January 2024: First Update/ Introduction
This article covers:
Introduction
What is Narrow Path
Why Start Narrow Path
The Story So Far
February Goals
Asks/Requests
Introduction
Welcome to my first monthly update. You can’t really be updated on something you didn’t already know about, so this is more of an introduction.
My name is Norm, and I’m the man behind the blog. Given this blog is all about detailing the stories of people’s professional journeys, it’s fitting that I publicly document the process of building this career advice blog right here on the site.
What is Narrow Path
Narrow Path documents the simple stories of ordinary people achieving their career goals.
There’s a lot of infotainment out there that focuses on the absurdly fascinating stories of mavericks and misfits who seem to carve out the most unique path to great success. They’re very entertaining, often inspiring and incredibly misleading. They encourage very impractical, romantic thinking around ambitious goals and rarely provide a replicable blueprint to follow (good luck turning a penchant for bench press into the Governor of California).
This blog instead hopes to focus on more relatable stories, that are detailed and specific enough to use as a guide for achieving aspirational but realistic career goals. I think of it as talking to someone 1 or 2 steps ahead of you for practical guidance on next steps.
To begin with, I will be focusing on people’s career transitions to Product Management. I want to focus on something hyper specific like Product for a few reasons;
I am currently navigating this transition myself and so it’s a 2 birds with 1 stone type situation
It’s rarely a job people originally plan to get into (as they often don’t know much about it), and so almost everyone has an interesting story of navigating that transition
It is specific enough that I can feasibly collect a representative sample of stories that are relevant to people from a variety of backgrounds/previous experiences
It is not unreasonable to suggest that I can understand the area well enough to develop a ‘best practices’ blueprint from the commonalities between stories
The audience is specific and known, making it easier to build a product around
Why Start Narrow Path
As above, I am currently navigating my own transition to Product Management, and so starting this blog ensures that I’m continually learning more about the role and how I can improve within it.
Personally, I’ve found listening to people’s career transition stories to be incredibly useful in achieving my goals, but the effort to connect and find relevant people is sometimes overwhelming. Not everyone has a huge network, and many people lack the confidence/strength/insanity to go rogue on LinkedIn asking randoms for advice. If this blog can connect people to helpful advice that otherwise mightn’t have had the tools to get it themselves, then I’ll be happy.
The Story So Far
I first had the idea last November, after a run of conversations with randoms of LinkedIn who were generous enough to lend me their time to give me advice on my transition to Product.
I liked the idea because hearing other people’s stories really helped me and so it seemed logical that it could also help others. Build-the-product-that-you-need-yourself type of situation…
By the end of November, I started cold outreach (LinkedIn DMs lol) and warm outreach (to friends who I knew were in Product or would likely know people in Product), and by mid-December, I had 3 conversations lined up.
The holiday break was a bit disruptive, but by the end of Jan, I had 3 stories pretty much ready to go. We’d put these together asynchronously in a Google Doc by;
Writing a bunch of prompt questions/suggestions
Interviewee writing informal notes/dot point answers
Editing that into a coherent narrative
Filling in the remaining blanks
I may transition to simply doing a live interview with people that I record and then edit into a story. It feels like less work for the interviewee, removes the burden of having to be a pest and follow up constantly, and also allows me to get immediate feedback on what questions/prompts generate easy, free-flowing responses and which need some work.
I built this really basic website with Squarespace in genuinely around 12hrs total. Whilst there’s a beautiful future of optimising the user journey here, I really just need it to be a place to hold my articles, collect newsletter subscribers, get feedback from readers and give a bit of legitimacy/formality to the project.
February Goals
My highest priority at this early stage is testing and validation. My highest priority within that is improving the core product - the interviews. To improve the product, I need to establish working acquisition channels (and operations) for both sides of my product;
Supply; where do I find good people to interview, can I consistently get enough people to say ‘yes’, can I help them complete their interview in a reasonable timeframe to ensure a steady flow of content
Demand; where can I reach my target audience, can I get them to engage with/read the content, how can I set up opportunities/channels for feedback to improve the content
If there’s no content being created, and no one looking at it, I have no hope of ever figuring out what is good and what is not!
My goals for February are all about my inputs, as I have no idea what to expect in the way of outputs:
100 cold outbound interview requests
5 warm outbound interview requests
10 new interviews (actioned, edited and published)
Experiment with 3 different supply acquisition channels
Experiment with 3 different demand acquisition channels
3 x customer development interviews with subscribers/readers/target audience
Asks
The most valuable thing I can get at this early stage in my journey is feedback. What parts of the articles are most helpful, what parts aren’t, what might be missing from the advice, or simply, what issues can’t be solved in this long-form story format?
If you’re interested in getting into Product or are looking for a career move but aren’t quite sure which direction to go in - it would be invaluable to chat!
Please shoot me an email at nick@narrowpathcareers.com
