with me, Yahoo! was still pretty relevant to a lot of us around the world back then.

I’d only been in the role for a few months when my boss went off to have a baby and left me in charge as PM of our product portfolio. This included some pretty big hitters like Yahoo! Mail, Messenger and Photos, used by many millions of you at the time.

Lesson #2: Being in the right place at the right time is how a lot of us become PMs. After all, when’s the last time you heard a kid say ‘I wanna be a Product Manager when I grow up’?

I was four years into my career as a PM before I realised I was a bit of a fake. I was actually doing more product marketing than product management. Doh! I didn’t consider myself a marketer then and still don’t now. Of course, having responsibility over the success (and failure) of products inevitably involves marketing to customers and (if you’re lucky) working with great marketers to do so. The problem was I didn’t have my own product team. Instead, I was found begging developers remotely located at headquarters in California who had their own roadmap, their own objectives and their own co-located PM.

Trust me, unless you have your own product team to help you achieve your objectives, you’re not a real Product Manager. You’re a fake, like I was. Change it, fast.

Lesson #3: Good PMs need good product teams to build great products.

It’s obvious now, in hindsight.

In 2008, in search of a product team (or at least some developers) I took an internal transfer to Sydney to work at Yahoo!7 (a joint venture between one of Australia’s biggest TV channels and Yahoo!). That little ole Sydney office had less than 300 people at the time but more software developers with appetites to innovate than I’d seen in London. To his credit, Rohan Lund (the then CEO) had realised Yahoo!7 wouldn’t get anything from its mothership in California, so hired local development teams to build innovative and cool new things. I’m proud to have had a hand in a couple of those, including an online catch up TV service called PLUS7. But the one I’m especially proud of is Banzai - a brand new to market adventure sports site showcasing amazing content from over 30 top sporting brands. Sadly, less than 10 years on Banzai doesn’t appear to be around anymore.

Lesson #4: Don’t be too single minded with how you measure success of your products.

Why? Well, you may be surprised when most of them turn out to be duds. Unless you’re clear before you start on what the product needs to do to be a success (for you, your customers and your business) the writing’s most likely on the wall. We expected to get 500k visits to Banzai within the first few months and we got that, but ultimately that one metric wasn’t enough for long-term success. Getting visits is easy, especially when you’re a juggernaut like Yahoo!, but keeping customers engaged and getting them to return regularly is much harder. If I had my time on Banzai again I’d be clearer on what Product Market Fit looked like and be uncompromising on the need to iterate on that, toward the product vision. Instead, most of the product team were moved onto the next big thing - assuming Banzai was already a winner.

After four years in Oz, I headed back to the UK and took up a role at Skype, who had recently been acquired by Microsoft. I was a heavy user of Skype at the time and loved their brand. I was also pretty excited by the flexible working arrangements Skype offered. I knew it wasn’t going to be 9–5 (I was based in London, my product team were in Prague and my boss was in California) but I liked the idea of fitting work in and around other important stuff in my life (like family, and mountain biking). I didn’t really think too much about what it would be like working with a remote team. I’d not done it before.

Lesson #5: Working with remote teams is hard.

There is nothing quite like the face-to-face interaction you get when co-located. It’s much harder to build the close relationships a good product team needs to succeed when you’re not in the same room every day.

Despite this challenge, I really enjoyed my time at Skype. I met a bunch of great (and very smart) people that stretched right across Microsoft. I was sad to leave after less than two years but did so for family reasons, returning home to NZ.

It’s fair to say that having a few heavy hitters like Yahoo!, Skype and Microsoft on your resume helps when it comes to job hunting. Instead of interview questions centered around whether you can do the job or not, they’re focused more on what you’ve learned from those big companies that they can leverage if you’re hired. This was the case for me in 2013 when I interviewed with Trade Me (NZ’s version of eBay). Trade Me was set to grow its staff considerably over the next few years and were keen to leverage big company experience where they could. I was their first formal PM, hired to take their mobile apps to the next level and to evangelise mobile across the company. Looking back, I’d give myself a 7 out of 10 for doing that.

Lesson #6: Lean in. I’m far from an extrovert but I’ve learned over the years that making a nuisance of yourself helps develop your career as a PM. It’s almost expected.

It’s not enough to just do as you’re told. Businesses want more from their PM’s. They want us to continually challenge the way things are done. We’re paid well for what we do and are expected to make a difference. Lean in and get involved in everything you can. And more.

I consider myself pretty experienced at product management now but am amazed at how much there is still to learn. One thing that’s bothered me for ages now is how much energy I use worrying about when a product or feature I’m working on will be done. I don’t think I’m alone on this. And so to my final lesson, for now.

Lesson #7: Worry about the What, not the When.

I’ve recently been running an experiment where I focus the vast majority of my time on making sure my product team’s are building the right products for our customers. Someone else is worrying about whether we’ll be done on time. Now I realise this is a luxury we can’t all always afford but I’d encourage you to push for it. It just makes sense. Of course as PMs we need to keep an eye on delivery to ensure the products we’re building for our customers are delivered at the right time but this should be secondary to ensuring they’re the right products.

Next time I think I’ll write about my experiences with mentors and mentoring others, and how important both are in your career as a PM. Or maybe I’ll write about something else product management related instead. It’ll probably be shorter anyway.