How I went from a pool boy to Product Management with no technical background
Norm
Background
My name is Norm. I actually run this here blog.
Like many people it seems, I took a non-traditional (non-technical) path to get into Product.
I studied a Bachelor of Arts (Languages) at the University of Sydney, which is about as far away from practical, vocational training for Product as possible. During uni, I worked as a pool boy lol. So, again, not particularly stacking the CV. My proudest achievement was running a semi-successful FB page with my brother and a friend that shared photos of old men drinking at local pubs, captioned with fictional stories about their lives - Humans of New York style. Gritty journalism.
My first desk job after uni was at the company I still work for; a music-tech startup. I officially started in sales, but as an early employee, I naturally moved around a bit and found myself eventually in a Founder’s Assistant-type role. This was great because I got to work with the founder on a wide variety of strategic projects that allowed me to try out lots of different types of roles from marketing to operations to product.
Whilst my current title is Product Operations and I’m managed by our Head of Product, in reality, we’re a small team and I have a wider range of responsibilities that encompass product delivery and sales operations. These synergise well with my product work as I’m intimately familiar with those processes and am in a great position to automate/streamline/generally improve them for greater efficiency and speed.
Why I chose Product Management
Funnily enough, I stumbled across Product Management pretty organically.
At the startup, we were developing a new, digital music format that artists could release their music in (think vinyl to cassettes to CDs to iTunes downloads to… what we were building). In developing the concept, we were spending lots of time talking to the supply side of this marketplace; music artists and their teams and so we had a really strong idea of what they needed from our product for it to work. We built that.
During this process, I realised that we were kind of neglecting the demand side of the marketplace (ie. the fans who would buy the product from the artist) and we were making lots of assumptions about what features they wanted. I read lots of books and online resources and quite independently started to fill that knowledge gap through interviews both with our customers, but also random music fans (at lunch I might go to a record store in London and see if I could strike up a conversation with someone, or I’d strike up conversations with music fans on Reddit ->).
I was so naive that a friend had to tell me that this kind of work (customer research and product development) was an actual role in and of itself. As I said… I had a level 0 knowledge base about business.
This sparked my interest, but it was a long road before I was officially in a Product position (more on that later).
Product interested me for a few reasons;
It was a perfect mix of;
soft, interpersonal skills (communicating with customers and between departments)
practical, analytical skills (research and experiments, data management, ops and project management), and
creative work (feature building & design)
With the goal of one day founding my own startup, Product Management felt like the core skill for getting through the painful early stage of getting to Product-Market fit
Salary expectations were much higher than the very project management/process-heavy work that I had been doing
How my prior professional experience affected my transition
At first glance, I didn’t feel like much of my previous professional experience was relevant for PM work. I assumed that I needed significant technical skills; probably a Computer Science degree, some coding experience or projects to point to, and certainly a solid understanding of research practices and data management. My existing experience spoke to pretty much none of that.
But after speaking to lots of people and reading all of the ‘must read books’ in all of the lists on all of the Reddit forums, the overwhelming importance of technical experience became less significant and scary.
“Hard skills can always be learned, and are usually easier to pick up than soft skills”
Even in my fairly limited experience working across sales and project management, there was some significant overlap in core PM skills;
Organisation: in both Product and Project Management you need to be able to keep lots of plates spinning and juggle demands from many different stakeholders, all without losing your attention to detail (as those details have the potential to derail the whole effort)
Cross-functional communication: as a project manager, I was responsible for product delivery, which required regular input and output from sales, design, marketing and even engineering (for technical delivery). Product Management similarly touches almost all departments in a business, so an ability to effectively collaborate with each of them is essential.
Customer research: whilst sales might not always seem like the most honest and well-intentioned discovery process, my experience selling in an early-stage startup had many similarities to the qualitative customer research done in Product. Understanding your customer’s pain points, needs and behaviours is essential for selling, particularly an immature product, and so if you can transpose questions/issues/rejections from prospective buyers as insights to be fed into the product, rather than ‘objections to be handled’, then you’re halfway to having basic Product research skills.
Processes & Tools: working closely on sales operations and processes forced me to think in terms of user journeys. Instead of that user being our paying customer, the user was our team trying to do their job within the systems provided to them. Great preparation for tackling our customer’s holistic product experience.
Hard skills can always be learned, and are usually easier to pick up than soft skills, so reframing my experience in this way helped me realise that I was much closer to the post than I initially thought.
How I planned and executed my transition from IB
When I first became interested in Product, we didn’t have an official Product function in the startup I was working in, so I didn’t have easy access to Product people. I was also living and working in London, so I was separated from my, albeit small, network in Sydney.
As such, I leant heavily on online communities (particularly Reddit) and other resources (books, blogs, etc.) in the early stages as I gained conviction in Product as a path I wanted to pursue.
Eventually, however, I needed to speak to someone and in lieu of having an existing network of product people, I took to LinkedIn. I set the search to London Product Managers and began cold messaging people who looked like they’d navigated a similar transition from Sales/Project Management into Product.
Most people ignored me, but the specificity of the message meant that a generous few responded, hopped on a call/got a coffee with me and shared all the secrets.
Some common (useful) advice that they gave me was;
To begin with, try to move internally - it’s much easier to get that first year or 2 of experience where you fill the gaps in your knowledge and skillset in a company you’ve already proven your value in
For your first move, look for established Product teams so that your skill deficits are less important, and you have lots of people to learn from
Get a Product coach; they’ll isolate the glaring holes in your skills, help you to find projects to build and demonstrate those skills, reframe your existing experience, and prepare you to ace any interviews you need
They also pointed me in the direction of the holy grail of resources (listed at the end).
Even after having an open conversation with the founder about my desire to work in Product, it took an active effort on my part to ensure I was continuing to get exposure to it.
A tactic that worked well for me was to isolate an area of weakness in your product function and own it. Find something that no one is doing (or doing well) because they either don’t have the time or perhaps have overlooked it as being of critical importance, and focus your attention on being the expert for that. For me, it started as demand-side customer insights and slowly expanded into broader research and experimentation tasks. My unique knowledge of that customer avatar meant that I was involved in all of the core product discussions and over time got exposed to the other aspects of the job.
Demonstrating a capacity to learn independently and take initiative in actually doing the work, was essential for securing support for the move long-term.
Today, I’m continuing to expand my Product responsibilities through the same process. I’ll independently start upskilling in a particular area of Product and in my own time apply it to the business challenges we’re facing. As I get feedback and my input improves, it’s an easy decision to bring me on more formally to help with that work.
What's next with PM experience
In the medium term, I simply wish to consolidate my skills and experience as a PM. It’d be great to get to a point in the long term where I’m comfortable leading a Product team or responsible for building a product from the ground up.
Ultimately though, I’d like to found a business of my own, and use my Product skills and experience to accelerate the incredibly challenging, stressful and draining journey to Product-Market fit.
Advice
Whilst moving internally is definitely the easiest way to start your journey into Product, doing so in a small startup <25 employees and only 1 (for a while 0) employees with Product experience wasn’t the perfect learning experience. There’s always value in figuring things out yourself as you gain a much deeper understanding for why things need to be a certain way and a capacity to challenge established norms, but that needs to be properly balanced with actual instruction/feedback.
“There’s always value in figuring things out yourself... but that needs to be properly balanced with actual instruction/feedback”
I haven’t done it, but many people have recommended getting a career/Product coach if you feel like you’re not getting enough feedback or you’re struggling to get that first opportunity. They’ll give you context on what your job should look like, will provide extra feedback, help you get more out of your opportunities, or if things aren’t working out - help you find another job that is better suited to your needs/ambitions.
Connecting with strangers who had navigated a similar transition to the one I was experiencing kind of played that educating role for me. It was naturally intimidating and a bit scary, but it was invaluable for defining my goals, gaining conviction on the things I needed to do to get there, and giving me a resource to bounce ideas off. It’s a lot easier to find someone to pay to help with that though lol.
Resources
Books
This book was recommended to me in the following way; “if you read this book, and regurgitate it in a Product interview, you will get hired”
Really practical guide to talking to customers in a way that gets you helpful feedback rather than useless fluff
Introduced me to many of the core concepts of Product Management (despite the fact that it’s a more general book on startups)
I haven’t used it, but it’s highly recommended for preparing for Product Interviews
Blogs
He’s the guy who wrote The Mom Test and just has incredibly intelligent things to say about bootstrapping, indie-hacking and building products that customers want as time/money/energy efficiently as possible
